School of Languages and Linguistics - Research Publications
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ItemProsa australiana(Intercultural Studies Group, 2010)
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ItemCommunities of practice in higher education: A challenge from the discipline of architecture(Elsevier, 2012-03-01)Uncritically applying a community of practice model has become rather prevalent in higher education settings (Lea, 2005). This paper attempts to return to the spirit of Lave and Wenger's earlier (1991) work and to use a community of practice perspective as a heuristic to analyse participation patterns in a final year design studio in the discipline of architecture. The data consisted of videotapes, transcriptions, and interviews with participants, and showed that students' opportunities to rehearse expert roles relevant to the profession were somewhat limited. Instead of an extended community of participants engaged collaboratively in joint activities, patterns of interaction between the instructor and the students were typically hierarchical. Despite this, the students felt that their participation in this class was a legitimate part of their trajectories towards membership in the professional community of practice, underlining the complexity of higher education contexts. The paper suggests that the usefulness of the concept of community of practice to higher education lies primarily in treating classes as one of many overlapping more or less formal communities students may be involved in.
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ItemConstruct validity in the IELTS Academic Reading test: a comparison of reading requirements in IELTS test items and in university study(Cambridge University Press, 2012)The study reported here was concerned with the issue of test development and validation as it relates to the IELTS Academic Reading Test. Investigation was made of the suitability of items on the test in relation to the reading and general literacy requirements of university study. This was researched in two ways – through a survey of reading tasks in the two domains, and through interviews with academic staff from a range of disciplines. Tasks in the two domains were analysed using a taxonomic framework, adapted from Weir and Urquhart (1998), with a focus on two dimensions of difference: level of engagement, referring to the level of text with which a reader needs to engage to respond to a task (local vs global); type of engagement referring to the way (or ways) a reader needs to engage with texts on the task (literal vs interpretative). The analysis found evidence of both similarities and differences between the reading requirements in the two domains. The majority of the IELTS tasks were found to have a „local-literal‟ configuration, requiring mainly a basic comprehension of relatively small textual units. In the academic corpus, a sizeable proportion of tasks had a similar local-literal orientation, but others involved distinctly different forms of engagement, including tasks that required a critical evaluation of material (i.e. more interpretative), or which stipulated reference to multiple sources (i.e. more global). The study also found a good deal of variation in the reading requirements across the disciplines. The results of the study are used to suggest possible enhancements to the IELTS Academic Reading Test. A useful principle to strengthen the test‟s validity, we argue, would be to push test tasks, where possible, in the direction of the more „global-interpretative‟ reading modes required in academic study.
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ItemMultilingualism in Cyberspace - Longevity for Documentation of Small Languages(Interregional Library Cooperation Centre, 2012)
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ItemNo Preview AvailableSustainable data from digital research(Custom Book Centre, University of Melbourne, 2011)
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ItemWorking Together in Vanuatu: Research Histories, Collaborations, Projects and Reflections(ANU Press, 2011-10-01)This collection is derived from a conference held at the Vanuatu National Museum and Cultural Centre (VCC) that brought together a large gathering of foreign and indigenous researchers to discuss diverse perspectives relating to the unique program of social, political and historical research and management that has been fostered in that island nation. While not diminishing the importance of individual or sole-authored methodologies, project-centered collaborative approaches have today become a defining characteristic of Vanuatu’s unique research environment. As this volume attests, this environment has included a dynamically wide range of both ni-Vanuatu and foreign researchers and related research perspectives, most centrally including archaeologists and anthropologists, linguists, historians, legal studies scholars and development practitioners. This emphasis on collaboration has emerged from an ongoing awareness across Vanuatu’s research community of the need for trained researchers to engage directly with pressing social and ethical concerns, and out of the proven fact that it is not just from the outcomes of research that communities or individuals may be empowered, but also through their modes and processes of implementation, as through the ongoing strength and value of the relationships they produce. With this in mind, the papers presented here go beyond the mere celebration of collaboration by demonstrating Vanuatu’s specific environment of cross-cultural research as a diffuse set of historically emergent methodological approaches, and by showing how these work in actual practice.
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ItemKeeping records of language diversity in Melanesia: The Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures (PARADISEC)(University of Hawaii Press, 2012)At the turn of this century, a group of Australian linguistic and musicological researchers recognised that a number of small collections of unique and often irreplaceable field recordings mainly from the Melanesian and broader Pacific regions were not being properly housed and that there was no institution in the region with the capacity to take responsibility for them. The recordings were not held in appropriate conditions and so were deteriorating and in need of digitisation. Further, there was no catalog of their contents or their location so their existence was only known to a few people, typically colleagues of the collector. These practitioners designed the Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures (PARADISEC), a digital archive based on internationally accepted standards (Dublin Core/Open Archives Initiative metadata, International Association of Sound Archives audio standards and so on) and obtained funding to build an audio digitisation suite in 2003. This is a new conception of a data repository, built into workflows and research methods of particular disciplines, respecting domain-specific ethical concerns and research priorities, but recognising the need to adhere to broader international standards. This paper outlines the way in which researchers involved in documenting languages of Melanesia can use PARADISEC to make valuable recordings available both to the research community and to the source communities.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableGerman Studies in Australia: a statistical overview, 1995-2010(German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), 2011)The new Netzwerk Deutsch survey on German as a Foreign Language world-wide, following two previous surveys, provides a unique (if not entirely complete and comprehensive) overview of the development of the numbers of students of German internationally. This article discusses the numbers indicated for tertiary students of German in Australia and sets them in relation to the world-wide average, as well as to the numbers indicated for the other English-speaking OECD countries. The decline in student numbers has been less dramatic in the Anglophone OECD countries than in the world on average. Australian German Studies programs in particular have proved resilient in the face of the world-wide trend.
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ItemAcoustic analysis of the effects of 24 hours of sustained wakefulness(Australasian Speech Science and Technology Association, 2010)The effect of 24 hours of sustained wakefulness on the speech of healthy adults is poorly documented. Therefore, speech samples were systematically acquired (e.g., every four hours) from 18 healthy adults over 24 hours. Stimuli included automated and extemporaneous tasks, sustained vowel and a read passage. Measures of timing and frequency were derived acoustically using Praat and significant changes were observed on all tasks. The effect of fatigue on speech was found to be strongest just before dawn (after 22 hours). Key features of timing (e.g., mean pause length), frequency (e.g., F4 variation) and power (alpha ratio) changed as a function of increasing levels of fatigue. Index Terms: fatigue, voice, tiredness, clinical marker
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ItemNo Preview AvailableAcoustic analysis of the effects of sustained wakefulness on speech(ACOUSTICAL SOC AMER AMER INST PHYSICS, 2010-12)Exposing healthy adults to extended periods of wakefulness is known to induce changes in psychomotor functioning [Maruff et al. (2005). J. Sleep Res. 14, 21-27]. The effect of fatigue on speech is less well understood. To date, no studies have examined the pitch and timing of neurologically healthy individuals over 24 h of sustained wakefulness. Therefore, speech samples were systematically acquired (e.g., every 4 h) from 18 healthy adults over 24 h. Stimuli included automated and extemporaneous speech tasks, sustained vowel, and a read passage. Measures of timing, frequency and spectral energy were derived acoustically using PRAAT and significant changes were observed on all tasks. The effect of fatigue on speech was found to be strongest just before dawn (after 22 h). Specifically, total speech time, mean pause length, and total signal time all increased as a function of increasing levels of fatigue on the reading tasks; percentage pause and mean pause length decreased on the counting task; F4 variation decreased on the sustained vowel tasks /a:/; and alpha ratio increased on the extemporaneous speech tasks. These findings suggest that acoustic methodologies provide objective data on central nervous system functioning and that changes in speech production occur in healthy adults after just 24 h of sustained wakefulness.