122251 AR MA+MEd Advanced Course in Linguistics - Focus: Applied (2023S)

We all know that English is more than a foreign language for most central Europeans. Apart from being taught at school, English is a go-to language for international travel, work and studies. Additionally, and maybe more importantly, English plays a central role in a lot of digital activities. In other words, English has become an integral part of central European life; a fact that is also reflected in recent sociolinguistic work on English in Europe, identifying it as a main second language, lingua franca, or set of Englishes characterised by different types of contact (e.g. Onysko 2016, Sherman 2018). When zooming in on individuals and their lives, though, the situation becomes more complex, diversified and maybe even chaotic: what is it that people actually do in English and what role(s) does the language play in their daily lives? Where do they encounter and use what kinds of English, for what purposes and to what extent? What relations, if any, are there between using English in different contexts and individual language proficiency? How do they evaluate English in relation to the other languages or varieties that form their linguistic identities? It is questions like these that we will deal with in this Advanced Course, which focuses on the dynamics of English in 21st-century multilingual lifeworlds.
After having operationalised the concept of lifeworld (originally ‘Lebenswelt’, E. Husserl 1936) for undertaking sociolinguistic research, we will approach the topic in three phases, approaching the individual in their lifeworld from a different angle each time, i.e. their linguistic repertoire, relevant linguistic landscapes, and their (reported) language use. Each of these phases will combine a literature-focused part based on selected readings and an empirical part, in which all participants will collect relevant information for their focal individuals. More precisely, each participant will identify and invite two or three individuals of a particular age group (e.g. 10-13 year olds; 30-50 year olds; retired people), whose multilingual lifeworlds will be explored and investigated for each of the three phases. By applying research methods introduced in the course, each student will analyse their own data, share their findings orally in class and write it up in the form of a short report. At the end of the course, students will compare the insights gained within each age group, resulting in their team reflections.