Sharing Experience From Linguistic Research

The ECIS conference was as a great opportunity to have a chat with invited speakers. We managed to catch up with Jim Cummins, Fred Genesee and Maurice Carder during a very busy schedule. We asked them about their favourite steps in the research process, what inspired their research and what they would recommend to young researchers.

INTERVIEW 1

Professor Jim Cummins, University of Toronto, Canada

 

What was the most interesting research you ever did? 

Probably the research that’s had the longest life in terms of still having influence was distinguishing between the kind of language we use in everyday face to face conversation situations as opposed to the kind of language that's required in schools. So the difference between conversational fluency and academic language proficiency, and that distinction is still very much relevant to what’s happening in schools, and it makes a big difference for students who are learning a second language in school or a second or third or fourth language in school because when the students have access to the language in the wider environment typically within about a year and a year and a half their thoroughly fluent in conversational aspects of the language, but it takes typically much longer for them to catch up in the more formal academic aspects of the language.

 

Because if you look at the language of textbooks, the language of books generally, you see a very different kind of vocabulary, much more low-frequency words whereas in every conversation, on Facebook we use high-frequency words and we don’t use complicated grammatical structures. In an academic text like in science textbooks, there is a lot of passive voice, there is a lot of big long words that come from Latin and Greek like acceleration, fluctuation, all those words that we tend not to use in everyday language. So that distinction is, I think, is one of the more significant and interesting ones that I was involved in and happened to make.

 

What advice would you give to beginner researchers?

Read a lot! Figure out what kinds of research is appropriate for what kinds of question.

 

INTERVIEW 2

Fred Genesee, Professor Emeritus, McGill University, Canada 

What inspired you to become a linguistic researcher?

I was worried that people thought that learning two languages was difficult for the children and often these children were told, or the parents were told that they should learn only one language, and I wanted to see whether that was good advice or bad advice. So I did research to see if children could learn two languages easily.

 

What advice would you give to beginner researchers?

Start small! Because even small questions result in very big research projects!

 

What is your favourite step during the research process?

Writing up the results, because when you write up your results you have to think very carefully about what you did and what it means, and you think you understand that when you start, but often at the end you have a different opinion of what you did and why you did it.

 

What was the biggest transcript in your career?

When we worked with transcripts of children who were 12 months of age, and for every 20 minutes of that transcript it took six hours to transcribe 20 minutes. That was a huge job!

 

 

INTERVIEW 3

Maurice Carder, Independent researcher and writer

Author of Bilingualism in International Schools: A Model for Enriching Language Education. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters (2007)

We used languages stories from this book as a starting point in our research so it was very exciting to meet the author!

 

Who are the students who wrote language stories in the book?

They were all students who were in my class. All sorts of different levels and that’s the sort of thing we often talk about because I encourage all my students to talk about their own mother tongue and to relate it, tell them to be proud of it and why they are still learning it. And then, I think I gave it as homework and I said,” Write a little autobiography”. And then when it came back, I didn’t correct it because I wanted it to be there, in the original.  

 

What advice would you give to beginner researchers?

Get ready for a lot of hard work. Really, research is fascinating, it’s an endless journey. You get to one thing, then you find another one and then you follow it. It’s different nowadays with the internet, it’s made things so much easier. When I wrote my book, the internet… I couldn’t use it at all. It was pen and paper but I ended up typing it up on the computer. I had to find books in the libraries. You have to be determined, you have to be confident, don’t take no for an answer, keep asking questions!

It was nice to learn what they knew about languages and what they thought about research.” - Ludovica