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The Common European Framework of Reference for Languages at 20: What have we gained from it? The Common European Framework of Reference for Languages was developed by the Council of Europe in the 1990’s and published officially in 2001, with its principal aim being to establish transparency in language competency. While the CEFR is widely used throughout Europe and beyond, it is on occasion over-simplified, with people focusing on the one-page, six-level grid (A1 – C2) that describes the Framework, without really interrogating how it can be best used in language testing and assessment, and in authentic language learning. This talk hopes to move beyond the ‘grid’, and will focus on three aspects in particular of the CEFR and its influence over the past 20 years: language testing and self-assessment; language and cultural competences and lesser-spoken / heritage languages and the Framework. This investigation will help us to answer the question posed in the title of the talk: what have we gained from the CEFR?

Leading Minds #5 | Multilingualism In Episode 5 of the Leading Minds: Expert Voices podcast from the College of Medicine, Nursing & Health Sciences, host Jonathan McCrea discusses multilingualism and its importance with Dr. Stanislava Antonijevic-Elliott and Dr. Mary Pat O'Malley from the School of Health Sciences in NUI Galway.

From Fireside Stories to Bounded Texts The Flower/Ó Direáin Collection is an important primary source of linguistic and folklore material in Irish. Collected in 1933 by renowned scholar Robin Flower from Aran Islands storyteller Darach Ó Direáin, the collection is preserved in Robin Flower’s Nachlass in the National Folklore Collection, Dublin. My presentation explores the interdisciplinary process involved in transforming manuscript-form archive material into a more readily accessible text for both an academic and general readership. I examine the detailed editing process and linguistic analysis involved in producing a folklore text that aims to uncover and retain the dialectal characteristics of the storyteller. A further examination of the construction process of this collection, in terms of positioned roles and discursive histories, reveals the multiple voices and socio-historical discourses that constitute a folklore text from the West of Ireland. Dr Marion Ní Mhaoláin has a PhD in Modern Irish and Anthropology from Maynooth University and taught Irish for many years in that university. She has also spent time as a linguist with an aboriginal community in Western Australia and is currently working in the Department of Speech and Language Therapy, NUI Galway, on a project about assessment of narrative in children attending Gaeltacht and non-Gaeltacht Irish-medium schools.

Back to the future: linguistic emergence in usage and the psychological mechanism of learning In this talk, Petar Milin will present work as part of the Out of our Minds team [https://outofourminds.bham.ac.uk/]. This group operationalizes the usage-based linguistic notion of emergence from use through psychological principles of learning. He will pay special attention to the hybrid methodology we are developing and using, which combines corpus analysis, computational modelling, and experimentation. The presentation will investigate how corpus analysis and computational modelling of learning can constrain one another to provide insights for both, the necessary and sufficient linguistic abstractions as well as the necessary and sufficient learning functionality, to meet the requirement of cognitive commitment and plausibility that is finally tested in the lab. The project is in harmony with Poggio’s (2012) addition to Marr’s (1982) three level of analysis, in which learning represents a self-sufficient level of explanation, and where the dynamic pressure of language-in-use constrains what emerges and how it gets learned.

Language contact phenomena in an Italian community in the UK Guest speaker Valentina Del Vecchio (G. d’Annunzio” University of Chieti-Pescara, Pescara, Italy) discusses language contact and code switching in an Italian community in the UK. Migration is a phenomenon that has a crucial impact on the linguistic repertoires of the people involved. It usually brings about the emergence of different language contact phenomena due to the contact between a community’s heritage language and the language spoken in the host country. Among these, in the last few years, special attention has been paid to code-switching (CS), which, as a general term, refers to the common practice in bilingual communities of using two or more languages in the same conversation. This talk aims at analysing the impact that a specific migration context – that of an Italian community in the UK – has on the patterns of CS found in conversations among speakers of different generations of migrants.

The devil is in the detail: Irish-language phraseology and linguistic theory Talk by Dr. Katie Ní Loingsigh as part of the Centre for Applied Linguistics and Multilingualism (CALM) Seminar Series. Phraseology has developed as a broad and varied field of linguistics over the past twenty years. This talk aims to provide an overview of the study of phraseology, the study of usual or typical turns of phrase, in the Irish language. There is an urgent need to document and undertake phraseological research on endangered languages and the link between phraseology in Irish and its cultural context will be examined. Firstly, a brief outline of the development of phraseology as an interdisciplinary field of research will be given. Idioms, often thought the prototypical phraseological category, in Irish will provide the principal focus of analysis in this talk. Idioms are considered carriers of culture and this research aims to build on prior phraseological research focusing on cultural phenomena.

Bilingual Language use and acquisition Bilingual Language use and acquisition: Motion event description by English-French sequential and simultaneous bilinguals. Motion is an ubiquitous daily human activity and described regularly in language. However, the way motion events are described varies cross-linguistically. This talk will explore how such differences can impact language acquisition and use. Specifically, the talk will focus on language usage in French - English adult sequential and simultaneous bilinguals. This talk will first present what sequential and simultaneous bilinguals are and how motion events are typically encoded in French and English. Then, results from experiments involving French - English adult sequential and simultaneous bilinguals will be discussed. The results will highlight specific difficulties inherent to each language that impede the use and acquisition of typical motion event descriptions. In this talk, applications will also be suggested for the teaching and learning of motion event description in different languages.

Intergenerational language transmission in Irish-, Kurdish- and Polish-speaking families This first seminar in the CALM 2021 Series by Dr Cassie Smith-Christmas will explore a model developed to give a holistic account of caregivers' goals for successful intergenerational language transmission, referred to as the 'Saibhreas' model. This model was developed within an autochthonous minority language context (Irish in Corca Dhuibhne, co. Kerry with the 'Sustaining Minoritized Languages in Europe' initiative), but the talk will show the relevance of the model to conceptualising intergenerational transmission of heritage languages in Ireland through the project 'Languages, Families, and Society'. The talk will outline the various challenges families encounter in reaching their goals for successful intergenerational language transmission and will discuss possible societal interventions that could help mitigate these causes.

Corpus linguistics tools in language acquisition research This talk, by Prof. Anna Bączkowska (University of Gdansk), will explore the benefits of corpus linguistics tools in language teaching research and practice. Prof. Bączkowska will talk about the CHILDES database, which is a repository of transcripts of conversations held among adults and children. The data illustrate developmental changes occurring in language acquisition in monolingual and bilingual children. Some corpus and NLP tools which allow one to extract material from the database as well as some statistical information available through different software programs will be demonstrated. Examples will be shown and analysed by resorting to the data of bilingual and multilingual children.

Prosody and Language Acquisition In this seminar, Dr Francesca Nicora of NUI Galway will join CALM Co-Director Dr John Walsh to discuss the prosodic features of speech in the context of teaching and learning foreign languages, particularly regarding the role of intonation and its relevance in speech communication. She will also present the overarching conceptual framework underpinning the teaching of foreign language prosody, including current models of intonational analysis, second language theories as well as didactic methods and approaches.

Mincéirí Tori: Conversations on Irish Traveller Language Join Traveller activist and Gammon language advocate Oein DeBhairduin and John Walsh (Co-Director of CALM) as they explore the history, uses, evolving contexts and celebrations of Gammon-Cant, the Irish Traveller Language.

Artificial intelligence approaches to multilinguality In this webinar, Dr John McCrae, Lecturer at Data Science Institute and Insight Centre for Data Analytics, NUI Galway, will talk about the use of artificial intelligence for issues in multilinguality. The talk will give an overview of AI applications, including machine translation, that are useful for this and a particular focus will be on the application of AI to minority languages and historical linguistics. We will also cover work on the development of computer-assisted language learning systems. This webinar was broadcast live on Zoom, and via the Moore Institute's Facebook page, on 10th December, 2020. Useful links: http://john.mccr.ae/ MooreInstitute

‌Making research meaningful for multilingual parents Featuring Dr Mary-Pat O’Malley Keighran, Lecturer in Speech & Language Therapy, NUI Galway. In this webinar, Mary-Pat will talk about ways in which research into multilingual speech and language development and disorders can be made accessible and meaningful to parents faced with persisting myths about raising multilingual children. For more information about Mary-Pat’s work, see www.talknua.com.

Language in a health crisis: navigating Covid-19 in a multilingual Ireland This webinar addresses key sociolinguistic dimensions of the Covid-19 crisis in Ireland, looking at Irish and immigrant languages. Panellists will explore challenges posed by the crisis for speech and language therapy services and EAL (English as an additional language) provision; the role of the state in providing public health information in languages other than English; and surprising opportunities that have emerged in terms of home language maintenance and language learning.

We are delighted to annouce the CALM Seminar Series for 2021-2022. With the support of the Moore Institute, there will be 6 online seminars during the academic year on topics of relevance to our research centre. Links to the events will be provided in individual posts on this site and on social media channels.