The Centre for Applied Language Studies (CALS), founded in 1997, is a research centre within the School of Languages, Literature, Culture and Communication. It brings together researchers and postgraduate students from several disciplines within the School, which includes six languages: English (English Language Teaching and English Literature), French, German, Irish, Japanese and Spanish. The Centre provides a focus for research in applied language studies within the University and a focal point for national and international links. It also promotes the interaction of research and the application of language activities in areas such as language learning, corpus linguistics, language in society, and language planning and policy. CALS also has a number of associate members from other Irish and European universities who make an important contribution to the work of the Centre by co-supervising Ph.D. theses and collaborating in publications and events. The Centre currently has 65 members, including 21 Ph.D. students.
Research in CALS is funded by the University of Limerick, which employs the members of faculty, and also by the Higher Education Authority, Ireland, which provides funding for a significant number of the Ph.D. students and for postdoctoral researchers through the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences, and the Programme for Research in Third-level Institutions, Cycle 4. The members have also coordinated and participated in a number of EU-funded projects. CALS is structured in three research clusters: New learning environments; Discourse, society and identity; and Plurilingualism and language policy. The following sections provide information on selected research outcomes within the three research clusters in 2009 and 2010. References to CALS members imply that they are researchers in the University of Limerick, unless otherwise stated.
New learning environments
Among the research areas in this research cluster, corpora and language learning is prominent, as members of the Centre have been responsible for the creation of the Limerick Corpus of Irish English (L-CIE) (Farr & O'KeeffeFootnote 1Reference Farr and O'Keeffe2004) and research on its applications in language learning and teaching, and also for research in the use of corpora in the learning and teaching of French. Attention has focused in particular on the potential uses of corpora in language teacher education (LTE) contexts. The focus here has been on the ways in which corpora can be used as aids to enhance language awareness, classroom pedagogy, and reflection among English language student teachers. A second dimension has been the use of corpora as professional development tools for teacher educators when contemplating and examining their own professional practices. A summary of this and other strands of research being conducted by CALS members can be found in the Routledge handbook of corpus linguistics (McCarthyFootnote 2 & O'Keeffe Reference McCarthy and O'Keeffe2010). See, for example, the chapter by Farr (Reference Farr, McCarthy and O'Keeffe2010a) for a discussion of corpus applications in language teacher education.
In the context of the teaching of French at secondary level education, teaching through the target language is the subject of a Ph.D. thesis in CALS by Stéphanie O'Riordan, involving the creation of a corpus of classroom discourse. A corpus of 15 French classes taught through French has been created, including native and non-native speaker teachers. This corpus has already been the source of research within CALS into teachers' use of discourse markers (Amador MorenoFootnote 3, Chambers & O'Riordan Reference Amador Moreno, Chambers and O'Riordan2006). Teaching grammar in the target language is often perceived by language teachers as a challenge. O'Riordan (Reference O'Riordan2009) analyses the recourses made to the learners' first language and to the target language in two classes within turns of speech dealing with grammar explanations and discusses the application of resources such as this corpus in LTE. One class was taught by a native-speaker teacher of French and one by a non-native speaker. As a resource of this size cannot claim to be representative of the practices of all teachers of French, O'Riordan explains that, in addition to fulfilling the useful function of increasing the amount of observation of teaching by the student teachers, its function is to serve as an aid to reflection and a source of attested examples, not as a model to be slavishly followed. She shows how the corpus data can be used in two ways in LTE. Firstly, they provide lexico-grammatical examples of how teachers give grammatical feedback in the target language, through simple concordances of words such as temps (tense). Secondly, the analysis of the data by the teacher and/or the student teachers provides attested examples of the various ways in which language teachers give feedback, thus encouraging the student teachers to reflect on their own practice.
Corpora also figure prominently in a book on language teaching materials development edited by two members of the Centre (Mishan & Chambers Reference Mishan and Chambers2010). In the first chapter, for example, McCarten & McCarthy show how frequency counting and concordance analysis make it possible to identify four macro functions in conversation, linked to particular lexico-grammatical features, namely organising your own talk, taking account of the other speakers, listenership, and managing the conversation as a whole. The authors note that using real language presents a number of challenges to authors of course books, such as the fact that the context may not be clear, or that teachers do not always approve of the presence of informal language in course books. The authors conclude by providing guidelines on the adaptation of corpus texts to create effective language learning materials.
In addition to corpora, language teacher education and language learning materials development, research in this cluster also focuses on areas such as learner autonomy, academic writing, and the use of social media in language learning (see, for example, Cleary et al. Reference Cleary, Graham, Jeanneau and O'Sullivan2009; Hourigan & Murray Reference Hourigan and Murray2010).
Discourse, society and identity
The second research focus within the centre is on language in context. The interrelationship between language, society and identity is important here, and varietal and pragmatic accounts are strong themes within this cluster. Again, the type of discourse used in teacher education features, with a detailed account of the language of teaching practice feedback found in Farr (Reference Farr2010b). The corpus-based methodology, complemented by other data sources such as diary entries and survey results from various interested parties, allows the author to take a strongly pragmatic approach in this volume, and to engage both qualitative and quantitative techniques. Age and gender have been explored in great detail in MurphyFootnote 4 (Reference Murphy2010), which is an analysis of talk in Irish English across three generations of female speakers. Again, within a discoursal pragmatic framework it examines linguistic phenomena such as hedging, vague language, amplifiers and boosters, and taboo language.
Irish English has been a strong feature of CALS research, drawing on L-CIE, as well as many other smaller corpora collected for specific purposes. A volume by Amador Moreno (Reference Amador-Moreno2010) gives a complete introduction to Irish English, using many illustrations from Irish fiction writing, as well as spoken corpora. O'Keeffe & Amador Moreno (Reference O'Keeffe and Amador-Moreno2009) have conducted specific linguistic analysis on the be after +v-ing construction (‘I'm just after seeing him’, in place of the more standard British English, ‘I've just seen him’), drawing on written fiction and contemporary spoken language. Another example is the detailed discussion of the use of religious references in academic and casual conversation contexts, and across age and gender groupings (Farr & Murphy Reference Farr and Murphy2009). The findings of this study indicate the acceptability of the use of religious references in many contexts, a phenomenon which has coincided with their increase in use as weak taboo language items largely devoid of any of their original meanings.
Plurilingualism and language policy
Much of the current research in CALS work in this area focuses on the interaction of macro and micro aspects of policy. Some of the work analyses and problematises current theoretical foundations and assumptions in this area (e.g. Kelly-Holmes Reference Kelly-Holmes2010) while other publications discuss crucial dimensions of policy and planning, such as language policing (e.g. Kelly-Holmes, Moriarty & Pietikäinen Reference Kelly-Holmes, Moriarty and Pietikäinen2009) and the relationships between society and the state in plurilingual contexts (Ó hIfearnáin Reference Ó hIfearnáin, Ball and Müller2009). A significant proportion of this work places a particular emphasis on language and the media (e.g. Kelly-Holmes Reference Kelly-Holmes2009; Moriarty Reference Moriarty2010). As such, the work encompasses both sociolinguistic and sociological approaches to the study of linguistic behaviour in late modernity.
A considerable proportion of the publications cited here have arisen from the Northern Multilingualism Project (www.northernmultilingualism.fi), led by the University of Jyväskylä, Finland. The aims of the project and its subsequent publications are: to explore multilingualism in North Calotte (‘Lapland’ or ‘Samiland’) and other peripheral contexts, with particular reference to minoritised languages; to examine discourses, practices and experiences of multilingualism in North Calotte and elsewhere, with particular reference to tourism, landscapes and media; to investigate the conditions and consequences of multilingualism, particularly in terms of language hierarchies, value and function of language(s) and agency.
Additionally, colleagues have recently contributed to sociolinguistic materials designed for use by students and to a major handbook of sociolinguistics around the world (Atkinson, Bengoechea & Michele de Oliveira Reference Atkinson, Bengoechea, Michele de Oliveira and Ball2010, commissioned by Routledge).
