To ensure smooth communication and collaboration, here are some troubleshooting tips to address common issues:
Check Internet Connection: Verify that you have a stable and reliable internet connection. Use a wired connection when possible, as it tends to be more stable than Wi-Fi. If using Wi-Fi, make sure you have a strong signal.
Update the Browser or App: Ensure that you are using the latest version of the web browser. Developers frequently release updates to address bugs and improve performance.
Clear Browser Cache: Sometimes, cached data can cause conflicts or issues. Clear the browser cache and cookies before joining the meeting.
Test Audio and Video: Before the meeting, check your microphone and camera to ensure they are working correctly. If you are a speaker, you can click on "Start Practice Session" button test to ensure audio and video devices are functioning.
Close Other Applications: Running multiple applications in the background can consume system resources and lead to performance issues. Close unnecessary apps to free up resources for the Dryfta meeting platform.
Restart Your Device: If you encounter persistent issues, try restarting your computer or mobile device. This can help resolve various software-related problems.
Use Supported Browsers: Ensure you are using a browser supported by the meeting platform. Recommended browsers: Chrome, Firefox, Edge, and Brave.
Allow Necessary Permissions: Make sure the Dryfta meeting platform has the required permissions to access your microphone, camera, and other necessary features.
Disable VPN or Firewall: Sometimes, VPNs or firewalls can interfere with the connection to the meeting platform. Temporarily disable them and see if the issue persists.
Switch Devices: If possible, try joining the meeting from a different device to see if the problem is specific to one device.
Reduce Bandwidth Usage: In cases of slow or unstable internet connections, ask participants to disable video or share video selectively to reduce bandwidth consumption.
Update Drivers and Software: Ensure your operating system, audio drivers, and video drivers are up to date. Outdated drivers can cause compatibility issues with the Dryfta meeting platform.
Contact Support: If none of the above steps resolve the issue, reach out to the platform's support team. They can provide personalized assistance and troubleshoot specific problems.
By following these troubleshooting tips, you can tackle many common problems encountered on Dryfta meeting platform and have a more productive and seamless meeting experience.
20230718T083020230718T1130Europe/Amsterdam[SYMP58] OPEN CALL - Social responsibilityHybrid Session (onsite/online)AILA 2023 - 20th Anniversary Congress Lyon Editioncellule.congres@ens-lyon.fr
Judging the likelihood of health outcomes: How does age affect the understanding of risk and certainty adverbs in English?
Oral Presentation[SYMP58] OPEN CALL - Social responsibility08:30 AM - 09:00 AM (Europe/Amsterdam) 2023/07/18 06:30:00 UTC - 2024/07/18 07:00:00 UTC
Miscommunication in healthcare is common. When communicating about risk and certainty, practitioners often use epistemic adverbs (e.g., possibly etc.) to explain the likelihood of outcomes or conditions. Previous work revealed subtle differences between monolingual English speakers in Canada and Australia in understanding epistemic adverbs (in English) (Segalowitz et al., 2016), however only young monolingual English speakers were studied. Here we explore whether, and how, age affects the semantic representation of epistemic adverbs. Accordingly, we compared young adult monolingual speakers of Australian English to older (55+) monolingual speakers of Australian English. Participants performed a dissimilarity-rating task on sentence pairs, in English, presented as doctors' opinions differing only with respect to the embedded epistemic adverb. Analyses of the dissimilarity ratings, using cultural consensus analysis (factor analysis across participants), weighted-data classical-MDS, and cluster analysis, established within- and across-community consistencies in the semantic mapping of risk and certainty for younger and older Australian monolingual speakers and, interestingly, also established differences in understanding between the two groups of speakers. Our findings suggest that adverbs of uncertainty have more nuances in meaning than adverbs of certainty. This underscores the importance of checking for understanding when working with clients from different age groups.
Older people use healthcare services more often than other groups (Welfare, 2016), and therefore are also more often engaged in conversations about their health. This communication is important, yet older patients and patients from diverse backgrounds rate communication with health practitioners lower than younger patients (Burt, Lloyd, Campbell, Roland, & Abel, 2016; Nguyen, Barg, Armstrong, Holmes, & Hornik, 2008). In addition, miscommunication in healthcare is common, and chances of miscommunication are higher when health practitioners (HPs) need to communicate degrees of uncertainty to their patients. When communicating about risk and certainty, HPs often use epistemic adverbs (e.g., possibly, likely etc.). Previous work revealed subtle differences between monolingual English speakers in Canada and Australia in understanding the meaning of epistemic adverbs (Segalowitz et al., 2016), however only young monolingual English speakers were studied. Here we explore whether, and how, age impacts on the semantic representation of 12 epistemic adverbs: apparently, certainly, clearly, definitely, evidently, likely, obviously, probably, possibly, presumably, reportedly, and supposedly. To explore the possible effect of age, we compared younger (n=57; age range = [18, 50]) and older (n=31; aged 55+) monolingual speakers of Australian English. Participants performed a dissimilarity-rating task on sentence pairs presented as doctors' opinions differing only with respect to the embedded epistemic adverb (e.g., It will likely be fatal versus It will probably be fatal). Analyses of the dissimilarity ratings, using cultural consensus analysis (factor analysis across participants), weighted-data classical-MDS, and cluster analysis, established within- and across-community consistencies and differences in the semantic mapping of risk and certainty for younger and older Australian monolingual speakers. Both groups have clustered together apparently, presumably, reportedly and supposedly; young and older Australians also added probably into a separate cluster. However, younger Australians clustered together certainly, clearly, definitely, evidently and obviously in a larger cluster, clustering likely and possibly together, while older Australians clustered certainly, likely, and possibly and placed clearly, definitely and obviously into a separate cluster. This may suggest that meanings of some epistemic adverbs such as likely and possibly may change with time. Our findings also show that adverbs of uncertainty may have more nuances in meaning than adverbs of certainty, and underscore the importance of checking for understanding when working with clients from different age groups, especially when discussing risk and uncertainty in healthcare settings.
References Burt, J., Lloyd, C., Campbell, J., Roland, M., & Abel, G. (2016). Variations in GP-patient communication by ethnicity, age, and gender: evidence from a national primary care patient survey. British journal of general practice, 66(642), e47-e52. doi:10.3399/bjgp15X687637 Nguyen, G. T., Barg, F. K., Armstrong, K., Holmes, J. H., & Hornik, R. C. (2008). Cancer and Communication in the Health Care Setting: Experiences of Older Vietnamese Immigrants, A Qualitative Study. Journal of general internal medicine : JGIM, 23(1), 45-50. doi:10.1007/s11606-007-0455-2 Segalowitz, N. S., Doucerain, M. M., Meuter, R. F. I., Zhao, Y., Hocking, J., & Ryder, A. G. (2016). Comprehending adverbs of doubt and certainty in health communication: A multidimensional scaling approach. Frontiers in Psychology, 7(MAY), 558. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00558
Promoting mental well-being through social media: A critical study of multimodal mental health campaign discourse in Hong Kong
Oral Presentation[SYMP58] OPEN CALL - Social responsibility09:00 AM - 09:30 AM (Europe/Amsterdam) 2023/07/18 07:00:00 UTC - 2024/07/18 07:30:00 UTC
Mental health discourse analysts have recently paid more to social media which can produce and disseminate more diverse knowledge and voices about mental health compared to the traditional, authoritative sources of information on this subject. This ongoing study examines some multimodal, multilingual social media posts about mental well-being that are produced and propagated by two mental health organizations in Hong Kong. It employs critical multimodal discourse analysis to examine how these posts discursively promote particular knowledge and beliefs about mental well-being through strategic representations of social actors, social activities and affect with various textual and visual resources. The analysis shows that many of the posts tend to discursively individualize affect and mental well-being by heavily relying on examples of individual persons and intensively personalizing engagement with the readers/viewers. Furthermore, many posts consistently link mental well-being to personal success, progress or achievement with a range of discursive resources such as specific mottos and metaphors of 'positivity' and public celebrities' quotes and condensed personal stories. I therefore argue the examined social media discourses subtly tie the promoted mental health awareness and knowledge to the neoliberal ideology of individual (self-)entrepreneurialism. In addition, the Chinese-language posts predominantly emphasize positivity whereas those in English tend to normalize affective swings more often, manifesting different ideologies about mental well-being. The study contributes to the field of mental health discourse research by drawing more attention to well-being (than illness) and non-English speaking contexts. References Atanasova, D., Koteyko, N., Brown, B., & Crawford, P. (2019). Mental health and the media: From illness to wellbeing. Sociology Compass, 13(5), e12678. Gershon, I. (2011). Neoliberal agency. Current Anthropology, 52(4), 537-555. Koteyko, N., & Atanasova, D. (2018). Mental health advocacy on Twitter: positioning in Depression Awareness Week tweets. Discourse, Context and Media, 25(2018), 52-59. Machin, D. (2016). The need for a social and affordance-driven multimodal critical discourse studies. Discourse & Society, 27(3), 322-334. Machin, D., & Mayr, A. (2012). How to do critical discourse analysis: A multimodal introduction. London: SAGE. Pavlova, A., & Berkers, P. (2020). Mental health discourse and social media: Which mechanisms of cultural power drive discourse on Twitter. Social Science & Medicine, 263, 113250. Sindoni, M. G. (2020). '# YouCanTalk': A multimodal discourse analysis of suicide prevention and peer support in the Australian BeyondBlue platform. Discourse & Communication, 14(2), 202-221. Thompson, R., & Furman, R. (2018). From Mass to Social Media: Governing Mental Health and Depression in the Digital Age. Sincronía, 73, 398-429. van Leeuwen, T. (2008). Discourse and practice: New tools for critical discourse analysis. Oxford University Press.
Affect and Cross-cultural Influence on Language Processing: An fNIRS study.
Oral Presentation[SYMP58] OPEN CALL - Social responsibility09:30 AM - 10:00 AM (Europe/Amsterdam) 2023/07/18 07:30:00 UTC - 2024/07/18 08:00:00 UTC
Linguistic research has approached emotion word representation and processing from a myriad of perspectives –psychological, sociological, developmental, and physiological– to name a few. However, the influence of culture on emotion word processing has rarely been investigated. It is known that culture plays a key role in how individuals interact with the world and process information (Basnight-Brown & Altarriba, 2018). This study aims to investigate this influence of cross-cultural differences in emotion word processing. Additionally, characterizing individual and cultural differences in terms of how the brain represents emotion concepts is an important line of work that remains to be done (Adolphs & Anderson, 2018). Therefore, this study also aims to investigate the neural correlates of emotion word processing in situations when a bilingual's first and second language are associated with different cultural values. To study the influence of culture on emotion word representation and processing this study will focus on how cross-cultural differences modulate emotional valence ratings using fNIRS (functional near-infrared spectroscopy). This study will include 60 English Chinese bilingual participants. Half of the participants will be L1 English - L2 Chinese speakers, and the other half will be L1 Chinese speakers - L2 English speakers. The stimuli will consist of 140 emotional words, 70 in English and 70 in Chinese. There will be 30 positive, 30 negative, and 10 neutral valence words in each language. Participants will perform an emotive rating task while their brain activity patterns are being recorded. We plan to utilize an 18-channel fNIRS system to record participants' cerebral hemodynamics associated with neural activity while they rate the words for emotional valence. Data collection for this research will be complete by January 2023. Although we cannot yet report our findings, we anticipate observing differences in valence ratings of emotion words elicited by cross-cultural differences (Barret, 2017). We also anticipate finding differences in neural activity between the two populations of participants. More specifically, we anticipate enhanced activation in the prefrontal cortex for words rated higher as positive compared to those rated as neutral and/or negative (Ashby & Isen, 1999).
The proposed study highlights the relevance of applied linguistics in a real-world context. Examining cross-cultural influences on emotion word processing can lead to more effective communication and teaching practices in the classroom by raising awareness of how certain emotions and emotion concepts are perceived by learners across cultures. Additionally, a deeper understanding of cultural differences may lead to a better-cohesed society. Adolphs, R., & Anderson, D. J. (2018). The neuroscience of emotion: A new synthesis. Princeton University Press. Ashby, F. G., Isen, A. M., & Turken, A. U. (1999). A neuropsychological theory of positive affect and its influence on cognition. Psychological Review, 106, 529-550. Barrett, L. F. (2017). How emotions are made: The secret life of the brain. Pan Macmillan. Basnight-Brown, D. M., & Altarriba, J. (2018). The influence of emotion and culture on language representation and processing. In Advances in culturally-aware intelligent systems and in cross-cultural psychological studies (pp. 415-432). Springer, Cham.
Multimodality in multi-party interactions: the orchestration of dining and interacting in speaking and signing French family dinners
Oral Presentation[SYMP59] OPEN CALL - Language & holistic ecology10:00 AM - 10:30 AM (Europe/Amsterdam) 2023/07/18 08:00:00 UTC - 2024/07/18 08:30:00 UTC
Family dinners grounded in commensality are a collective ritual that plays a key role in family members' cultural heritage (Ochs & Kremer-Sadlik, 2013). Those shared moments of everyday life present a perfect opportunity to study language practices in the framework of multiactivity (Haddington et al. 2014). Because the subtle interweaving of these practices while eating fully engages the body, this presentation will highlight the semiotic differences between children using a spoken language, French, and a sign language, Langue des Signes Française (LSF), at different ages. They are constraints that could be different for speaking and signing family members - using the mouth to eat and speak is problematic and it is not easy to cut meat or pour water and be an active addressee of a signer; but there are also possible multi-activities one learns to combine - chewing can be synchronous with actively listening and gazing at the speaker or signer. Family members deploy a multitude of skillful multimodal variations in the collective coordination of bodies, activities and artifacts. In this study, we focus on the finely-tuned coordination and in situ organization of the joint activities of conversing and dining that fully engage the same body components (eyes, head, mouth, hands, arms). Our aim is to capture the multiple deployments of the embodied behaviors of dinner participants, and children's progressive socialization to multiactivity. We show how family members collaboratively manage the accomplishments of multiple streams of activity and coordinate their temporal organizations through the embodied performances of dining and interacting (Goodwin, 1984). Ethnographic methods were used to collect dinnertime data in two official languages of France characterized by their semiotic differences. We recorded dinners in middle-class families speaking French or signing in French sign language living in Paris with children between 3 and 12 years old. The families we video-recorded consist of two adults and two to three children. We use two standard cameras and one 360° camera to capture multiple angles and code our data in ELAN on independent tiers in which the use of participants' modalities are captured. Qualitative analyses were combined with quantitative methods. Our analyses demonstrate that 1) because of the specialized role of gaze and of the articulators involved (mouth, hands, arms…), there are crucial differences between coordinating speaking vs. signing, and eating; 2) parents provide their children with feedback on how to coordinate the activities of eating vs. speaking or signing which helps 3) children become increasingly expert at coordinating semiotic resources and at navigating between activities.
Goodwin, C. (1984). Notes on story structure and the organization of participation, In Structures of Social Action: Studies in Conversation Analysis, J. Maxwell Atkinson, John Heritage, eds., London, Cambridge University Press, pp. 225–246. Haddington, P., Keisanen, T., Mondada, L., Nevile, M. (2014). Multiactivity in Social Interaction: Beyond multitasking, Amsterdam/Philadelphia : Benjamins. Ochs, Elinor and Tamar Kremer–Sadlik (eds.). 2013. Fast–Forward Family. Home, Work, and Relationships in Middle–Class America. Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Setting up English/French Teletandem programmes at University: institutional integration and student engagement
Oral Presentation[SYMP57] OPEN CALL - New fields of research in Applied Linguistics10:30 AM - 11:00 AM (Europe/Amsterdam) 2023/07/18 08:30:00 UTC - 2024/07/18 09:00:00 UTC
Tandem language learning (Brammerts & Calvert 2003, Helmling 2002) in its traditional form is based on two key principles: learner autonomy and reciprocity between two native speakers who team up to learn each other's language. Since its introduction in higher education in the 1960's, tandem learning has undergone several major changes triggered by the advent of the Internet, first with electronic written communication (e-tandem, Little & Brammerts, 1996) and then with virtual spoken communication through videoconferencing (Cappellini & Zhang 2013) also called Teletandem (Vassallo & Telles 2006). One may wonder whether the original principle of learner autonomy may be weakened by the willingness to embed such an informal practice into the formal context of higher education institutions. This paper will present the results of an experiment conducted on English/French University Teletandem exchanges with three pilot cohorts of students (each tandem pair consisting of a native French speaker and a native English speaker) over three consecutive semesters during and after the 2020-2022 Covid pandemic, which spurred the transformation from a face-to-face (Horgues & Scheuer 2015) to a virtual tandem set-up. A Teletandem programme was implemented between University of Texas at Austin (UTA) and Université Sorbonne Nouvelle (USN) in parallel with a free Teletandem practice programme at USN. We will address this question: To what extent does institutional integration contribute to limiting or, conversely, empowering Teletandem students in their approach to second language learning? Our method consists in intersecting i) a comparative analysis of the data collected in online final questionnaires completed by the French participants of each pilot cohort (about 20-30 students) ii) a reflection on the resources, pedagogical framing, and guidance provided to these same participants. The results show that some degree of institutional embedding, despite its assumed limitation of autonomy, is actually helpful to support collaboration and student engagement (Christenson et al. 2012), and thereby ensure a more stable and secure learning environment.Brammerts, H., & Calvert, M. (2003). Learning by communicating in tandem. In T. Lewis & L. Walker (Eds.), Autonomous language learning in tandem (pp. 45–59). Sheffield, UK: Academy Electronic Publications.
Cappellini, M., & Zhang, M. (2013). Étude des négociations du sens dans un tandem par visioconférence [A study of meaning negotiation in a video-conferencing tandem]. Recherches en Didactique des Langues et des Cultures, 10(2).
Christenson, S. L., Reschly, A. L. & Wylie, C. (Eds.). (2012). Handbook of Research on Student Engagement, New York: Springer.
Helmling, B. (2002). L'apprentissage autonome des langues en tandem [Autonomous language learning in tandem]. Paris, France: Didier.
Horgues, C. & Scheuer, S. (2015). Why some things are better done in tandem? In J. A. Mompeán & J. Fouz-González (Eds.), Investigating English pronunciation: Trends and directions (pp. 47–82). Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Little, D. & Brammerts, H. (1996). Guide to Language Learning in Tandem via the Internet. CLCS Occasional Paper No. 46.Trinity College, Dublin.
Vassallo, M. L., & Telles, J. A. (2006). Foreign language learning in-tandem: Theoretical principles and research perspectives. The ESPecialist, 27(1), 83–118.
Céline HORGUES Maitre De Conférences, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle Co-authors Claire Tardieu Professor Of English Didactics, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle
Dan Dewey
Stéphanie Caët
Claire Tardieu
