The Centre for Applied Language Research at the University of Southampton is one of two research centres within the discipline of Modern Languages. Established in 2004, CALR now has more than 50 members, predominantly faculty members working in the School of Humanities/Modern Languages, as well as growing number of postgraduate researchers. The Centre has always sought to work collaboratively with other centres and institutions worldwide and regularly hosts visiting international scholars. Additionally, many of its members work closely with the Centre for Transnational Studies, which also comes under the School of Modern Languages. CALR promotes an extensive applied language research agenda, including language education policy, second language acquisition (SLA), foreign language learning (FLL) and teaching, sociolinguistics, intercultural communication and language globalisation. Emanating from the legacy of Christopher Brumfit, the founder of the Centre, CALR work has always reflected an awareness of global and local issues in language use and learning. Brumfit was renowned for balancing his concerns for the rights and freedoms of the language learner with his influential work on classroom pedagogy. Since his passing in 2006, these values have lived on in the work of the Centre.
Throughout the year, CALR organises a seminar series, at which talks are given by visiting researchers from the UK and beyond. The Centre also hosts an assortment of conferences, as well as an Annual Lecture; in 2008 this was given by Professor David Crystal on ‘The future of Englishes’ and was attended by University members as well as former students of Professor Crystal, and interested members of the public.
The overview that follows has been divided into four research areas: Pedagogy, Language Acquisition, World Englishes and Bilingualism/Multilingualism, although there are obvious overlaps between these areas. While the range of research in the Centre covers much of the wider research arena within applied linguistics, the following research summary is focussed on issues broadly concerning language teaching and learning. Further information on the work of the members mentioned here can be found online (www.calr.soton.ac.uk).
Language teaching
International and technological trends in education have opened many new issues in language teaching and also brought many researchers with diverse language and cultural backgrounds into the centre. What follows is a brief overview of some prominent research areas and specific studies, with the caveat that the space here does not allow us to cover all the research currently being undertaken in sufficient detail.
Rosamond Mitchell was one of the two founders of CALR (along with Christopher Brumfit), and continues to play a pivotal role within the centre. Mitchell's fields of interest could hardly be wider, as she actively contributes to the fields of SLA, foreign language education in British education and wide areas of EFL pedagogy from children's learning to various issues in higher education. Her latest collaborative research project for the state Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF) takes place in British primary schools, reviewing the introduction of foreign language learning in Key Stage 2 (ages 8–11). It investigates the nature and quality of language provision, and assesses the impact of this on both language learning and wider learning across the curriculum. The early results show positive implications for primary school language learning, with beneficial areas including a perceived benefit to children's general literacy skills, cultural awareness, oracy skills, enjoyment, and dispositions and strategies for learning generally.
Mitchell's other work includes a joint project on multicompetencies, funded by LINEE (Languages in a Network of European Excellence). The study focuses on students with multilingual competencies stemming from their backgrounds as immigrants in three European countries. The research focus is on how the students use language inside and outside the classroom, how this interacts with their perceptions and attitudes towards languages, multilingualism and ‘legitimate’ varieties in education, and the part that language policy and school practice have to play in tensions between institutional ideas of multi-competence and actual student experience. The second stage of this research focuses on further issues relating to multicompetencies, attitudes and language learning (see below). Immigration and identity are also key aspects of Alma Rodríguez-Tsuda's research into adult L2 learning in an urban English context. Her approach emphasizes how the learner's profile, including their gender, various social memberships and oppositions and wider cultural and linguistic factors have a strong and interwoven influence on their attitudes towards, and success in, language learning.
Another research focus within CALR is the current work on language learning strategies. This area of research has been evolving over the last decade, and has been enriched by the work of Mike Grenfell of the School of Education (Southampton). His most recent publications compare the strategies employed by students with multilingual competencies to those used by monolingual students in language learning environments, and the variations in the roles and effects of strategy intervention in the classroom (see Grenfell & Macaro Reference Grenfell, Macaro, Cohen and Macaro2007). This research strand is being supported by related work in the centre, including Tiwaporn Kongsom's forthcoming research into the effects of teaching communicative strategies in Thailand.
The Centre for Language Study (CLS) works within modern languages and contributes a great deal to the work of CALR. Under the direction of Vicky Wright, who is engaged in several research projects into aspects of the learning of modern foreign languages, CLS is currently overseeing important research on learner autonomy, resource-based learning and the role of technology in language learning and teaching. Notable work includes that of Julie Watson, who has had a pivotal role designing and implementing a variety of online resources for international students in her role as Manager of Academic Development on an e-learning project in CLS. The project has been investigating the value of such online tools to enhance students’ experiences through pre-arrival online preparatory courses. A website developed for the UK Council for International Student Affairs is in full operation (www.prepareforsuccess.org.uk), and its the success has implications for the future of international student recruitment and preparation. Other research in the field includes the work of Kirsten Söntgens, whose research interests are on the use of technology to transform the traditional roles of learners. Her previous studies have looked at the use of online portfolios and explicit skills training to this effect, and made recommendations for further curriculum development and associated staff development needs. Her current focus is on the potential benefits of using podcasts to transform language course content, the roles of learners as well as language skills developed in the learning process.
SLA and foreign language learning
Of particular importance within CALR is the number of projects, both ongoing and recently completed, in the area of SLA, both from the perspective of the teacher and the learner. Two of the most well-known CALR studies are the Spanish Learner Language Oral Corpus (SPLLOC; www.splloc.soton.ac.uk) and the French Learner Language Oral Corpora (FLLOC; www.flloc.soton.ac.uk), both of which aim to promote research relating to the acquisition of Spanish and French as a second/foreign language, by providing access to a growing database of oral corpora to other researchers. SPLLOC is funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council and was built through collaboration between the Universities of Southampton, Newcastle and York. The project is led by Dr Laura Domínguez, whose expertise lies in the area of syntactic development in L1 and L2 acquisition with particular relevance to Spanish. There are two SPLLOC corpora: in SPLLOC1 (April 2006 – March 2008) data was collected from L1 English classroom learners of Spanish, with a view to investigating the acquisition of central morphosyntactic properties of Spanish, such as word order and clitic pronouns, and to providing a description and analysis of developmental sequences of L2 Spanish from an interface perspective; SPLLOC2 (August 2008 – January 2010) will expand this corpus further by researching the development of Tense and Aspect in L2 Spanish by L1 English learners. The aim of FLLOC has been to create a corpus of spoken L2 French from beginner to advanced level. The latest FLLOC phase ran from 2005 to 2008 and was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. Its objectives were to add further intermediate-level data to the corpus and to investigate lexical and morphological issues in French interlanguage.
Other current or recently completed SLA/FLL research projects have focussed on instructed language learning in the UK and abroad. Patricia Romero de Mills uses ethnographic investigation to provide an in-depth analysis of the elements involved in the development of criticality among undergraduate students of Spanish in the UK in both oral and written work. Competence in writing is central to the work of Wisut Jarunthawatchai, who employs a process-genre approach to the teaching of rhetorical and linguistic features in developing the writing competence of Thai university students, and Majad Alqahtani, who explores pedagogical and theoretical aspects of the writing in English of students in Saudi Arabia. Further studies range from the sociolinguistic within SLA (Alma Rodriguez-Tsuda, mentioned above) to the acquisition of an L2 phonology, as in Caroline Hyde-Simon's investigation into the relative difficulty of acquiring an L2 (Zürich German) which is phonologically closer to the L1 (Standard German), compared to an L1 which is phonologically more distant (English). The sounds explored are both similar and dissimilar in the L1 and L2. Data will be collected from learners at beginner and advanced level from each L2 group, and will subsequently be analysed using the acoustic analysis programme PRAAT (www.praat.org). Results will be compared to native speaker productions of the sounds in question.
World Englishes
Jennifer Jenkins chairs the centre and has brought a fresh focus to global issues in the teaching, learning and uses of English. Jenkins, a distinguished linguist who has produced seminal works in the fields of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) and World Englishes, is currently extending her field of research, with new projects including her role as leader of a LINEE work package focussing on the acquisition of ELF in conversational settings. The findings will be relevant to pedagogy, issues of correctness, effectiveness, skills and norms in multilingual communication, and will look at the effectiveness of native speakers in ELF communicative environments.
There are a number of postgraduate research students studying various aspects of ELF, with foci ranging from ELF communication in China (Wang Ying) and Japan (Mariko Kitazawa), to Nicola Galloway's work on implementing ELF awareness in ELT pedagogy in Japan. Continuing the theme of pedagogical issues in the changing roles of English, Robert Baird's work concentrates on current developments of English usage in international higher education, and the consequences for academic writing and writer identities. Identity and culture are central themes in William Baker's work on intercultural awareness and its development among Thai English users in higher education. In this study, Baker investigates the role of culture(s) in L2 use and learning, and attempts to construct a model of intercultural awareness to elucidate the ‘cultural dimension’ in such use, and learning and intercultural communication in ELF.
Bilingualism and multilingualism
Another area of research focus, clearly connected to that above, is that of the relationship between two languages which are of a similar status in a linguistic repertoire, as in that of a bilingual speaker. Activity within CALR includes Gabi Budach's project looking at bilingual literacy teaching and learning in an Italian–German two-way immersion project based in a primary state school in inner Frankfurt (Germany). The environment uses German and Italian as target languages and medium of instruction, and the main objective of the study is to understand processes of the children's learning that are enhanced by this specific environment encouraging the inclusion of various resources: multilingual, various genres, and content from different ‘national’ curricula (Italian and German). Mike Grenfell's work on language learner strategies and bilingualism addresses the topic of the strategy use of students who are learning L3 French with a view to opening a research agenda which brings together psycho- and sociolinguistic perspectives. There is a long research tradition in studying bilingual learners from such perspectives, and extensive research literature on language learner strategies within the field of SLA, yet there is little literature which brings together these three components. The research will explore the theoretical, practical and policy-related issues of bilingual students learning an L3 in a formal classroom context.
Elena Ioannidou, fosussing on multilingual immigrant students in Italy, England and Austria, focuses on how multilingual repertoires are used in the school context, and whether knowledge of more than one language reinforces language learning in other languages. The exploration of immigrant speakers is also fundamental to Laura Domínguez's study of the ways in which immigrant bilingual speakers (Cuban exiles who have settled in Miami and Spaniards who have moved to the UK) modify their L1 (including their vocabulary and key syntactic structures) under the influence of the new linguistic environment.
