Multilingualism in the Wild

We would like to warmly invite you to join our Radboud Summer School course on "Multilingualism in the Wild"
Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands http://www.ru.nl/radboudsummerschool/
Dates: 10-14 August 2015
Topic:
Successful communication is a key factor for social and cultural integration. At the same time, increasing numbers of people travel, live, or work in a non-native language environment, and thus speak multiple languages that are not their mother tongue. The processing of these non-native languages is a complex cognitive task; speaking and listening to a non-native speaker asks for both socio-cultural as for language-specific strategies. This difficult multilingual multitasking in a person’s head is especially noticeable when listening to (or as) a non-native speaker in the presence of background noise like in a pub.
In this course we focus on the effects of multilingualism in the real world, ‘in the wild’. What effect does non-nativeness have on comprehensibility, status and image and media choice? But also, for example, on safety in a multilingual working team in an international organisation. Would it not be helpful if we all could learn to use new languages in a native way?
And how can a new language best be learned; in a classroom with a grammar book or better on the street in the country and the culture the language belongs to? Is there a difference between learning your mother tongue and learning a second language? Is it possible to reach the “perfect” native level in a second language? Does learning to speak and listen in a new language really mean that you have learned to think or literally look at the world around you in a different way?
Course leaders:
dr. Marianne Starren, associate professor dr. Odette Scharenborg, associate professor
More information:
http://www.ru.nl/radboudsummerschool/courses/history-langa-comm/@969952/multilingualism-the/
Registration closes at the end of June.
Apply now:
http://fmfe01.hosting.ru.nl/fmi/iwp/cgi?-db=WebAanmeldingRSS&-loadframes
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