Language ecology Archive

Languaging and Linguistic Exostructures: Aligning cultural-historical, ecological, and distributed approaches to L2 development by Steve Thorne, Portland State University & University of Groningen, The Netherlands Within a variety of language-related disciplines, there is growing commitment to more holistic and ecologically oriented frameworks that recognize cognition and communication as coordinated, embodied, relational, distributed, and arrayed across…

The Ecology of the Foreign-Language Literature Classroom: Complexity Theory as a Model for Pedagogy by Glenn Levine, Associate Professor, University of California - Irvine. In recent years, complexity theory has been adapted from the natural and physical sciences as a sort of meta-theory for applied linguistics. The purpose of this presentation is to show how…

Language Ecology in Practice: Implications for Foreign Language Education by Claire Kramsch, Professor of German and Foreign Language Acquisition, University of California, Berkeley Language ecology as applied to language learning has been defined as a “convenient metaphor for a post-structuralist conceptualization of language learning as a nonlinear, relational human activity, co-constructed between humans and their…

What is Dialectical Ecolinguistics and what can it do for the language teacher? by Sune Vork Steffensen, Scandinavian Institute, University of Aarhus, Denmark Taking as a starting point “the ecological turn,” especially in the humanities and in the linguistic sciences, I present the diverse traditions comprised under the term Ecolinguistics (or Language Ecology) and I…

Language Policy and the Ecological Turn by Alastair Pennycook, Professor of Languages in Education, Faculty of Education, University of Technology, Sydney Although the notion of language ecology has been both popular and productive as a way of understanding language and environment, drawing our attention to the ways in which languages are embedded in social, cultural,…

Towards an Ecology of Language by Mary Pratt, Silver Professor, Department of Spanish and Portuguese Language and Literature, New York University The idea of societies as custodians of their languages has mainly been associated with elitist ideologies aimed at creating class-based linguistic hierarchies.  Egalitarian thought about language has generally opposed prescriptive views.  This however eliminates…

Language Ecology: An Interdisciplinary Symposium   Friday and Saturday, February 20-21, 2004 370 Dwinelle Hall

NB: accompanying lecture slides and audio are forthcoming. Language Ecology Course Information, Syllabus, Reading Psychology/CS 124 and Psychology 290G – Spring 2004 Faculty Dan Slobin - Psychology, Linguistics (coordinator ) Patricia Baquedano-López - Education Andrew Garrett - Linguistics William Hanks - Anthropology, Linguistics Leanne Hinton - Linguistics Claire Kramsch - German, Education Johanna Nichols -…

Language Ecology - A Course Proposal (2002) 1. Summary “When I think of my tongue being no longer alive in the mouths of men a chill goes over me that is deeper than my own death, since it is the gathered deaths of all my kind.” — David Malouf, Antipodes (1985) 1.1. Introduction. We envision…

This report presents a review of study abroad research conducted from an ecological perspective (Kramsch, 2003; Leather & van Dam, 2003; van Lier, 2004) and identifies areas of inquiry that are lacking compared to second language acquisition and other fields (i.e., linguistics, psychology). It identifies value-based views as a high-priority area of interest and draws on frameworks in other fields to outline how language learning research could effectively describe the moral ecology of study abroad for language learning.