MIC@10 - Faculty Research Forum
Multilingual and Intercultural Communication: Celebrating 10 Years of Applied Research
Purpose
As a special celebration marking the 10th anniversary of MIC, we are happy to announce our upcoming MIC Faculty Research Forum, which will showcase the cutting-edge research of our faculty members across academic disciplines and professional ranks, exploring diverse facets of multilingual and intercultural communication, including multilingual participatory research, intercultural engagement, translation and migration, access and equity in language teacher education, language bias and justice system, and World Englishes.
Time & Venue
Tuesday, May 7, 2024, 9:00-11:30 am (ET), on Zoom
https://stonybrook.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJwkdOugpzgpHtLnv8R-a5k7FnZIQm7sRpLd
Format
Each presenter will focus on a specific area of work that is important to multilingualism and intercultural communication by highlighting pivotal aspects of their work, providing a brief overview of the current state of their specific topic area, and discussing challenges and future directions. Each presentation will be 15 minutes. 30 minutes will be reserved at the end for Q&A.
Audience
This research forum is open and free to all interested scholars and students around the world. Registration is required.
https://stonybrook.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJwkdOugpzgpHtLnv8R-a5k7FnZIQm7sRpLd
Forum Facilitators
Facilitator
Shyam Sharma is Associate Professor and Graduate Program Director in the Program in Writing and Rhetoric. His scholarship and teaching focus on issues of language and language policy/politics, cross-cultural rhetoric and communication, international students and education, and online instruction and the use of new media in education. His works have appeared in a variety of venues, including The Republica, where he writes a column on higher education. Through international organizations including the Society of Transnational Academic Researchers, he facilitates faculty training, research- and teaching- based collaborations, and institutional exchanges, online and onsite.Co-Facilitator
Chikako Nakamura is a lecturer of Japanese language in the Department of Asian and Asian American Studies at Stony Brook University. She is Assistant to the Director of the Center for Multilingual and Intercultural Communication.
Agenda
Opening remarks - Agnes He, Professor and Interim Chair of the Department of Asian and Asian American Studies and Director of the Center for Multilingual and Intercultural Communication at Stony Brook University
Presentation #1 Multilingual Participatory Research - Stony Brook Stories of Language and Life (Joy Janzen)
In American higher education, a linguistic hierarchy places a single variety of English at the apex. Students and faculty who speak other languages or other varieties of English experience negative judgements, exclusion, silencing, and self-censorship. To counter these ideologies about language, the Stony Brook Stories project was created. In this ongoing initiative, multilingual speakers are interviewed about their experiences using and not using their linguistic repertoire in academic environments. Their interviews provide a micro lens to examine macro-level social issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion. What is linguistic justice in a university context and how can it be achieved?
Joy Janzen is a lecturer in the Linguistics Department at Stony Brook University. She has published in Review of Educational Research and TESOL Quarterly, among other journals, and has been a Fulbright scholar in Mexico and the Czech Republic.
Presentation #2 Intercultural engagement (Jiwon Hwang and Eriko Sato)
The rise of English as a lingua franca has undoubtedly made transactional communication in international contexts more efficient, but has also increased linguistic and cultural bias against speakers of languages other than English (LOTE). Nonetheless, LOTE teaching cannot improve the situation if its goal remains to be producing native-like speakers with only standardized or monolithic knowledge of cultural facts. The focus of LOTE teaching should be on fostering individuals who can effectively and harmoniously engage across cultures and languages, leveraging their multilingual and intercultural competence. How can we implement interculturality in our LOTE classrooms in higher education? How will it positively impact our highly multilingual and multicultural societies?
Jiwon Hwang is Assistant Professor and Director of Asian Languages in the Department of Asian and Asian American Studies at Stony Brook University. Her research focuses on second language acquisition, experimental phonology, and psycholinguistics. She served as PI on an NSF-funded project examining communication between native and non-native English speakers in global university settings. Recently, her work has broadened to include intercultural communicative language teaching. Currently, she is leading a research project on intercultural engagement and language learning, funded by the US Department of Education. Eriko Sato is Associate Professor of Applied Linguistics and Japanese, as well as the Director of the Language Learning and Research Center (LLRC) at SBU. She has been serving as a co-PI on the project on intercultural engagement funded by the US Department of Education since 2020. Sato’s recent research monograph is titled "Translanguaging in Translation: Invisible Contributions that Shape Our Language and Society" (Multilingual Matters, 2022). Her forthcoming book, “Embracing Hybridity in Language Education: Paving the Pathway to Diversity and Inclusion,” is to be published by Multilingual Matters.
Presentation #3 Translation and Migration (Loredana Polezzi)
Translation can be an instrument of containment and control as much as a way to create new connections and transform cultural practices. In the contemporary context, where human mobility is both pervasive and controversial, the need for translation is more evident than ever, yet it also foregrounds crucial questions about the nature of communication. What do we want translation to be and to do? What do we expect from it and what forms do we want it to take? Do we imagine it as a way to erase difference, make it disappear, or as a route to the reappraisal of human diversity and creativity? Ultimately, what could an ethics of translation look like – and how does it relate to migration?
Loredana Polezzi is Alfonse M. D’Amato Chair in Italian and Italian American Studies in the Department of Languages and Cultural Studies at Stony Brook University and Honorary Chair in Translation Studies at Cardiff University (UK). She is co-editor of leading international journal The Translator and a previous President of the International Association for Translation and Intercultural Studies (IATIS). She was a co-investigator in the projects ‘Transnationalizing Modern Languages’ and ‘Transnationalizing Modern Languages: Global Challenges’, funded by the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council under the ‘Translating Cultures’ theme.
Presentation #4 Access and Equity in Language Teacher Education (Sarah Jourdain)
Who is allowed the privilege of becoming a teacher? Our K-12 teaching force in the United States, including World Language teachers, is disproportionately white and female. The reasons are numerous and include disparities in access to teacher education programs as well as preconceived notions of who can and should be a teacher. There is consensus that we must work to change the preconceptions while simultaneously breaking down the barriers to access. How can we best achieve these goals? And how can World Language teachers play a vital role in this process?
Sarah Jourdain is Chair of the Department of Languages and Cultural Studies and Director of the World Language Teacher Education Program at SBU. She has been involved in World Language teaching and Teacher Preparation for over three decades. She has served in numerous organizations including AATF, ACTFL, LILT, NECTFL and NYSAFLT and has published in Foreign Language Annals, The French Review, and The Modern Language Journal, among others. Her current research focuses on Social Justice in language teaching and Language Teacher Education through an historical perspective.
Presentation #5 Language Bias and Wrongful Convictions (Susan Brennan & NRT Bias trainees)
Data science and AI are powerful tools for generating new knowledge, fueling innovation, and dealing with society's most pressing problems. However, "big data" and machine learning tools can perpetuate biases that advantage some people and disadvantage others. Stony Brook’s NSF-funded Research Traineeship, Detecting and Addressing Bias in Data, Humans, and Institutions, brings together human-centered scientists (from Psychology, Linguistics, Economics, Political Science, and Africana Studies) and data scientists (from Computer Science and Applied Math and Statistics) to apply computational techniques in convergent research that supports human values. Current projects include modeling National Registry of Exonerations (NRE) data about innocent people who have been exonerated, with an eye to supporting future decisions made by Innocence Project intake staff about what new cases to take on, as well as to uncovering biases experienced by non-native-English speakers who have been wrongfully convicted.
Susan Brennan is SUNY Distinguished Professor of Cognitive Science in Psychology, with affiliations in Computer Science, and Linguistics. She uses eye-tracking, behavioral, and other data-intensive methods to study psycholinguistics, communication (verbal, nonverbal, and multimodal), adaptive language use, and the human use of technology. As SUNY Research Fellow for Innovation in Graduate Education, she runs SUNY GREAT, now in its 4th year of providing research funds to SUNY students who win federal graduate fellowships. From 2015-2018, she worked as a rotator at NSF, directing the Graduate Research Fellowship Program in the Division of Graduate Education.
Presentation #6 World Englishes and Multilingualism (S.N. Sridhar)
The “World Englishes” paradigm, now 50 years old, has revolutionized the teaching, learning, and research into the roles of English world-wide. It challenged the native-speaker centric, prescriptivist, colonialist perspectives in English language teaching (ELT), Second Language Acquisition (SLA) and Multilingualism and showed how they denied the values of equity, inclusivity, and pluralism. As a result, there has been a “multilingual turn” in SLA -- a recognition that non-native varieties are legitimate varieties conditioned by unique multilingual ecologies and optimally serving unique socio-cultural functions. In this talk, I will outline how this paradigm also best explains the humanistic dimensions of multilingualism in English as a global phenomenon but also in traditionally multilingual societies, which have often been neglected by researchers.
S.N. Sridhar is SUNY Distinguished Service Professor of Linguistics and India Studies and Director of the Mattoo Center for India Studies at Stony Brook University. Educated at Bangalore and Illinois, he focuses on language interaction in the minds of individuals and society, cognitive representations and processing of multiple languages, social and pragmatic functions of code-mixing, role of multilingualism in construction of second language acquisition theory, role of language contact in historical change, language modernization, standardization, and forging of a literary idiom in multilingual societies. He is author of three books, coeditor of ten collections, and numerous articles. He is heading a consortium of scholars translating the 15th century Kannada Mahabharata, of which Volume One has just been published by Harvard University Press.
Q&A
30 minutes