Una Cunningham

• Stockholm University

This study investigated the effect of an innovative learner-training programme conducted with undergraduate students at a university in Pakistan. The MALL-based programme was designed to develop the students’ competence and confidence in using smartphones to make blogposts as a means of increasing their opportunities to practice writing in English...

Parents and prospective parents who speak a language other than English in New Zealand are in something of an information desert when it comes to how and why they might go about raising their children bilingually. While the official languages, Te Reo Māori and New Zealand Sign Language, have special status among the languages of New Zealand, other...

Strategic deployment of the digital world in educational ecosystems inhabited by multilingual children (4–6 years old), their teachers and their families is evolving in some communities. This study reveals the “actors” and communities that mediate the extent and the nature of engagement with new media in contexts of early childhood education, inclu...

This paper investigates the effects of learner training for CALL general use tools on students whose digital literacy is lower than that assumed by the New Zealand university system they are preparing to enter. Previous studies have found that computers offer multiple benefits for teaching and learning writing skills. The use of word processors can...

Potentially addictive behaviours supported by the internet and mobile phones raise concerns in education services for early childhood. Although there is evidence that screen media can distract the attention of young children, there was a massive uptake of digital devices by early childhood centres (ECCs). We investigated practices of families (n =...

With the rapid penetration of technology in the lives of students, it has become important for educators to look for opportunities to enhance students’ engagement and achievement by integrating technology in education. However, deciding which technologies should be included is a big challenge for higher education institutes, particularly in develop...

The children of migrants grow up with influence from at least two cultures, and they must negotiate their path to adulthood through one or more ethnicities and one or more language varieties that may set them apart from the majority population. We asked how teenagers born to migrant parents in an English-speaking context appeal to the cultures and/...

Vietnamese high school students have few opportunities to use English outside class and they are often reluctant to speak in class. This paper describes and explains the students’ willingness to communicate (wtc) and relates this to varied perceptions of social presence. Eighteen high school students in Vietnam took a six-week online course using F...

This paper presents an online course devised to meet the needs of Swedish primary school teachers who need to teach English to their pupils despite not having studied the language themselves more than minimally at tertiary level. Over a hundred teachers took the course as an online summer course. The course was on the learning and teaching of Engli...

This study examines what happens when online and campus students participate in real time in the same campus classroom. Before this study, postgraduate students studying online in a course intended primarily as professional development for language educators were taking the course through reading the course literature including assigned articles, w...

Anyone who has tried to learn a language with a very different sound system will understand the challenges faced by speakers of a language as different as Vietnamese who are attempting to learn to speak English in a way that is intelligible to non-speakers of Vietnamese. Many learners have very limited opportunity to hear model pronunciations other...

This paper provides an overview of the main findings from a European-wide on-line survey of English pronunciation teaching practices. Both quantitative and qualitative data from seven countries (Finland, France, Germany, Macedonia, Poland, Spain and Switzerland) are presented, focusing on teachers' comments about: ● their own pronunciation, ● their...

Increasing numbers of students are finding their way from West Africa to Europe. Where previously students would prefer to study in the UK, now countries like Sweden are popular alternatives, for a number of reasons. Many of the students who come to Sweden to study English have received much or most of their previous education through the medium of...

p>The aim of this paper is to bring theoretical concepts from other areas of scholarly research to bear on synchronous online education in a cross-disciplinary effort to shed light on what is going on by introducing systems of thought from other areas. The liminality and associated communitas which are found in synchronous online learning environme...

This chapter presents an analysis of recordings of workplace interactions conducted with videoconferencing software. Video-conferencing offers users the widest variety of channels, or modes, of interaction, combining video with voice chat, text chat, whiteboard capabilities and collaborative document manipulation. The video-conferencing environment...

Models and Targets for the Pronunciation of English in Vietnam and Sweden This paper aims to account for the factors that lie behind the choice of models and targets for the pronunciation of English by learners of English in Vietnam and in Sweden. English is the first foreign language in both Vietnam and in Sweden. English is used as a language of...

This study aims to describe some of the phonetic variation and characteristics associated with the pronunciation of Northern Ireland English (NIE) in general and the English of rural southwest Tyrone (ERST) in particular. Vowel quality, i.e. the precise sound of the vowels used, expressed in acoustic terms, and vowel quantity, i.e. how long vowels...

This study aims to pin down some of the pho-netic variation and oddities associated with Northern Ireland English (NIE) in general and the English of rural southwest Tyrone (ERST) in particular, Vowel quality and vowel quantity relationships are crucial here. ERST may have short or long vowels, depending on factors that are not phonologically inter...

The proposed presentation is a progress report from a project, which is aimed at establishing some phonetic correlates of language dominance in various kinds of bilingual situations. The current object of study is Swedish students starting in classes, which prepare for the International Baccalaureate (IB) programme. The IB classes in Sweden are tau...

Introduction The current study is in preparation for a larger study of the language proficiency of students in English-medium schooling, which investigates, among other things, students' loss and gain in Swedish and English. The focus of this study is the realization of phonological length in the Swedish and English of three bilingual children This...

In the field of bilingualism it is of particular interest to stablish which, if any, of a speaker’s languages is dominant. Earlier research has shown that immigrants who acquire a new language tend to use elements of the timing patterns of the new language in their native language. It is shown here that measurements of timing in the two languages s...

We report three listening experiments focussing on the phonetic correlates of perceived foreignness and perceived strength of foreign accent in Swedish. In the first experiment, it is shown that accentedness can be reliably measured on the basis of a relatively short speech sample and that a statistical count of deviating pronunciations correlates...

In the field of bilingualism it is of particular interest to establish which, if any, of a speaker's languages is dominant. Earlier research has shown that immigrants who acquire a new language tend to use elements of the timing patterns of the new language in their native language. It is shown here that measurements of timing in the two languages...

The features of non-native speech which distinguish it from native speech are often difficult to pin down. It is possible to be a native speaker of any of a vast number of varieties of English. These varieties each have their phonetic characteristics which allow them to be identified by speakers of the varieties in question and by others. The phone...

The proposed presentation is a progress report from a project which is aimed at establishing some phonetic correlates of language dominance in various kinds of bilingual situations. The current object of study is Swedish students starting in classes which prepare for the International Baccalaureate (IB) programme. The IB classes in Sweden are taugh...

Vietnamese speakers of English are often able to communicate much more efficiently in writing than in speaking. Many have quite high proficiency levels, with full command of ad-vanced vocabulary and complex syntax, yet they have great difficulty making themselves understood when speaking English to both na-tive and non-native speakers. This paper e...

Guía dirigida a padres y educadores que desean facilitar el desarrollo de los niños cuya vida cotidiana se desenvuelve en un ambiente bilingüe, y ayudarles a sacar el máximo partido de esa situación. Se analiza la enseñanza bilingüe a través de las distintas etapas evolutivas, abarcando desde la actitud de los padres antes del nacimiento del niño,...