32.3109, Featured Linguist: Michał B. Paradowski

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-32-3109. Sat Oct 02 2021. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 32.3109, Featured Linguist: Michał B. Paradowski

Moderator: Malgorzata E. Cavar (linguist at linguistlist.org)
Student Moderator: Jeremy Coburn, Lauren Perkins
Managing Editor: Becca Morris
Team: Helen Aristar-Dry, Everett Green, Sarah Robinson, Nils Hjortnaes, Joshua Sims, Billy Dickson
Jobs: jobs at linguistlist.org | Conferences: callconf at linguistlist.org | Pubs: pubs at linguistlist.org

Homepage: http://linguistlist.org

Please support the LL editors and operation with a donation at:
           https://funddrive.linguistlist.org/donate/

Editor for this issue: Joshua Sims <joshua at linguistlist.org>
================================================================


Date: Sat, 02 Oct 2021 18:39:07
From: LINGUIST List [linguist at linguistlist.org]
Subject: Featured Linguist: Michał B. Paradowski

 
It is a great pleasure to be able to contribute to the Fund Drive for the
LINGUIST List, a resource which I have relied on since my MA years, and now
during each inaugural seminar meeting encourage students to subscribe to.
My adventure with linguistics officially began with my filing an application
to the University of Warsaw’s Institute of English Studies. While up to that
point my neighborhood and classrooms could not have been more monolingual and
homogenous, I had always been drawn to other languages, even down to
deciphering the mysterious ingredients and descriptions printed on foreign
food packaging, or checking out translators’ footnotes/endnotes in novels.
My choice of courses at university zeroed in on Theoretical and Applied
Linguistics. At the time, I also did a semester of teaching English as a
foreign language in my former high school, getting many ideas from my
observations of the classroom. I subsequently undertook a PhD under the
supervision of Romuald Gozdawa-Gołębiowski, inspired by and expanding upon his
Interface Model of comparative/contrastive ISLA. I was assigned to teach
Generative Syntax 101, developing activities on the systemic and systematic
mechanics of the English language. It was gratifying to see the students grasp
the subject matter and ace the final exam, even those who were repeating the
class. Parallel to the syntax classes, in my fresher year I again taught
full-time at my old high school, which permitted gathering data for my
dissertation. In the subsequent years, I focused on writing, with gainful
employment restricted to the classes at the university and working as an ELT
consultant for television, and a food and wine critic. Though the last of
these may appear to be unrelated to linguistics, it will turn out to have more
than merely anecdotal significance.
As it happened, after having won several culinary competitions and met the
chefs, I interned in the kitchens of Warsaw’s hotels. While there, one of the
U.S. chains asked me to help with a series of bilingual cookbooks they were
planning to publish. My task was to translate, proofread and edit the content
contributed by Polish chefs or other nonnative speakers of English. This
assignment required familiarity with not only specialized lexis, but also the
preferred structures and discourse conventions of American recipes. I
approached the task by compiling a reference corpus, utilizing pre-edited and
standardized recipes from a popular cookery software solution. Altogether,
four bilingual cookbooks were published, but the process also led to the
compilation of enough novel linguistic material to merit a couple of
conference presentations and a Q1-listed journal paper. My internship at the
Sheraton also paid off in a more tangible form: the contract included a clause
whereby I could return to the pastry kitchen to bake a dessert for my PhD
viva: a sponge base with roasted hazelnuts, followed by a layer of dark
chocolate mousse, stewed Williams pear under a layer of Bourbon vanilla crème,
and topped with matching glaze. I prepared the torte the day before the public
defense and stored it overnight in the walk-in fridge. Then on the morning of
the viva I carried it across the square to our institute, concealed it under
the table (the formal green drapery was finally useful), and later served it
to the committee and the guests in the audience. It was the icing on the cake,
so to speak, of the various activities during my PhD days.
As in any journey, there were many other steps that fell into place naturally.
One regret is an unrealized one-year Fulbright Research Grant to go to the
Department of Second Language Studies, University of Hawai`i at Mānoa to work
under the guidance of Bonnie Schwartz and Bob Bley-Vroman. For personal
reasons, it was necessary for me to relinquish the grant and complete the
dissertation ahead of time. However, an opportunity to briefly visit that
department came one year later, when it hosted the Second Language Research
Forum.
After graduating from the PhD program, I took a position as an assistant
professor at the University of Warsaw’s Institute of Applied Linguistics. My
enjoyment of teaching, learning, research, and interacting with other scholars
also led me to look for opportunities to participate in inspiring conferences,
which additionally permit catching up with old friends and making new ones in
the field. Invitations to give guest lectures, workshops and public outreach
talks have provided stimulating forums for exchanging ideas and insights with
new audiences, thus far in over 30 countries.
A serendipitous accident in these wanderings took place one September day
quite close to home, when walking past the old university library I stumbled
upon an announcement for a workshop on language simulations. I walked in and
spoke to the organizers, who graciously let me participate. It soon became
clear why there had been no notice of the event at my institute: it was being
organized and attended almost exclusively by physicists. I managed to
understand the gist of most of the presentations, and began to ponder why
linguists were not tackling the same research questions and instead seemed to
be abandoning the field by walkover. One of my strengths has always been
finding points of overlap and connection among different phenomena and
disciplines, and a year later I got accepted to a summer school in complexity
science organized by Henrik Jeldtoft Jensen and Kim Christensen from Imperial
College London’s Department of Mathematics, and then to the European
Conference on Complex Systems, thanks to the generosity of the late Dietrich
Stauffer. Insights gained from subsequent events and readings led to two
successful grant proposals applying the methodology and tools of complexity
science to language phenomena. One, a small project carried out together with
Łukasz Jonak, investigated the social diffusion of linguistic innovation in a
microblogging site. A larger, current project financed by the National Science
Centre of Poland and carried out in collaboration with six colleagues uses the
tools of computational Social Network Analysis (SNA) to investigate how
communication among participants in intensive immersive L2 courses influences
their progress. While the importance of social networks has been recognized in
the SLA community, especially among study abroad researchers, those works have
typically tended to only consider learners’ egocentric networks – without
obtaining equivalent reciprocal information – and have predominantly focused
on communication with native speakers of the target language. The novelty of
our approach lies in filling the gap by reconstructing (maximally) complete,
directional weighted graphs of communication among the learners, as well as
using a range of computational metrics, measures and algorithms that have been
a staple in contemporary network science, though not in L2 research, despite
their great utility. The first papers from the project can already be accessed
at https://peerlang.ils.uw.edu.pl/publications/. We are currently seeking
collaborators, so if anyone reading this is aware of intensive language
courses being offered in this or next academic year, please share the
information and get in touch with us – some remuneration is foreseen, as well
as the potential for joint publications.
I have found it immensely motivating and inspiring to be able to learn about
and straddle different disciplines, exchange ideas and work alongside skilled
colleagues who bring different competencies to the table. For instance, my
projects so far have benefitted from collaboration with a sociologist,
psychologists, an anthropologist and ethnographer, computer scientists, a
physicist, an epidemiologist, and education researchers. The interdisciplinary
character of the research has expanded the scope of its outreach – by now our
work has been presented in theoretical and applied linguistics/SLS/TESOL and
related departments and conferences, as well as those focused on fields as
diverse as education, psychology, sociology, mathematics, statistics, physics,
complex systems and networks, robotics, and artificial intelligence.
The theme of this year’s LL Fund Drive is “silver linings”, and it would be
impossible to speak of these without mentioning the COVID-19 pandemic. Apart
from the countless human tragedies it has brought, it has meant introducing
broad-based changes to teaching and research. In my own case, on the former
front the protracted duration of working in the distance mode has been a bit
daunting. While academic life had attracted me with its prospect of
face-to-face interactions with students and colleagues, the pandemic has meant
1.5 years of talking to the computer screen (with the exception of a few
invited mask-to-mask teaching stints abroad during brief re-openings). I have
greatly missed daily interactions with friends, colleagues, and students. A
major upset was the Presidential Proclamation, thwarting a planned lecture
trip to the U.S. this year. One of the many things the pandemic has taught me
is to take nothing for granted – and to be resourceful.
On the research side, the project of one of my PhD students suffered in
particular: Agnieszka has been investigating how Polish speakers with Down’s
syndrome process and comprehend different types of simple vs complex clauses.
The study had been planned with in-person sessions in order to ensure a
consistent protocol and to accompany the comprehension and reaction-time
experiments with tests carried out under the supervision of a qualified
psychologist. With the target participants being a vulnerable population, this
was no longer possible to carry out during the pandemic, so the study needed
to be modified, converted to an online format, and resubmitted to the IRB.
My main study-abroad grant project expectedly also ground to a halt. However,
in early March of 2020, even before the school closures were announced in
Poland, I was already thinking about the need to investigate how language
teachers and learners would cope with this unprecedented and hurried
transition to emergency remote instruction. Over the next five weeks, with the
help of PhD student and psychology graduate Magda, a comprehensive,
custom-made survey was developed and approved by IRB. In addition to the
original surveys for language teachers and learners, we elaborated versions
for instructors and students in linguistics and related fields, as well as for
educators in non-language subjects. Though the questionnaire included 400+
items and would sometimes take upwards of 45 minutes to complete, we
endeavored to see the stakeholders as human beings rather than merely in their
instructors’ or students’ hats. The approach paid off: responses came in from
nearly 9,000 participants from 118 countries (many of them recruited with the
help of the LINGUIST List). So far, the data analyses have yielded six papers
(shared at http://schoolclosure.ils.uw.edu.pl/publications/), which have
merely scratched the surface of this massive dataset. Further analyses are
forthcoming; we have also been joined by expert colleagues from other
institutions and are looking forward to exciting collaborations.
The shift to the online delivery of language instruction has also opened up
opportunities for investigating if and how brick-and-mortar classroom research
topics have changed under distance learning. A grant project implemented by
Magda and me will investigate the role of grit and complementary personality
factors in L2 courses being offered online. (If the readers know someone who
is or has just finished learning a second/foreign language online – or
face-to-face, for that matter, as there is a corresponding version of the
survey – please feel free to share the link to the study:
https://L2grit.ils.uw.edu.pl; it has already obtained IRB approval.)
On the academic front, other pandemic-related changes have brought greater
opportunities for participating in conferences, seminars, workshops and
lectures close and far. It has become easier to move between sessions, or even
between events. (Of course, the social component is missing, and events held
on the other side of the world require staying up at odd hours.) Apart from
open events, I have also been fortunate to join the SLS Colloquia at Indiana
University-Bloomington (thanks for keeping me on the roster, Mike!), which I
had missed since my sabbatical, the CSTAT Workshops at Michigan State (thanks,
Kiyo and Marianne!), as well as advanced data analysis and visualization
courses offered by the Institute of English Studies at our own university
(thanks, Agnieszka, Karolina, and Breno!). This year also brought several
invitations to give keynote talks, lectures, and workshops at events and in
places that would have been hard to reach otherwise, especially during the
academic year. Another outcome during these months has been the (sometimes
reluctant) realization by administrative bodies that many council board
meetings and other formalities can be successfully arranged online.
While the future may currently seem a bit less predictable (though life has
never been exactly otherwise), at least two things seem certain: first, it is
important to not only set goals, but also try to enjoy the path along the way.
Second, linguistics is such a fascinating and ever-growing field that it will
never keep us bored. I trust that the LINGUIST List will soon be filled again
with new, exciting face-to-face events. If this is your wish as well, every
donation to the Fund Drive helps keep this invaluable resource running
smoothly.

Michał B. Paradowski
Institute of Applied Linguistics,
University of Warsaw







------------------------------------------------------------------------------

***************************    LINGUIST List Support    ***************************
 The 2020 Fund Drive is under way! Please visit https://funddrive.linguistlist.org
  to find out how to donate and check how your university, country or discipline
     ranks in the fund drive challenges. Or go directly to the donation site:
                   https://crowdfunding.iu.edu/the-linguist-list

                        Let's make this a short fund drive!
                Please feel free to share the link to our campaign:
                    https://funddrive.linguistlist.org/donate/
 


----------------------------------------------------------
LINGUIST List: Vol-32-3109	
----------------------------------------------------------