Mira Goral
I am a Professor of Speech-Language-Hearing Sciences at Lehman College and the Graduate Center of The City University of New York (CUNY). I completed my B.A. in Linguistics at Tel Aviv University and my Ph.D. in Neurolinguistics at the Graduate Center, CUNY. My areas of research interest include language in bilingual and multilingual speakers, aphasia, language attrition, and language and cognition in aging. I am also certified with Certificate of Clinical Competence for Speech-Language Pathologists (CCC-SLP)
In recent years, my research efforts have been directed toward understanding language production in aphasia and toward enhancing our ability to measure treatment-related change in bilingual and multilingual individuals with aphasia. In addition, I have dedicated my time to mentoring a diverse group of students at all levels who work and volunteer in my research lab and at the Lehman Speech-Language Clinic.
What will be the focus of your work at MultiLing?
At MultiLing, I will lead the research work on multilingual aphasia. The overarching aim of the project is to understand patterns of language use and recovery in multilingual individuals who acquire aphasia, including the effects of variables, such as language usage patterns, as well as structural similarities and differences across languages
Jannis Androutsopoulos
I grew up in Athens, Greece. After my first degree in German Philology at the University of Athens I moved to Heidelberg, Germany, where I received a PhD in German sociolinguistics in 1997. There followed a 2-year postdoc project at Universität Heidelberg, a 3-year researcher appointment at Institut für Deutsche Sprache Mannheim, an assistant professorship at Leibniz Universität Hannover and a readership at King’s College London from where I moved to my present post at Universität Hamburg in 2009. My research is based in sociolinguistics and has a focus on mediated communication. In a number of projects I have examined a wide range of media text and talk in unidirectional mass media, participative and interpersonal digital communication.
My interests include language style, language and identity, language ideologies, written language and literacy, multimodality, new forms of public communication in the digital age, the relationship between media and linguistic change, not least, mediated multilingualism. My first study of multilingual practices was in the late 1990s, and, multilingualism has been one of my core areas in research and teaching ever since.
What will be the focus of your work at MultiLing?
At MultiLing I am joining Theme 2, Multilingual practices, with a project on Multilingualism in mediated communication, which I will develop in close collaboration with core member Jan Svennevig and two researchers, a Postdoc and a PhD candidate.
Our main question is how multilingual practices play out in digitally mediated interaction. Digital technologies constrain in certain ways what speakers can do with their linguistic resources, but also enable new forms of interaction across distant social spaces, in which people’s linguistic resources are used in both familiar and innovative ways.
We examine digital language practices not just to confirm what we already know about multilingualism in face-to-face interaction, but to find out how multilingual practices are extended and reconfigured, for example in text-based interaction. We envisage two focal sites of investigation: Multilingual families who use digital media to enable distant interaction and organisations who draw on digital media to enable new forms of professional services.
Alastair Pennycook
I am Professor of Language in Education at the University of Technology Sydney. I have worked in language education in many parts of the world, including Germany, Japan, Canada, China, Hong Kong and Australia. My best-known work is on the global spread of English, critical applied linguistics, language and popular culture, and language as a local practice. Three of my books The Cultural Politics of English as an International Language (Longman, 1994), Global Englishes and Transcultural Flows (Routledge, 2007), and Language and Mobility: Unexpected Places (Multilingual Matters, 2012) have been awarded the BAAL Book Prize.
Recent work has focused on urban multilingualism, leading to the book (with Emi Otsuji), Metrolingualism: Language in the City, (Routledge, 2015). When I am not writing and researching, I am also involved in marine ecology and reef preservation projects such as Saving Philippines Reefs (SPR) as part of the Coastal Conservation and Education Foundation, based in Cebu in the Philippines.
What will be the focus of your work at MultiLing?
At MultiLing I am an Adjunct Professor with a particular focus on multilingualism and globalization from a Norwegian perspective. Our aim here is to study the role of different languages in Norway¹s contemporary multilingual landscape. In order to understand globalization, migration and changing social and economic conditions we need to focus not only on English but also on the complexity of interlocking languages in any context. We are therefore interested in the ways in which migrant communities and workers negotiate different languages among their own languages, other languages of the community and workplace, English and Norwegian.
This diversity applies not only to urbanised contexts in major cities but also to Northern Norway that have been linguistically diverse for centuries and where cross-border contact, trade and migration between Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia complicate the relation between regional languages such as Sami, national languages such as Norwegian or Russian, and English as a language of tourism and wider communication. We are currently developing research projects to investigate these contexts.