You are cordially invited to attend the TSL Brown Bag Lunch Research Talk by Yachao Sun, Xiaofei Pan, Ge Lanon Linguistics, Humanities, and Data Sciences: Their Intersections and Implications.
Date/Time: Friday, Feb. 17, 12pm, (China Standard Time).
Location: IB 2026
Snacks and bubble teas provided.
Please RSVP by 5 pm Thursday Feb. 16: https://duke.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_1Na5ryXivJDlIzA
Abstract
This interdisciplinary research will investigate DKU international students’ language knowledge, beliefs, and use of different resources for Chinese as a second language (CSL) writing across linguistics, humanities, and data sciences. Specifically, this project will build a corpus to examine grammatical features that occur in DKU international students’ CSL writing. Computational techniques (e.g., Part-of-speech tagging and syntactic parsing) will be applied to analyze these linguistic features. These features will guide us in conducting semi-structured interviews to investigate students’ language ideologies and explore how sociopolitical boundaries between languages facilitate or undermine their learning of CSL writing. Translingual practice will be adopted as a theoretical framework to guide this interdisciplinary research. Translingual practice, as a concept, has been widely discussed and implemented in various research areas, such as applied linguistics, composition studies, TESOL, bilingual education, and second language (L2) writing. This concept advocates for taking advantage of multilinguals’ full linguistic repertoires for meaning-making (the linguistic perspective), empowering multilinguals with agency in shaping their own language (the humanistic perspective), and processing language data with technology (the data science perspective). Therefore, this theoretical framework will provide us with flexibility and intersectionality to conduct this interdisciplinary research. To operationalize translingual practice, scholars have enacted translingual practices as learning and teaching strategies in various contexts, with diverse student groups, and for different research purposes. However, it is underexplored whether and how translingual practices can facilitate the teaching and learning of CSL writing. This proposed interdisciplinary study aims to address this void by investigating language ideologies and boundaries in DKU international students’ CSL writing.
