News

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.

In 2016, with the funding that came with the status as a World-leading Research Community, MultiLing hired three highly reputable international scholars as research professors. This spring, all three of them have been and will be visiting Oslo and MultiLing.

This week, MultiLing in partnership with NTNU hosted a two-day seminar on signed language linguistics and interpreting research.

Paradoxical as it may seem, PhD fellow Rafael Lomeu thinks being an independent scholar is reliant on building a network of colleagues and friends.

Multilingualism as a resource in education was the topic of discussion as researchers and educationists from 14 different countries gathered for the Multilingualism and Education conference at UiO last week.

Would you like to participate in a research study on bilingualism? Do you have a child who has been growing up bilingually with Norwegian and English since birth?

MultiLing's socio-cognitive laboratory was officially opened on March 22. To mark the occasion, the center organized a tour of the facilities and a demonstration of the equipment.

PhD Fellow Maria Obojska has given her answer, after working on her dissertation at MultiLing for more than two years.

The first week of February, PhD students from all over the world gathered at MultiLing for our winter school: "Language Policy in Multilingual Contexts – methodological approaches."

Last week, the INTPART 2017 Linguistics Summer School was held at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg.The topic for the course was "Multilingualism, multimodality and embodiment: Sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic perspectives."

Pernille Hansen gave her doctoral defense on October 6 in Gamle Festsal at Domus Academica.