Multilingualism
Multilingualism and Language Policy studies how nation-states, institutions, communities, and individuals create, interpret, and implement policies (both implicit and explicit) about the use, discourse, and teaching/learning of languages across domains. The field looks at language ideologies, practices, management, power relations and agency in the building of normative language practices in multilingual contexts and investigates how they impact on sociocultural, economic, political, and educational experiences of the people from diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds. Furthermore, it explores the usages, representations, meanings, practices and modalities of language practices across diverse domains.
Haerim Hwang‘s research focus lies at the intersection of (psycho)linguistics and computational science. She explores fundamental issues in (second) language acquisition and processing via behavioral experiments and natural language processing methods. Specifically, she looks at how (second) language is acquired and processed; what the role of grammar, cognitive factors, and psycholinguistic factors is in (second) language acquisition and processing; and how linguistic features are realized in the input to and output of (second) language learners. Jookyoung Jung focuses on psycholinguistic dimensions of digital literacy in association with L2 competence development. She investigates learners’ internal processes while processing technology-mediated input. She is also specialized in eye-tracking research to see how second language learners process multimodal input. Wilkinson Daniel Wong Gonzales works on languages in East Asia from the perspectives of contact linguistics, language documentation, corpus linguistics, and scociolinguistics. His focus is on the interactions between languages in their respective linguistic ecosystems and how multilingual innovations form depending on the socio-historical context of the region. He has worked on (contact) languages like Lánnang-uè, Colloquial Singapore English, Philippine English, Hokkien, and Taishanese. He is also involved in multilingualism-related projects in diasporic contexts (e.g., the MULTI project or Mis-/Underrepresented Languages Teaching and Inclusion Project, Variation in Asian and Pacific Islander North American English, The Lannang Archives). Carmen Lee examines multilingualism in digital and online environments, with a particular focus on how language practices, ideologies, and identities are constructed and negotiated across platforms and digital contexts. Her monograph Multilingualism Online (Routledge, 2017) extends traditional multilingualism research by exploring how multilingual individuals and communities engage in language choice and meaning-making practices in networked, digital spaces. Jette Hansen Edwards works on speech intelligibility of Asian Englishes, attitudes towards and use of Hong Kong English, and the native speaker of English in Asia are all explored through a multilingual and multidialectal approach to the historical sociocultural and sociolinguistic changes in the language ecologies of different contexts in Asia.