In this webinar we present LAwKS-3 an ongoing cross-disciplinary collaboration between linguists at Ulster University and St Patrick’s Academy ] to create a set of innovative teaching resources for post-primary pupils. This project will produce a complete set of online and print resources that can be used by secondary schools across the UK, which will provide a language awareness module for pupils at Key Stage 3 (KS3).
These resources are intended to fulfil the following objectives:
• To provide core grammatical concepts that will support foreign language learning and English literacy, by helping pupils to recognise similarities among languages while understanding the reasons for their differences,
• To share insights that have been long established within the field of linguistics but whose potential benefits for language learners often remain unexploited,
• To increase pupils’ engagement with modern language learning and help to reduce the perceived difficulty of these subjects.
In this event, we will present the project, its aims and we will also give a taster of the first class.
Dr Christina Sevdali is a Senior Lecturer in Linguistics at Ulster University. She was born in Greece and obtained her Bachelor’s Degree in Greek Philology with a major in Linguistics from the University of Crete in 2000. In 2002 she obtained her MPhil in theoretical linguistics from the University of Cambridge and in 2007 her PhD from the same institution. Christina is the Course Director of the Language and Linguistics degree at the School of Communication and Media and teaches morphology, syntax and historical linguistics. She is founding member of UCoM (Ulster Centre on Multilingualism) and has led the Language made fun project, in collaboration with Barnardo’s NI. This project, funded by the Lottery trust, aims to assist children of refugees and asylum seekers with their English while also promoting multilingualism. Christina is the principal investigator in two projects funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC): “Investigating Variation and Change: Case in diachrony” (2017 – 2019) and “Language Awareness for Key Stage 3-LAwKS-3” (2020 – 2021). She has been publishing in journals such as Language, Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, Syntax, Lingua, Journal of Historical Syntax, Lingue e Linguaggi, Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics and the Proceedings of NELS and has co-edited an Oxford University Press volume on “Syntax and its limits”.
