The IMC is proud to host a special Saint Nicholas Event:

This semester, the Project Workshop of the first year of the MA in linguistics went into its second round - and Katrin Heimann was organizing the course.

The goal of this programme is to develop the students´ capacity to use knowledge and skills acquired at university in order to identify and help solving a linguistic challenge out there in the world.

Students of this year have worked on 4 exciting projects with very different partners and we would very much like to invite all interested IMCers to share the presentations of these - together with a beer or wine :)

The event takes place on the 6^th of December, from 3pm on (torsdag bar hour!), at the meeting room of the Interacting Minds Center. 

Please see below for some teasers regarding the single projects

1. Linguistics for the Vuggestue

The aim of this project was to produce a video (approx. 10 min.) about linguistic theories on language acquisition for crèche/kindergarden teachers to be, currently in education at VIA, fitting to the specific educational background and motivation of this target group. The presentation will report on the process and result of this project, covering the theories of Skinner, Chomsky, Vygotsky, Bruner and Tomasello by a 10 minutes video developed and produced by the students.

2. Dhai

At the basis of this project stood the observation of a Laerdansk teacher that Asian speakers are prone to have special pronounciation difficulties in Danish and the request to develop teaching material specifically targeting this group. The presentation will show the process and outcome of this project resulting in teaching material targeting speakers of Thai in particular.

3. Talk as fast as you walk?

The project, which is done in collaboration with the AU research project “The Puzzle of Danish”, is on speech rate among variants of Danish with the initial hypothesis being that speech rate is in part determined by population density. The presentation will report on the process of developing automatized tools to segment large amount of speed data in turns according to who speaks when.  It will also give first insights into the statistical analysis of this data.

4. Mind the google gap!

At the basis of this project stood the observation that school pupils of today are confronted with digital translation tools such as Google Translate, but that the use and limitations of these tools is chronically under-reflected. The presentation will show the development of a presentation illuminating these issues for the target audience by means of a Sprogzonen-presentation.

Contact

Katrin Heimann, Assistant Professor, IMC