News

The Covid-19 pandemic has put racial debates in the US on top of the agenda, according to linguistics professor Lourdes Ortega.

“Our tips are for all teachers in all schools to try to find the strengths multilingual students have because we are a very good resource for the community.[…] There are a lot of things that the teachers can learn from this project. Teachers don't need to treat us like we don't know anything at all, because we already know something.”

Around the world, people are adjusting to measures put in place to slow the spread of the novel coronavirus. The University of Oslo closed its doors Thursday 12 March. At MultiLing we are adjusting to a new normal: working and teaching from home, not knowing when we'll be able to return.

GURT 2020 Multilingualism: Global South and Global North Perspectives – an important milestone for MultiLing’s INTPART collaboration – was sadly cancelled due to the coronavirus. However, it didn't take long for the organizers to regroup and launch GURT as a virtual conference.

The last week of February, PhD students from all over the world gathered at MultiLing for our winter school: "Issues in second language learning (with)in marginalized populations: Research methods, language policy, teacher education, ideologies."

In 2018, MultiLing opened its Socio-cognitive Laboratory, which allowed for many new and exciting research projects to be carried out. In January 2020, a new branch of the lab, the Babylab, will be ready to receive its first participant visits.

PhD candidates are generally encouraged to spend time abroad. I had no idea how I could benefit from this until I spent seven weeks in Copenhagen. Here are some thoughts on recontextualizing my work, on the complexities of Scandinavian interaction and on generosity.

"Leaders in academia have much to learn from leaders in other fields," says HR Manager at the Faculty of Humanities, Helga Reiss. This fall, MultiLing organized its second Women and Leadership Roundtable at Campus Blindern.

MultiLing’s MA scholarships for 2019 have been awarded to three excellent projects by Aafke Diepeveen, Aminata Diakite, and Ellen Elveseter.

In June, MultiLing hosted a three-day workshop which aimed to reflect on visual prompts and methods in both psycho- and sociolinguistics, organized by Judith Purkarthofer and Pernille Hansen. The workshop was part of Colloquium B in MultiLing’s five-year-plan, “Engaging innovative methodologies in studying multilingualism across the lifespan”.

Ritu Jain (PhD), lecturer at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, visited MultiLing this May. Here she writes about her experience at the Center.

Many are under the misconception that the widespread multilingualism in our modern and increasingly globalized world is a fairly new development. This round-table conference, organized by Aneta Pavlenko and Pia Lane, aimed to show that practices of multilingualism have been common and necessary for centuries, even millennia.

The annual meeting with MultiLing’s Scientific Advisory Board (SAB) was held this week, on May 2-3. Among the themes of the meeting this year were career planning and grant application processes, with a particular focus on applications to the European Research Council (ERC).

Lenore Grenoble (The University of Chicago) just spent three months at MultiLing as a US Fulbright Arctic Chair grantee. We asked her to tell us a bit more about her stay in Oslo, and her current research: 

Anne Pitkänen-Huhta (University of Jyväskylä) has been spending the last two months at MultiLing. Here, she tells a little more about her stay as a visiting scholar at MultiLing. 

Quentin Williams, senior lecturer at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa, returned to MultiLing for a month long stay in October.

Research shows that Snapchat, Facebook and WhatsApp help families with immigrant backgrounds develop their multilingualism.

Erica Brozovsky, PhD Candidate at the University of Texas at Austin, just spent a month at MultiLing. Here, Erica tells a bit more about her research, and her stay in Oslo. 

How can you best provide quality education in linguistically and culturally diverse classrooms? This and other hot topics were discussed in depth at "Multilingual and Intercultural Education – Theory and practice from Latin America and Norway" at the end of September. The seminar aimed to strengthen connections among Norwegian and Latin American scholars of multilingual and intercultural education.

When we arrive in a new country, public signs, ads and billboards are often the first form of contact we have with the language and script of the place. At the start of October, colleagues from Norway, Russia, and the UK gathered in Oslo to share their research on linguistic landscapes, and to develop new collaborations between the countries. 

This year's Summer School explored experimental approaches to multilingualism. Lecturers were Janet van Hell (Pennsylvania State University) and Barbara Mertins (Dortmund Technical University).

Attending a conference can be time consuming and costly. As a Ph.D. student I am working towards a strict deadline, and nothing should come between me and my primary focus – to produce a proper thesis and submit it on time. Why, then, did I spend weeks in preparation, more than a full week away from the office and a good part of the project’s operational funds to participate at ICCA2018 in July?

Doctoral fellow Ingvild Badhwar Valen-Sendstad and postdoctoral fellows Pawel Kazimierz Urbanik and Olga Solovova are the newest members of the MultiLing team. 

Professor Nancy Hornberger (University of Pennsylvania) visited MultiLing for several weeks in May. During her stay, she shared her expertise in language policy, ethnography, and education research in many different ways. 

If you really want to empower women, what do you have to do? At the Women and Leadership round-table last week, students, university staff, and international scholars came together in Oslo to share experiences, and to discuss how we can achieve gender equality at all levels in academia.