History of the Group
The CIEN research group is based in the Departamento de Filologia Anglesa i de Germanística at the Facultat de Filosofia i Lletres, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. It was founded in 2001 with fundings from the Spanish Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia to carry out the project BFF2001-2576 on Verbal Practices in Intercultural Communication: Strategies for the Negotiation of Meaning. The Original Members of this first team are: Melissa G. Moyer (Principal Investigator), Joan A. Argenter, Albert Branchadell, Eva Codó, Joan Pujolar, Adela Ros and Monica Heller.
Current Team members include Melissa Moyer (Principal Investigator), Eva Codó, Gabriele Budach, Alexandre Duchêne, Monica Heller, Maria Rosa Garrido, Massimiliano Sassi, Gema Rubio Carbonero and Andrea Sunyol.
The group is currently funded by AGAUR (2014 SGR 1508) and officially recognized by this Catalan Research Agency. The AGAUR has allocated 10.500,00 € to fund our research activities for the period 2014-2016.Furthermore, different members of the team are involved in three main funded projects:
·Multilingualism and Mobility: Linguistic Practices and Construction of Identity
·Las mudas lingüísticas: una aproximación etnográfica a los nuevos hablantes en Europa
·The Appropriation of English as a Global Language in Catalan Secondary Schools: A Multilingual, Situated and Comparative Approach.
From 2007, the group was funded by the research grant HUM2007-61864/FILO from the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología to carry out a project on The Management of Multilingualism in Institutional Contexts and research grant 2007ARAF100018 from the Catalan Research Agency AGAUR to investigate the Management of the Linguistic Reception of Newcomers in a Public Institution and a Non Governmental Institution. The CIEN Research Group received official recognition from the Catalan research agency AGAUR (2009 SGR 1340) for the five-year period 2009-2013. The AGAUR allocated 33.600,00 € to fund our research activities during this period.
For 2009 to 2013 we continued our research into the management of multilingualism and institutional communication in public, private and nongovernmental organisations. Previous research interests of the group were concerned with the role of international languages like English as commodities in the emerging linguistic market in Catalonia. During this period, we introduced a focus on the migrants’ perspectives through the study of their sociolinguistic trajectories.
Some of the activities developed for the period 2009-2013 are the following:
A series of talks about multilingualism, transnational migration and sociolinguistics given by professionals working in different institutions and other researchers in the field. On October 2, Frances Giampapa from Bristol University was our first guest speaker of the term.
Specialised seminars in qualitative research methods (e.g. transcription of audio and video data) and sociolinguistic theory (e.g. the analysis of social processes through language) based on the research carried out by the group members.
Workshops with professionals working at the institutions where the CIEN Research Group has undertaken fieldwork (health clinic and NGOs) to discuss our results and to establish collaboration agreements linked to our research activities.
Strengthening the group’s connections with national and international research groups in the field of critical sociolinguistics. We would like to organize data analysis and discussion sessions in order to share research concerns, discuss methodological problems and construct a common theoretical framework.
Activities
Melissa Moyer, Eva Codó and Maria Rosa Garrido participated in the panel on Sociolinguistic and pragmatic aspects of institutional discourse: Service encounters in multilingual and multicultural contexts organized by Rosina Márquez-Reiter and Luisa Martín-Rojo at the 11th IPrA Conference celebrated in July 2009 at the University of Melbourne, Australia. Eva Codó & Maria Rosa Garrido co-authored the presentation “Migrants and global language resources: A study of bureaucratic and legal advice encounters” and Melissa Moyer compared three institutional sites in her presentation “The Management of Multilingualism in Public, Private and Non-Governmental Institutions”.
Members of the CIEN team also contributed to the International Symposium on Bilingualism 7 (ISB7) in July 2009 at Utrecht University, the Netherlands. Melissa Moyer co-authored the presentation “Neo-liberal practices: Multilingualism as resource but for whom?” with Alexandre Duchêne, a member of the team from the University of Fribourg. Eva Codó and Maria Rosa Garrido jointly presented the paper “Transnational African migrants’ construction of postcolonial identities”.
The “Language, Ideologies and the New Economy” seminar celebrated in April 2009 at the Institute of Multilingualism (University and PH Fribourg) included Melissa Moyer and Katia Yago’s presentation on “Transnational Spaces, Social Structuration and Multilingualism in a Tourist Community on the Costa Brava”.
Melissa Moyer was a visiting scholar at Birkbeck College University of London from April to June 2009. She gave lectures and shared research interests with students and colleagues from the Departments of Applied Linguistics and Spanish, Portuguese, and Latin American Studies. One of the purposes for visiting Birkbeck College was to take up a comparative research project with Dr. Penelope Gardner-Chloros and Dr. Li Wei on code-switching in Chinese-English, Greek-English and Spanish-English immigrant groups. They have worked closely in the past to develop the LIDES project and they are now in a position to begin to undertake a comparative study.
As an essential part of our collaboration with the research team led by Luisa Martín Rojo (UAM), a series of coordinated research meetings on Migration and Multilingualism were initiated in May 2009. The aim of these meetings is to exchange ideas, analyse data together and coordinate research projects. The first research meeting between the two groups was held at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid.
Our research team organised the 3rd AILA International Seminar on Language and Migration in February 2009. The seminar theme was “Institutions, Language and Migration: Processes, Power and Control”. Maria Sabaté presented part of her PhD research with a paper entitled “Consolidating Embryonic Institutions of Migration: The Case of Locutorios”. Eva Codó was a plenary speaker with the keynote talk “When Migrants Meet the State: Control, Evaluation and Social Categorisation in Bureaucratic Encounters”.
Melissa G. Moyer and Maria Rosa Garrido jointly presented “Ideologies and Practices of Multilingualism in an Immigrant Support Organisation: Making Micro-Macro Connections” at the Sociolinguistics Symposium 17 celebrated in Vrije Universiteit, The Netherlands. Maria Sabaté also presented the paper “Ideologies on multilingual practices in a rural school managing diversity” based on her MA Thesis at the University of Toronto.
Melissa Moyer, Eva Codó, Melinda Dooly, Maria Rosa Garrido and Lola Ruiz from the CIEN team presented a joint paper on the Constructions of Multilingualism and Multimodality in Institutional Sites to the panel organized by Gabi Budach and Marilyn Martin-Jones on Multilingualism, Literacy and Multimodality at ISB6 in June 2007 at the University of Hamburg, Germany.
Joan Pujolar and Melissa Moyer jointly organized a panel at Sociolinguistic Symposium 16 in Limerick, Ireland 2006 on Immigration and Multilingual Language Practices in Institutional Settings: Issues of Identity and Power. Eva Codó a member of the team presented a paper on “Global languages, local contexts: English as a lingua franca at a government office in Catalonia”
The original team (2001-2003) was active in the organization of the 5th International Symposium of Bilingualism (ISB5) in March 2005.
LIPPS-LIDES project
The LIPPS project is conceived as a network of researchers who, in addition to carrying out their own research on language interaction data, are committed to the overall goal of producing a database and developing coding schemes and guidelines. Each researcher is in fact working independently on his/her own data set, but a common set of overall goals will be kept in mind. The goals of the LIPPs-LIDES project are:
To develop standards for transcribing and coding multilingual data.
To develop a computerized database (corpus) of multilingual interaction data in standardized form.
To develop user-friendly tools for the transcription and coding of language interaction data.
For further information of lipps-lides Lancaster