RSS 1.0Applied Linguistics
Browse by
Recent Submissions
-
Experiences establishing a new speech-language pathology training program in Ethiopia, a resource-limited setting: Lessons learnedPurpose: Ethiopia is the second most populous country in sub-Saharan Africa. While Ethiopia’s health care system includes primary health centres, general, and specialized hospitals, allied health care like speech-language pathology, was not available until 2003. This article was written with the aim of sharing the experience of establishing speech-language pathology as a profession and the first speech-language pathology training program in Ethiopia. Materials/Methods: In this paper, we retrospectively examine how the leadership of local stakeholders, a multidisciplinary team, and the development of a professional infrastructure lead to the success of the program. The authorship group, who were involved in the program from inception to implementation, share their experiences. Results: The speech-language pathology undergraduate program at Addis Ababa University graduated its first class in 2019. Plans to grow the training program at the graduate level are ongoing. Conclusions: This novel program, grown from several international partnerships, is an example of how low- and middle-income countries can improve access to the service providers necessary to treat their populations
-
The informational richness of testimonial contextsAn influential idea in the epistemology of testimony is that people often acquire justified beliefs through testimony, in contexts too informationally poor for the justification to be evidential. This has been described as the Scarcity of Information Objection (SIO). It is an objection to the reductive thesis that the acceptance of testimony is justified by evidence of general kinds not unique to testimony. SIO hinges on examples intended to show clearly that testimonial justification arises in low‐information contexts; I argue that the common examples show no such thing. There is a great deal of information available in testimonial contexts, including in the examples alleged to show otherwise – enough information to render SIO implausible. Purported SIO examples tend to give a wrong impression about the informational richness of testimonial contexts, I argue, due to the lack of detail in which they are presented.
-
Critical incident analysis through narrative reflective practice: A case studyTeachers can reflect on their practices by articulating and exploring incidents they consider critical to themselves or others. By talking about these critical incidents, teachers can make better sense of seemingly random experiences that occur in their teaching because they hold the real inside knowledge, especially personal intuitive knowledge, expertise and experience that is based on their accumulated years as language educators teaching in schools and classrooms. This paper is about one such critical incident analysis that an ESL teacher in Canada revealed to her critical friend and how both used McCabe’s (2002) narrative framework for analyzing an important critical incident that occurred in the teacher’s class.
-
Psychocentricity and participant profiles: implications for lexical processing among multilingualsLexical processing among bilinguals is often affected by complex patterns of individual experience. In this paper we discuss the psychocentric perspective on language representation and processing, which highlights the centrality of individual experience in psycholinguistic experimentation. We discuss applications to the investigation of lexical processing among multilinguals and explore the advantages of using high-density experiments with multilinguals. High density experiments are designed to co-index measures of lexical perception and production, as well as participant profiles. We discuss the challenges associated with the characterization of participant profiles and present a new data visualization technique, that we term Facial Profiles. This technique is based on Chernoff faces developed over 40 years ago. The Facial Profile technique seeks to overcome some of the challenges associated with the use of Chernoff faces, while maintaining the core insight that recoding multivariate data as facial features can engage the human face recognition system and thus enhance our ability to detect and interpret patterns within multivariate datasets. We demonstrate that Facial Profiles can code participant characteristics in lexical processing studies by recoding variables such as reading ability, speaking ability, and listening ability into iconically-related relative sizes of eye, mouth, and ear, respectively. The balance of ability in bilinguals can be captured by creating composite facial profiles or Janus Facial Profiles. We demonstrate the use of Facial Profiles and Janus Facial Profiles in the characterization of participant effects in the study of lexical perception and production.
