Category: research

Migrants here to provide maximun benefit

Today, 27/1/2019, Sajid Javid UK Home Secretary laid out that the Govt sees immigrants as an asset to generate a “maximum benefit”.

May´s thing with immigrants and freedom of movement

A couple of years ago I published research that examined how migrants were constructed both in the UK immigration legislation and in the information delivered through the UK Border Agency website. We wrote this in 2015 well before the Brexit Referendum. I read this again today and have realised how naive we were. The following is part of our conclusions:

What our results seem to suggest is that for the UK Administration, the issue of immigrant integration is not part of how immigrants are constructed in the legislation and the information that the UK immigration agencies and authorities publish and distribute. This failure to mention integration issues in the legislation is not found in other legal systems such as in Italy, where Hernández González (2016) discovered a tension between inclusion/integration and exclusion/control in the same 2007–2011 period. The language-driven evidence provided in this study corroborates that the use of the lemma ‘migrant’ in the two corpora analysed calls for a partial construction of immigrants mainly as workers who need to be tightly controlled and classified into Tiers to prevent unlawful behaviour. In doing so, migrants, an alternative word for immigrants in our research context, acquires an extremely subtle negative prosody.

Pérez-Paredes, P., Aguado. P. & Sánchez, P. (2017).  Constructing immigrants in UK legislation and Administration informative texts: a corpus-driven study (2007-2011). Discourse & Society,28,1,81-103.

OU innovating pedagogy report 2019

This series of reports explores new forms of teaching, learning, and assessment for an interactive world, to guide teachers and policy makers
in productive innovation.

This seventh report proposes ten innovations that are already in currency but have not yet had a profound influence on
education.

To produce the report, a group of academics at the Institute of Educational Technology in The Open University collaborated with
researchers from Norway’s Centre for the Science of Learning & Technology (SLATE).

Authors: Rebecca Ferguson, Tim Coughlan, Kjetil Egelandsdal, Mark Gaved, Christothea Herodotou, Garron Hillaire, Derek Jones, Iestyn
Jowers, Agnes Kukulska-Hulme, Patrick McAndrew, Kamila Misiejuk, Ingunn Johanna Ness, Bart Rienties, Eileen Scanlon, Mike
Sharples, Barbara Wasson, Martin Weller, Denise Whitelock

Pdf.

Website.

Populist Discourse. Critical Approaches to Contemporary Politics

So happy to contribute to this volume on populist discourse:

Pérez-Paredes, P. (2019). Little old UK voting Brexit and her Austrian friends: A corpus-driven analysis of the 2016 UK right-wing tabloid discourse. In Hidalgo, Benítez & De CEsare (eds.) Populist Discourse. Critical Approaches to Contemporary Politics, 1st Edition. London: Riutledge. 

The volume has been edited by Edited by Encarnación Hidalgo Tenorio, Miguel-Angel Benitez-Castro and Francesca De Cesare.

Some references on Usage-based language learning approaches

Ellis, N. (2017) Chapter 6 – Chunking in Language Usage, Learning and Change: I Don’t Know from Part III – Chunking. Edited by Marianne Hundt, Universität Zürich, Sandra Mollin, Universität Heidelberg, Simone E. Pfenninger, Universität Salzburg. Cambridge University Press, pp 113-147
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316091746.006

Ellis, N. (2017). Cognition, Corpora, and Computing: Triangulating Research in Usage‐Based Language Learning. Language Learning, 67(S1), 40-65.

Ellis, Nick C., & Ferreira-Junior, Fernando. (2009). Construction Learning as a Function of Frequency, Frequency Distribution, and Function. Modern Language Journal, 93(3), 370-385.

Tyler, A. (2010). Usage-Based Approaches to Language and Their Applications to Second Language Learning. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 30, 270-291.

Tyler, A., & Ortega, L. (2016). Usage-based approaches to language and language learning: An introduction to the special issue. 8(3), 335-345.

Tyler, A. (2018). Nick C. Ellis Ute Römer Matthew Brook O’Donnell: Usage-based approaches to language acquisition and processing: Cognitive and corpus investigations of construction grammar. Cognitive Linguistics, 29(1), 155-161.

Weber, Kirsten Morten H. Christiansen Peter Indefrey Peter Hagoort (2018) Primed From the Start: Syntactic Priming During the First Days of Language Learning. Language Learning. https://doi.org/10.1111/lang.12327