This paper brings new insight to poverty and social exclusion through an analysis of how poverty-related issues are commented on in the largest online discussion forum in Finland: Suomi24 (‘Finland24’). For data, we use 32,407 posts published in the forum in 2014 that contain the word köyhä (‘poor’) or a predefined semantically similar word. We apply the Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies (CADS) method, which combines quantitative methods and qualitative discourse analysis. This methodological solution allows us to analyse both large-scale tendencies and detailed expressions and nuances on how poverty is discussed. The quantitative analysis is conducted with topic modelling, an unsupervised machine learning method used to examine large volumes of unlabelled text. Our results show that discussions concerning poverty are multifaceted and can be broken down into several categories, including politics; money, income and spending; and unequal access to goods. This 1 Lehti is the corresponding author. Lehti and Luodonpää-Manni are first authors with equal contribution.
Language learning is one of the key predictors of how well immigrants will integrate into a new society. In many European countries, the resources reserved for language education have proved insufficient as people fleeing the war in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria have entered Europe. This situation has called for ways of mobilising volunteer workers to help newcomers in a coordinated manner. In Finland, a method called Toisto has been developed to enable volunteers with little or no teaching experience to teach the basics of Finnish to newcomers. From the pedagogical and linguistic point of view, Toisto derives from a usage-based notion of language, according to which the spoken modality in general, and modelling-based instruction in particular, can be used to teach grammar without the explicit formulation or explanation of rules. In addition, Toisto aims to compensate for the written language bias very much present in the L2 context in the Finnish education system. In this paper, we outline the theoretical grounding and basic characteristics of the Toisto method. We map the ways in which a usage-based notion of language motivates a communicative, oral language pedagogy, and provide some initial evidence of the feasibility of the method. Finally, we discuss the implications of the Toisto method for adult language education.
This study explores the question of whether native and non-native listeners, i.e. natives familiar with the language they are judging and non-natives who are not, manage to distinguish a foreign accent from a native accent in the speech of native speakers (NSs) and nonnative speakers (NNSs). Participants included 21 speakers (11 NSs and 10 NNSs who were native Turkish speakers) as well as two listener groups that consisted of 61 Finnish listeners (FLs), and 10 Turkish listeners (TLs) without Finnish experience. This study compares accent ratings by these two listener groups that evaluated the 21 spontaneous speech samples for foreign accent using a 9-point scale. The results showed a very significant difference between the listener groups for the NSs but no significant difference for the NNSs. The difference between the FL and the TL groups was because the FLs managed to distinguish the NSs from the NNSs, but otherwise these two listener groups exercised statistically similar ratings. Therefore, these results demonstrate that the listeners’ familiarity with Finnish, the target language, hence listeners’ native speaker status strongly affect ratings of foreign accents, since native listeners could distinguish the NSs, whereas non-native listeners could not. The results suggest that listeners’ familiarity with the target language plays a much more MELIKE UZAL, ERKKI KOMULAINEN, MEHMET AKIF KƖLƖÇ AND OLLI AALTONEN 110 profound role in accent detection than their familiarity with the accent language. Moreover, the results show that contrary to previous research, in the absence of listeners’ familiarity with the target language, it is much more challenging to detect a foreign accent. The results also showed that speech rate correlated with the judgments provided by the TLs but not with the judgments provided by the FLs. This result raises the possibility that there are salient universal features of non-native speech such as speech rate that even non-native listeners unfamiliar with the language they are judging utilize while judging a foreign accent.
Conventionally, ethnographic methods in sociolinguistics aim to discover how language works as “situated social practice and how it is tied to social organisation” (Heller 2011: 10). Within this, ethnography has viewed participant observation as central and essential. More recently ethnographers have moved to combine this with more structured, researcher-facilitated question-based tools such as ethnographic interviews (Sherman Heyl 2001) and focus groups (Suter 2000). This article reports on another creative method, aiming to bring together the strengths of both these approaches to access school-age young people’s orientations to language education policies. There were three main motivations: firstly, to minimise the distracting influence of the researcher’s presence, secondly, to aid in empowering participants, encouraging them into an active role in the research process and thirdly, to avoid favorability bias in participant responses. On the latter point, to truly value the voice of participants you have to find ways to move beyond the “right answer”, which often requires pushing methodological boundaries. I developed a new protocol, ethnographic chats , which I found offered the best of both from existing approaches: a compromise between the immersive depth of participant observation and the greater thematic precision of focus groups or ethnographic interviews. The method was characterised by specific procedural and interactional characteristics of frame and genre, which differentiate it in specific ways from ethnographic interview and focus group methods. Rich data emerged from this process, which would not otherwise have been available. I conclude by outlining the potential for ethnographic chats in other social and geographical contexts.
