Centre of Sustainable Education of the Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences Begins Participation at BYLEC Project
Aktualizēts 30.09.2015 12:42
On September 28, 2015 the researchers of the Center of Sustainable Education and teachers of English from Daugavpils began participation at the new International Project “BYLEC – Baltic Young Learners of English Corpus.” The project’s leading institution is Uppsala University, Campus Gotland, in Sweden led by the senior lecturer Stellan Sundh, PhD. Other partner institutions are the following: Stockholm University, Daugavpils University, Tartu University in Estonia, Vytautas Magnus University, Kaunas in Lithuania and Immanuel Kant Federal University of Russia in Kaliningrad. Among the project’s partner schools in Latvia there are: Daugavpils Basic School ‘Saskaņa’, Daugavpils Basic School No. 11, Daugavpils Basic School ‘Vienība’, Daugavpils Russian Secondary School – Lyceum and Riga Sergejs Žoltoks Secondary School. The project is multidisciplinary with six universities in five countries of the Baltic region involved, and is meant for the young learners’ current use and learning of the English language.
The purpose of the project is to investigate the level of English of the 12-year-olds in the Baltic Region in frames of the differences in their interlanguage significant for their written proficiency in English and the successful lingua franca communication. The focus is on the interlanguage of Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Russian and Swedish learners of English. The research should answer the following questions: what are the specific productive patterns of young learners’ second language production in these five countries; what intercultural aspects, societal factors and native language interference could explain the identified variation in learner language; what features of spoken English and digital communication emerge in their written production such as discourse markers, emoticons, traits from texting messages, multiple causal coordination and informal vocabulary; what are the pedagogical implications for classroom work with writing in English of these identified differences.
More information:
Dzintra Iliško, PhD, associate professor
E-mail: dzintra.ilisko[at]du.ces.lv
Ilona Fjodorova , PhD, researcher
E-mail: ilona.micule[at]du.ces.lv