TESC Colloquium – Henriette Arndt

Thursday September 19th the first colloquium of this academic year will take place. We are very happy to welcome our speaker Henriette Arndt. Henriette is researcher at Lund University in the area of Natural an Artificial Cognition.

She will give a talk entitled “Applications of ESM in linguistics: Documenting language use in everyday life”.

Abstract:

Frequent language exposure and use are among the most important conditions for successful language learning. While these concepts have been studied extensively in the context of the language classroom, much less is known about when, where, and how learners use different languages in their everyday life. This lack of research can be explained, in part, by the methodological challenges that documenting language use poses for researchers. To date, studies have primarily relied on summative recall questionnaires, which have been criticised for being too broad-strokes and severely limited in the aspects of language use which they capture — focusing primarily on measuring the quantity of language use, rather than qualitative aspects such as the environments in which different languages are used, with whom, and the learners’ experiences.

Recognising that the Experience Sampling Method (ESM) offers an alternative approach to measuring language use in everyday life which can yield exceptionally rich and highly contextualised data, researchers at Lund University developed the LANG-TRACK-APP (Arndt, Granfeldt & Gullberg, 2022), an open-source set of ESM tools for linguistics research. In this seminar, Arndt will present selected findings from two studies conducted with the LANG-TRACK-APP, which investigated everyday language use among migrants in Sweden and university students in Erasmus study abroad programmes. The results will be used to illustrate the great potential which the ESM holds to further our understanding of the complexity of factors involved in everyday language use and acquisition.