120228 SE MA Seminar - Focus: Applied Linguistics / Linguistics Seminar (2018W)

English in Europe: Emergent Themes and Issues

English in Europe is not just, or primarily, ‚the language of the British and Irish’, and will be even less so in a post-Brexit EU. It pervades the private and professional lives of most European citizens: apart from what is often (and deprecatingly) referred to as ‘Euro-English’ spoken and written in Brussels corridors, there are daily interactions such as business meetings in Barcelona, academic conferences in Stockholm, Erasmus students’ pub conversations in Prague and encounters between asylum seekers and port authorities in Lampedusa, to mention just a few examples.

This very complex situation gives rise to a plethora of applied linguistics research questions, and it is obvious that only a small selection of these can be addressed in the course of one seminar. For this reason, themes and research questions will not be pre-determined before the beginning of the course but will be allowed to emerge in the first phase of the seminar, according to participants’ interests and backed up by relevant readings, to be developed into individual small-scale projects.

One issue that all projects will address is just how this ‘English’ can be conceptualized and characterized that serves these diverse functions, and how actual interactions via English, more often than not used as a lingua franca, exemplify and illustrate the specific issues that arise in these contexts.

The superordinate course objective is to gain expertise in the formulation and exploration of applied linguistics research questions that emerge due to the uses of English in today’s Europe.

Students will develop their understanding of phenomena relating to English as a lingua franca in Europe and theoretical approaches to studying these. They will become familiar with topics and findings of research in these areas and with ways of critically reflecting on these. By undertaking their own small-scale empirical projects, they will gain informed insights into the nature of these phenomena, use appropriate methods for investigating them, and evaluate the relevance their findings may have for their understanding of English in today's globalized world.

This seminar combines lecturer input, on- & offline assignments, reading-based pair and group work and discussions, and individual research work leading to student presentations and seminar papers. In the first phase of the seminar, we shall engage in some shared reading and discussion of key texts and get familiar with selected corpora. Participants will then be able to design their own projects, and will discuss their ideas and findings both during the weekly sessions as well as at the seminar conference on January 11-12 (see above).