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  8. 2017

LingLunch | Michał B. Paradowski (Warsaw)

29 March 2017

Time: 1:00 - 2:00pm
Venue: ArtsTwo 2.17

We are pleased to welcome Michał B. Paradowski (Institute of Applied Linguistics, University of Warsaw) to QMUL as part of our LingLunch series. Lunch is not provided, but feel free to bring it along! Title and abstract below.

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Social Network Analysis as a research paradigm in language studies

A growing body of 21st-century research has sought to integrate methods and techniques from different fields of science in order to further our understanding of the world and the governing principles therein. A method which has been increasingly applied in addressing these cross-disciplinary questions is social network analysis (SNA), consisting in investigating social structures through the prism of graph theories.

Social networks have been found to play an increasing role in human behaviour and the attainment of individuals. The talk will present the results of two projects applying SNA to language phenomena. One (Paradowski & Jonak 2012) involves exploring the social propagation of neologisms in a Twitter-like microblogging site. We demonstrate that the general lexical innovativeness of Internet users scales not like a power law, but a unimodal, that the exposure thresholds necessary for a user to adopt new lexemes from his/her neighbours concentrate at low values, and that, contrary to common expectations, the most popular tags are characterised by high adoption thresholds.

The other project (Paradowski, Ochab, Cierpich & Chen, subm.) investigates the impact of social network structure and ‘first world’ peer interaction dynamics on L2/L3 learning outcomes in the setting of naturally occurring face-to-face interaction. We find that the best predictor of TL performance is reciprocal interactions in the language being acquired, that output in the TL is a stronger predictor than input, a negative relationship between performance and interactions with same-L1 speakers, a significantly underperforming English native-speaker dominated cluster, more intense interactions taking place between students of different proficiency levels, as well as several other significant outcomes.

Hypotheses will be presented which account for the novel findings. The proposed novel methodology can provide new insight into the link between social relations, language change, and language acquisition, showing for instance how social network configuration and peer interaction dynamics are stronger predictors of L2/L3 performance than individual factors such as attitude or motivation, and offer a novel methodology for investigating other language phenomena.

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Michał B. Paradowski is an assistant professor at the Institute of Applied Linguistics, University of Warsaw, a teacher and translator trainer, and an ELT consultant for television. His interests include second and third language acquisition research, cross-linguistic influence, bi- and multilingualism, psycholinguistics, embodied cognition, and complexity science. His recent edited volumes are Teaching Languages off the Beaten Track (2014) and Productive Foreign Language Skills for an Intercultural World (2015); his monograph M/Other Tongues in Language Acquisition, Instruction, and Use is currently in press.

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