Kirk Sullivan

Umeå University | UMU · Department of Language Studies

It has often been acknowledged that English is the dominant language of scholarly publication. While the disadvantage this poses to English as an Additional Language (EAL) academics is controversial, it is clear that some senior academics and doctoral researchers perceive that EAL writing affects idea creation. This article surveys the research on...

This longitudinal case study examines reading difficulties identified in Grade 2 and Grade 6 national assessment test (NAT) scores in relation to Grade 9 NAT in Swedish (L1) and English (L2). A norm-referenced screening was used in Grade 2 to assess word reading and reading comprehension. In line with the simple view of reading, four subgroups were...

This chapter considers the language biographies narrated by two female forced migrants from the area of the former Yugoslavia that is now Bosnia. We analyse these to access defining traumatic and agentic moments towards high-level language and literacy skills in Swedish. They arrived, along with many other forced migrants fleeing the Balkan wars, d...

Translanguaging is a concept that is increasingly used in multilingualism studies with disparate definitions and uses in the literature. In this chapter, students who are advanced multilingual speakers at home, school, and elsewhere are in focus. The chapter examines historical and contemporary definitions of translanguaging and shows that not all...

In Chapter 9, Sullivan, Waldmann and Wiklund present a linguistic landscape intervention in a lower primary school in Sweden, a country in which Swedish and its speakers share the linguistic and sociopolitical space with other national languages and their speakers such as the Sámi. Their action research takes an opposite direction of inquiry to tha...

Interdisciplinarity has emerged as a major trend both in Swedish academia and abroad. While the value of interdisciplinary contributions to research has long been acknowledged, others worry about the waning of disciplinary specific training in higher education. Arguments both for and against interdisciplinary teaching environments have been raised....

This chapter presents a questionnaire study that asks Swedish upper secondary school students about their informal out-of-school ICT-based literacies and how these feed into their formal school-based writing of English argumentative texts. Two questionnaires in combination with national test grades for an English argumentative text assignment are u...

Doctoral researchers increasingly write in English where English is a non-ambient language, for example, in Norway. Yet, similar to other contexts, a goal of the Norwegian doctoral degree is that doctoral graduates are able to communicate their research in both national and international contexts, which usually means English. Through narrative anal...

Translanguaging is a concept that is increasingly used in multilingualism studies with disparate definitions and uses in the literature. In this chapter, students who are advanced multilingual speakers at home, school, and elsewhere are in focus. The chapter examines historical and contemporary definitions of translanguaging and shows that not all...

This chapter deals with syntax rules and grammaticality judgments in the teaching and learning of English as a second and foreign language for linguistically diverse learners. Grammaticality judgment tasks are used in linguistic research to probe speakers' implicit knowledge about the syntactic rules of language. This chapter discusses grammaticali...

Studies have shown a slow but steady change in reading habits among students in Swedish upper second-ary schools. The frequency with which they read fiction on a daily basis has decreased and reading com-prehension has declined. Consequently, Swedish politicians and school authorities have taken measures to reverse these trends. Fiction reading has...

Language learning practices are shaped by their material conditions. Using an action research case study intervention, this chapter shows how the introduction of mobile video chats for children learning a home language creates the material conditions for language engagement and participation practice to emerge that encourage the learning of the hom...

Den talspråkliga förmågan är en central del av språkförmågan. Den är av avgörande betydelse för barns tänkande och lärande i (för)skolan och ligger till grund för läs- och skrivutvecklingen. Det är därför ett viktigt uppdrag för (för)skolan att stödja alla barn så att de får utveckla sina talspråkliga förmågor. I denna artikel presenteras resultate...

The expectation that doctoral students publish during their studies has increased in recent years. The standard of having international academic publications before entering the job market has long been perceived to pose an even greater challenge to doctoral students in non-English speaking countries who are often expected to publish in English, ra...

Sápmi is a geographical area that runs across the Kola Peninsula in Russia to northern Finland, Norway and Sweden. All Sami languages have been going through a rapid language change process and many of the traditional language domains have disappeared during the last decades due to previous national and local language policies. Nevertheless, recent...

One impact of globalization is that English has achieved a natural place among the languages used by children in the Scandinavian Sápmi. The children speak or are learning North Sami, a national language (Finnish, Norwegian or Swedish) and English as compulsory subjects. This chapter draws on English data collected in a literacy research project in...

This exploratory study examined how the level and nature of teaching presence impacted two online forum discussions from three dimensions: participation and interaction, cognitive presence, and knowledge development via assimilating peer messages. Effects on participation and interaction were graphically depicted. Effects on cognitive presence and...

Chapter Summary Supporting the development of professional skills is a central role of professional degree programmes. This case study considers how one audiology degree programme implemented reflective writing to support student professional development during periods of practical training. In particular, the case considers how much and what type...

Geocaching, or treasuring hunting using GPS technology, is an international phenomenon with science education possibilities. This potential is little researched or strategically used in teaching and learning contexts. Four school students were interviewed after a day’s cycling trip that included geocaching. The interviews were semistructured and fo...

A key reason for using asynchronous computer conferencing in instruction is its potential for supporting collaborative learning. However, few studies have examined collaboration in computer conferencing. This study examined collaboration in six peer review groups within an asynchronous computer conferencing. Eighteen tertiary students participated...

This paper investigates whether imitation can pose a problem for speaker discrimination within the line-up. The voice chosen for the experiment was that of a well-known Swedish politician. A professional imitator provided an imitation of the voice samples presented. Eight other voices were used in the experiments. Four groups heard a series of diff...

Observational learning has proved to be an excellent method to help writers develop their writing skills. By observing another writer producing text, or one's own text developing on the computer screen, writers are able to focus their full attention on how a text is produced without also having to focus on the writing task itself. Several studies o...

Life-long learning skills have moved from being a side-affect of a formal education to skills that are explicitly trained during a university degree. In a case study a University class undertook a translation from Swedish to English in a keystroke logging environment and then replayed their translations in pairs while discussing their thought proce...

World English accents are beamed via the media into the homes of those living in English speaking countries. The situation is the same in non-English speaking countries with a subtitling rather than dubbing policy. The degree to which an individual is exposed to the range of world Englishes, thus, varies from country to country. Research into the a...

Factors affecting an individual's ability to identify people aurally are of forensic importance. This paper investigates how topic, dialect, gender, age, and hearing status affect detection of an imitated voice. Two imitations of the same person, but on different topics, were used as familiarization voices. One topic was associated with this person...

In a case study a University class undertook a translation from Swedish to English in a keystroke logging environment and then replayed their translations in pairs while discussing their thought processes when undertaking the translations, and why they made particular choices and changes to their translations. Computer keystroke logging coupled wit...

In a case study a University class undertook a translation from Swedish to English in a keystroke logging environment and then replayed their translations in pairs while discussing their thought processes when undertaking the translations, and why they made particular choices and changes to their translations. Computer keystroke logging coupled wit...

In this paper we use keystroke logging to examine the development of fluency and revision in high school L1 Swedish and L2 English writing. Each writer wrote one text in English and one in Swedish in each year of the study. Using a combination of statistical and automatic analyses of the keystroke log, we attempted to investigate: i) how the on-lin...

This article discusses the use of computer logging as a means of investigating aspects of the second language (L2) writing process as writers are engaged in producing text at the keyboard. The observation of writing by means of this method provides researchers with detailed information concerning aspects of the planning, formulation, and revision p...

Research based on the Australian English diphthong and the British English segment vowel+/r/+vowel has shown that the dynamics of F1, F2, and F3 frequencies can be used for speaker discrimination. This study investigates whether this method can be applied to Swedish. Five male speakers of Swedish were recorded reading a newspaper article that conta...

Consonant gradation is a feature of Sami and is realised in Northern Sami in changes from nominative singular to genitive plural form, e.g., "heavdni" (spider) and "heavnni-t" (spiders). The data examined in this paper was collected in 2007 and represents the first acoustic analysis of consonant gradation in Northern Sami. The data was collected in...

Speech produced by children in the initial stages of development does generally not uphold as many phonetic distinctions as speech sounds produced by adults. A child's productions of different target words may therefore have similar acoustic properties and result in homonyms being perceived by the adult observer. This study presents a longitudional...

In this chapter an instructional format, Peer-Based Intervention (PBI) using computer keystroke logging is investigated as a computer technology to enhance language acquisition. In PBI, a process-oriented approach is taken, in which noticing, reflection and language awareness are central concepts of language learning. The method aims to promote lea...

In this paper we use keystroke logging to examine the development of fluency and revision in high school L1 Swedish and L2 English writing. Each writer wrote one text in English and one in Swedish in each year of the study. Using a combination of statistical and automatic analyses of the keystroke log, we attempted to investigate: i) how the on-lin...

In this chapter an instructional format, Peer-Based Intervention (PBI) using computer keystroke logging is investigated as a computer technology to enhance language acquisition. In PBI, a process-oriented approach is taken, in which noticing, reflection and language awareness are central concepts of language learning. The method aims to promote lea...

This paper examines the interaction between the emotion indicated by the content of an utternance and the emotion indicated by the acoustic of an utterance, and considers whether a speaker can hide their emotional state by acting an emotion even though being semantically honest. Three female and two male speakers of Swedish were recorded saying the...

This chapter presents the use of the Geographical Information Systems (GIS) for data mining and visualising information about cognitive activities involved in writing. The information can be collected from various sources, such as keystroke logs, manual analysis of stimulated recall sessions and think-aloud protocols. After an introduction to the G...

The synthesis of results from these diverse experiments indicate that age of the listener and the familiarity with the target speaker impact significantly upon the acceptance of the imitated voice, that the listener's familiarity with the regional accent reduces the impact of the semantic expectation and that the dialect background of the listener...

This subchapter provides an introduction to the possibilities and limitations of digital tools for recording of writing processes, a comprehensive framework in which the digital tools that are explained further in the subchapters 2-5 are integrated and a critical perspective to the characteristics of the tools, their usage and related automatic ana...

This paper presents a cross-sectional and longitudinal investigation into the development of a contrast in voicing production in simple and complex consonant clusters for 21 children. The results showed that, although the group results indicated a progression that may have been caused either by development in articulatory proficiency or by an growi...

This paper presents a cross‐sectional and longitudinal investigation into the development of a contrast in voicing production in simple and complex consonant clusters for 21 children. The results showed that, although the group results indicated a progression that may have been caused either by development in articulatory proficiency or by an growi...

This paper presents a cross‐sectional and longitudinal investigation into the development of a contrast in voicing production in simple and complex consonant clusters for 21 children. The results showed that, although the group results indicated a progression that may have been caused either by development in articulatory proficiency or by an growi...

This paper investigates the eect of gender on voice onset time distribution at three stages of speech development. Two subject groups consisting of children, aged approx- imately 3 and 9 years, were compared to adult speakers regarding voice onset time of initial plosives. The results showed significant gender eects in the aspirated plosives in the...

Listeners assign an age to a speaker based on their voice alone. The accuracy of estimates of speakers' ages may not be a great as has been suggested. This experiment suggests that listen- ers may be better able to rank-order voices by perceived age, than providing perceived ages, per se. However, whether perceived age can act as a distracter for v...

Abstract The accuracy of forensic identification / verification methods,are constantly under question. How accepted an expert witness’s opinion is in a court room,setting is highly dependent,on both his, or her reputation as an expert and the method he or she used to perform the analysis presented in court. The method,used must show robustness and...

There are several possible situations in which perpetrators might want to disguise their voices in order to avoid identification and to deflect the search for them to another person or group of individuals. One possible manner that can be used for voice disguise is the adoption of another accent. This paper examines the mimicking of the British-Eng...

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This paper shows that there was a selective listener preference for Foil 4. However, preliminary comparison of Foil 4 with the target imitated voice has not revealed conclusively any similarities in speech features that account for listeners' preferential selection

Recent studies have shown that ability to recognize an imitated voice is affected by topic and familiarity with the person being imitated. The signal detection methods used in those studies give no specific information about the distribution of non matching positive responses (false alarms) amongst voices used as distracters (foils). This paper sho...

The writing process has long been a subject for investigation. Until recently researchers have been restricted to written protocols for the analysis of writing sessions. These provide vast amounts of information from which it is impossible to create detailed mental representations of the writer’s movements around the text, revision activity, or pau...

This article presents the results of a study carried out in Sweden to investigate the promotion of self-assessment and reflection in the adult second language (L2) classroom. A method is proposed in which the computer is used first to record a writing session, and later to replay the entire text production in retrospective peer sessions. The method...

New technologies afford a range of opportunities that can transform teaching techniques and offer enhanced possibilities for learning. This potential is often not grasped by the technologist or the educationalist when introducing new technologies into the learning situation and a situation arises which can be described as “New technology, no new pe...

Research has shown that a complex interaction of acoustic features besides voice onset time is associated with the perception of voicing in plosives for adult speech. It is possi-ble, then, that the acquisition of the voiced/voiceless contrast for plosives by young children may involve patterns of acoustic correlates that are not adult-like. This s...

Through its financial support of SOCRATES the European Union (EU) actively encourages university students to study for part of their undergraduate degree at a higher educational institution in another EU member state. This period of foreign study is then cross-credited to the home institution as if the study had occurred at the home institution. Th...

1996) shows that adult listeners also make use of vowel spectra to identify /a:/ and /a/. If vowel duration is a primary cue, the use of the vowel spectrum in special cases may be seen as perceptual fine-tuning to improve the efficiency of processing vowel quantities. In that case we would expect young children to develop the use of vowel duration...

In a legal setting a witness may be asked to recognize a suspect based on a voice sample alone. Previous research has shown that knowledge of a language has an effect on an individual's ability to identify speakers. Recent research using a set of voice line-ups has demonstrated that there was no unambiguous improvement in the ability to recognize a...

Impostors pose a potential threat to security systems that rely on human identification and verification based on voice alone and to security systems that make use of computer audio-based person authentication systems. This paper presents a case-study, which explores these issues using recordings of a high quality professional impersonation of a we...

Research on the perception of Swedish vowel quantity by adult native listeners shows that vowel duration is a primary cue for identifying vowel quantity. However, when a vowel has a relatively long duration (e.g., due to its inherent duration, or its context), adult listeners may make use of both duration and spectra to identify vowel quantity. Use...

Reading aloud and text-to-speech synthesis share the commonality of taking a printed text and generating the acoustic correlate. This chapter starts from the premise that modelling the human solution for generating the pronunciation of a word previously unseen will result in more effective and accurate pronunciation modules for machine synthesis. T...

An academic department in the university sector experiencing rapid growth was plagued by structural inadequacies due to the inappropriateness of the organizational arrangements carried over from former, smaller units, and also by an identity crisis, both at personal and departmental levels, which had resulted in major inter-personal and inter-small...

A witness to a crime may be required to identify a speaker based on voice samples from a language which is not their first language. Previous experimental work has shown that knowledge of a language has an effect on an individual's ability to identify speakers. This paper examines whether this ability increases over the course of the British four-y...

In the spring of 1995 the Social Democrats, the party of government in Sweden, introduced legislation on gender equality in education as part of its commitment to equal opportunity for both genders in Swedish society. Part of the proposal behind the legislation related to the creation of a more equal division of professional positions between the g...

Research on the perception of Swedish vowel quantity suggests that when the duration of a vowel is relatively long, due for example to inherent duration or postvocalic voicng, vowel quantity might not be adequately cued by duration alone and might also make use of the vowel spectra to distinguish vowel quantities. The current project investigates w...

In many languages, vowels are characterized by their use of contrastive phonological vowel quantity and vowel quality. In Swedish, vowels have traditionally been described as being distinct in quality as well as having a phonological distinction between short and long vowel quantities. In English, however, phonological distinctions among vowels are...