ELN European Literacy Network – Winterthur Conference
From 7 to 9 February 2018 the ELN Conference took place at the LCC (now ILC) in Winterthur. Working groups presented their outputs from the COST-Action as well as planned the final year of the Action by discussing the relationships with partners and stakeholders and by preparing for the 2018 Literacy Summit.
Programme
Opening Talk
Daniel Perrin, Zurich University of Applied Sciences
Daniel Perrin, born 1961 in Bern, Switzerland, is Professor of Applied Linguistics, Director at Zurich University of Applied Sciences, President of the International Association of Applied Linguistics AILA as well as Co-Editor of the International Journal of Applied Linguistics and the de Gruyter Handbook of Applied Linguistics Series. His main areas of research and teaching are text linguistics, methodology of applied linguistics, text production research, and analysis of language in the media and in professional communication.
On, for, and with Practitioners: A Transdisciplinary Approach to Investigating Literacy
In my presentation, I argue why research on practitioners should be turned into research with and for practitioners (Cameron, Frazer, Rampton, & Richardson, 1992, 22). Methodologically, I draw on two decades of multimethod research and knowledge transformation at the interface of applied linguistics and transdisciplinary action research in the field of literacy, writing, and text production. Empirically, the presentation is based on large corpora of data collected in multilingual and multicultural workplaces.
First, I explain transdisciplinary action research as a theoretical framework that enables researchers and practitioners to collaboratively develop sustainable solutions to real-world problems in which language use in general and writing in particular play a substantial role. Then, progression analysis is explained as a multimethod approach to investigate text production practices in natural environments such as workplaces. Examples from four domains (education, finance, translation, and journalism) illustrate what value transdisciplinarity can add to writing research. An in-depth analysis offers step-by-step understanding of the trajectory from a real-world problem to a sustainable solution.
I conclude by suggesting three empirically-based measures for research on literacy that contribute to the development of both theory and practice.
The presentation is based on the author’s contribution to the 50th Anniversary publication of the Dartmouth Institute for Writing and Rhetoric.
Keynote
Catherine McBride, The Chinese University of Hong Kong
Catherine McBride is Professor of Developmental Psychology at The Chinese University of Hong Kong and currently a Senior Fellow at the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Study (FRIAS), working on a book on dyslexia across cultures. The author of over 200 peer-reviewed journal articles, she is a past President of the Society for the Scientific Study of Reading and current President of the Association for Reading and Writing in Asia. She is a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science and has served as an Associate Editor of four journals (currently, for the International Journal of Behavioral Development) and one international encyclopedia. Her main research area is reading development and impairment across cultures, and she is currently the PI on a large-scale grant (Collaborative Research Fund, Hong Kong) focused on the genetics, neuroscience, and cognitive underpinnings of children’s reading and writing in Chinese and English.