4,091 research outputs found
The role of English lingua franca in a university entrance test
No full textThis paper examines the need for a valid and reliable test of receptive skills in English for incoming European University students, in the light of the Bologna agreement, and the subsequent minimal level (B1 or B2) set by many universities. It reports on a needs analysis conducted among third year Italian university students who were asked to identify the specific English language skills required of them to complete their degree course, and a critique of existing tests aimed at university level students, concluding that these appear to be more suited to the needs of students in a native speaker English speaking environment
Local Institution, Global Examination: Working Together for a 'Co-certification'
No full textThe gap between major testing organizations whose products are intended for a world market, and the institutions which use them across the globe can seem potentially unbridgeable from a local perspective. For the testing organization, the challenge is to produce language tests which are objective, culturally unbiased, politically correct, and universally valid (and one could add some more qualities to this list). But for the test taker, and for the teachers and institutions who have to make choices about which tests to use, the resulting tests may be perceived at best as anodyne, and at worst inappropriate. This paper charts the progress and pitfalls of an experiment in co-certification – a collaborative process by which a local institution worked with an international assessment agency to adapt an existing suite of tests, with the aim of making it more suited to local needs. Six years on, the co-certification appears to be a ‘niche’ product requiring a considerable investment of time and energy by both partners. But we believe that it is increasingly in the interests of global testers to be sensitive to local needs and contexts; that the project we have described shows that collaboration is possible, and can lead to better tests; and that the model outlined could be adapted to other, quite different, contexts
Collaboratori linguistici in Italian universities: what light do they shed on the development of English lingua franca?
No full textThe study reported here sets out to explore the main findings from a nationwide survey administered online to native english-speaking teachers (neSTs) working in Italian universities (known as collaboratori esperti linguistici or CEL). The research objectives at the basis of the survey design are:
a. to investigate nS teachers’ awareness of the role of english as the world’s lingua franca;
b. to explore current attitudes in english Language Teaching (ELT) pedagogy and methodology with the aim of developing english as a Lingua franca (eLf)-aware language teacher education programs, course-books, materials
and syllabus design
Towards TEEUS: a test of English for European University Students
No full textEuropean universities now demand a minimum level of competence in English for all incoming students. But which competences, and which English? This paper reports on ongoing research at the University of Venice, sponsored by Trinity College London, suggests that the time is ripe for an entrance test based on the emerging reality of English in a non-native speaker environment (otherwise known as ELF), and implications for teachers who may feel increasingly under threat by drifting standards
Forefronting Welsh through English: translating and translanguaging in Alys Conran's 'Pigeon'
No full textAlys Conran’s first novel, Pigeon, (2016), relates the misadventure of a disaffected young Welsh boy, partly through the eyes of his friend and accomplice Iola, who, like Pigeon, comes from a broken family. Both are growing up in a bleak post industrial village in North Wales, never named, possibly Bethesda, the setting for one of the finest novels ever written in Welsh, Caradog Prichard’s Un nos ola leuad, which also charts the psychological undercurrents of a pre-adolescent boy trying to make sense of the world in which he finds himself, as he wanders innocently along a path of self-destruction.\ud
Prichard’s novel, written half a century ago, is in Welsh. Conran, a native speaker of Welsh, writes in English. In choosing to do so she offers insights into the way in which the two languages of Wales have been brought together through the media, through a bilingual educational system, and through changed attitudes towards both English and Welsh in the wake of devolution, more functional and less emotively charged. Pigeon and Iola are Welsh speakers, but they resort to English not just to interact with Pigeon’s monolingual step-sister, brought to the village by a violent Englishman who moves in with Pigeon’s mother, but also to play out their own fantasies, fuelled by the language of films and social media. In short, Pigeon, with its continual reference to the language use of its protagonists, can be seen as an exploration of ‘translanguaging’, a term which first appeared in Welsh as trawsieithu (Williams 1994) and has been defined by Canagarajah (2011) as ‘the ability of multilingual speakers to shuttle between languages, treating the diverse languages that form their repertoire as an integrated system’
Wales, English, and the Bracchi Factor: the co-construction of national identity in devolutionary Wales
No full textThis article examines the nature of Italian immigration to Wales over the last century and images of Italy in the collective consciousness. It considers the unique role played by Italians in the gradual development of Wales as an English speaking country. From the end of the 19th century, until well into the second half of the 20th, incoming Italians virtually invented the catering trade in Wales. Unlike other immigrant communities, which settled in the towns and remained compact, the Italian distribution was capillary across industrial south Wales and beyond; even the smallest mining village had its Italian café. After considering cross-cultural and linguistic aspects of the phenomenon – a minority community (Italians) within a minority community (Wales) in a context of an apparently irreversible process of anglicisation - the article concludes by referring to the recent reciprocal rediscovery of national identity within a context of devolution.
What happened to Anglo-Welsh? Translation trends in writing from Wales
No full textThis article looks at recent Welsh fiction in the light of devolution, the related increase in bilingualism and the emergence of young writers who choose to write in Welsh and translate their work into English. This is quite a new departure from 20th century writing from Wales, in which the two strands (writing in Welsh and writing in English, known as 'Anglo-Welsh') were quite distinct. The article examines the reasons behind the choice of language, and the rewriting processes involved in three recent novels
By-product of Bologna: a Minimum Level of English for European University Students
No full textThis article is a report of work in progress. It describes the development and implementation of an on-line entrance test in English, and a related on-line support course, in the Faculty of Languages in Venice University (2008), against the background of the Bologna Agreement, and the perceived need for incoming students in the Italian university system - and elsewhere in Europe - to have a minimum level of English if they are to be able to successfully complete their course of studies, whether at their home university or in another European university as part of an exchange programme. It goes on to consider the kinds of competences in English which are most likely to be required during a course of studies at a European university, and concludes by calling for a targeted test of those competences which would be more valid than the 'default' B1 tests currently being administered in the Italian system
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