Academic & Teaching staff

James Wilson

Teaching Fellow in Russian

James Wilson

0113 343 1912

 

 

 

James Wilson

Teaching Fellow in Russian

Email

0113 343 1912

BA (Sheffield)

MA (Sheffield)

PhD (Sheffield)

Biography

I received a BA degree in Russian with Czech from the University of Sheffield in 2001, after which I spent six months in the Czech Republic as a teacher of English as a Foreign Language. It was during this time that I became interested in language variation in Czech, in particular in the language situation in Moravia, a theme that I developed in my MA and PhD degrees.

 

 

Since submitting my PhD in 2007, I have had various teaching roles at the University of Sheffield, I have carried out a language project funded by the Centre for East European Language Based Area Studies (CEELBAS), on which I investigated the market for Russian for research programmes, and I have worked in a team of editors on an edition of the Oxford Student's Dictionary for Czech learners of English. This is my second post as Teaching Fellow of Russian at GRASS. I also worked here in 2009/2010 and before teaching Russian at Leeds I was Teaching Associate in Slavonic Languages at the University of Sheffield. From April 2010 to August 2011 I worked as Research Fellow at the Centre for Translation Studies at the University of Leeds where I was employed on the IntelliText (http://corpus.leeds.ac.uk/it) and KELLY projects.

Research interests

My research interests are in two areas: (1) variationist sociolinguistics and (2) language pedagogy.

I am interested in language variation and change in Czech, dialect contact and second-dialect acquisition (as well as in variationist sociolinguistics more generally). My PhD study addressed the linguistic accommodation of Moravian migrants living in Bohemia. It tested an unsubstantiated hypothesis that speakers of Moravian dialects who move to Bohemia quickly reduce or avoid features of their localized dialects and accommodate to Common Czech, a non-standard koine spoken throughout Bohemia and in the westernmost parts of Moravia.

I also have a keen interest in new and innovative methods of teaching Slavonic languages at both undergraduate and postgraduate level, in particular in corpus-based language learning and teaching. In recent years I have worked on several language projects that have tested the application of corpora for teaching Russian and I am particularly interested in the development of materials to support corpus-based tools and maximise their effectiveness in language learning and teaching.

Publications

  • James Wilson. (forthcoming). "Opravdu mluví Moravané ijící v Praze obecnou četinou?" ['Do Moravians living in Prague really speak Common Czech?']. Proceedings of Četina v pohledu synchronním a diachronním (Stoleté kořeny ÚJC)
  • James Wilson. (forthcoming). "The role of salience and other factors in second-dialect acquisition: the case of Moravians in Prague". Slavia Centralis
  • James Wilson, Serge Sharoff, Anthony Hartley and Paul Stephenson. (forthcoming). 'Advanced corpus solutions for language tutors and students'. Language Resources and Evaluation Journal (LREJ)
  • James Wilson, Serge Sharoff and Paul Stephenson. (2011). '"Value-added teaching": corpus-based methods for LSP teaching'. Talaván, N., Martín Monje, E. & F. Palazón (eds.) Technological innovation in the teaching and processing of LSPs: Proceedings of TISLID'10

· James Wilson, Anthony Hartley, Serge Sharoff and Paul Stephenson. (2011). 'Advanced corpus solutions for humanities researchers'. Proceedings of the Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation 2010

· James Wilson. (2011). 'Types of accommodation in first-generation dialect contact between adult speakers of mutually intelligible but regionally different varieties'. Multilingua 30 (2): 177-220

  • James Wilson. (2010). Moravians in Prague: A Sociolinguistic Study of Dialect Contact in the Czech Republic (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang)

Recent seminar and conference papers

· 'The role of salience in second-dialect acquisition: the case of Moravians in Prague', The International Conference on Language Variation in Europe 6 (ICLaVE 6), University of Freiburg, Germany, July 2011

· 'Opravdu mluví Moravané ijící v Praze obecnou četinou?' ['Do Moravians in Prague really speak Common Czech?'], Četina v pohledu synchronním a diachronním (Stoleté kořeny ÚJC), Ústav pro jazyk český, Prague, Czech Republic, June 2011

· 'Using corpora for teaching and studying Russian', 4th Annual Seminar of the Russian Language Teachers' Group, Leeds Metropolitan University, UK, March 2011

· 'Developing corpora for teaching foreign languages: a case study of Russian', American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages (AATSEEL) Annual Meeting, Los Angeles, USA, January 2011

· 'Výsledky studie Moravanů v Praze a dalí monosti výzkumu v rámci variační sociolingvistiky' ['The results of the study of Moravians in Prague and further possibilities for research in the variationist paradigm'], Sociolinguistics Seminar, Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic, December 2010

· '"Value Added Teaching": corpus-Based methods for LSP teaching', First International Workshop on Technological Innovation for Specialized Linguistic Domains (TISLID), Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia, Madrid, Spain, October 2010

· 'Training in pronunciation: an added bonus or a core component of Russian language programmes?', British Association of Slavonic and East European Studies (BASEES) Annual Conference, Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, UK, March 2010

  • 'Russian for research: new perspectives on postgraduate language teaching', Languages of the Wider World Research Seminar Series (CETL-LLW), SOAS-UCL Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning, London, UK, March 2009 [invited talk]
  • 'Dialect contact in the Czech Republic: do Moravians in Prague really speak Common Czech?', 3rd International Conference on Perspectives on Slavistics, University of Hamburg, Germany, August 2008
  • 'Developing a Russian for reading/research course', British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies (BASEES) Annual Conference, Fitzwilliam College, University of Cambridge, UK, March 2008
  • 'The impact of four independent variables on acquiring a second dialect: a study of dialect accommodation in the Czech Republic', The International Conference on Language Variation in Europe 4 (ICLaVE 4), University of Cyprus, Nicosia, Cyprus, June 2007
  • 'Accommodation in a society with a socially stigmatized standard: a study of Moravian students in Prague', Sociolinguistics Symposium 16, University of Limerick, Ireland, July 2006

Guest lectures

· 'How to use the IntelliText interface to learn Russian', University of Nottingham, UK, March 2011

· 'Moravané v Praze: variační analýza jazykového kontaktu v České republice' ['Moravians in Prague: a sociolinguistic study of dialect contact in the Czech Republic'], Charles University, Prague, December 2010

Organized events

  • Second IntelliText Workshop, University of Leeds, UK March 2011
  • First IntelliText Workshop, University of Leeds, UK, June 2010
  • Panel on "New Methods in Teaching Slavonic Languages", British Association of Slavonic and East European Studies (BASEES) Annual Conference, Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, UK, March 2010
  • CEELBAS Workshop on Languages for Research, University of Sheffield, UK, May 2008
  • Panel on "Central and East European sociolinguistics", Annual Meeting of the Linguistics Association of Great Britain (LAGB), University of Essex, UK, September 2008

Teaching

I am currently teaching on the following modules:

  • SLAV1010 Beginning Russian 1
  • SLAV1020 Beginning Russian 2
  • SLAV1101 Core Russian 1
  • SLAV1102 Developing Russian 1
  • SLAV2101/2102 Core Russian 2
  • SLAV2103/2104 Applied Russian 2
  • SLAV3101 Core Russian 3
  • SLAV3103 Applied Russian 3