The Principal’s Awards for Excellence in Teaching and Research will also be presented at the event.

“Glendon College is renowned for offering a bilingual education across a wide range of liberal arts disciplines, with a focus on public and international affairs and the study of languages and cultures,” said Robert HachĂ©, 91ŃÇɫ’s vice-president research & Innovation.  “This festival of research provides an opportunity for members of the 91ŃÇÉ« community to learn more about the diversity and broad range of research initiatives taking place at Glendon College.”

“I am delighted to welcome the 91ŃÇÉ« community to this first Glendon Research Festival. Our campus has more than 85 researchers conducting a wide array of projects in fields ranging from mathematics to drama studies, from neuroscience to political science," said Glendon Principal Kenneth McRoberts. The events held this year will feature exciting research on Quebec, education, Aboriginal linguistics and French-English translation. We will also recognize the recent achievements of our colleagues and honour the recipient of the Principal Research Award during an afternoon celebration. We hope that members of the 91ŃÇÉ« community can join us for the Glendon Research Festival and take this opportunity to visit Glendon's beautiful new facilities.”

The festival offers four research events: 

A bilingual conference on the student mobilization in Quebec will be held from 9:45am to 1pm in the BMO Conference Centre at Glendon College.  The conference is organized by Glendon political science Professor Francis Garon and the . Five panellists will explain the social and political origins of the “carré rouge” movement and explore its implications for student tuitions fees and for post-secondary education policies in both Quebec and Ontario.  for more details.

The education is presenting  a special lecture on linguistic and Aboriginal literacy by expert Barbara Burnaby from Memorial University in Newfoundland. The lecture will be an opportunity to learn about how public policy and educational initiatives can help to teach, develop and stabilize the Innu language in Labrador and elsewhere in Canada. The lecture is at the Glendon Auditorium, 91ŃÇÉ« Hall A100, from 6 to 7pm.

Professor AurĂ©lia Klimkiewicz and the Glendon Translation Department are organizing a lecture (in French) on translation theory. Guest speaker Annick Chapdelaine, a translation theorist, translator and literary specialist at McGill University in Montreal, will discuss the challenges of dualist taxonomies in translation. She will draw examples from her work on celebrated American writer William Faulkner. The lecture will take place in the Senior Common Room, third floor, 91ŃÇɫ Hall, from 6 to 6:40pm.

The principal’s office and the Glendon Research Services will host their annual celebration of Faculty research achievements by honouring the recipients of the Awards for Excellence in Teaching and in Research. This celebration provides an opportunity to recognize the success of those colleagues who have received research funding and those who have published books and articles since November 2011. Members of the 91ŃÇÉ« community are invited to attend the celebration in the Senior Common Room, third floor, 91ŃÇÉ« Hall, from 4 to 5:30pm .

For more information please contact Michael Ah Choon, acting research officer, Glendon College at ext. 66829 or mahchoon@glendon.yorku.ca.

Republished courtesy of YFile– 91ŃÇɫ’s daily e-bulletin to research stories on the research website.

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Funded through the  program of the Social Sciences & Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), the principal investigator of the project – Le français à la mesure d'un continent : un patrimoine en partage (French Language Across a Continent: A Shared Heritage) – is Professor France Martineau of the University of Ottawa who holds a University Research Chair in Language and Migration in French America and is the director of Le laboratoire Les Polyphonies du français and co-founder of the Laboratoire de français ancien.

The study will include 13 fellow researchers and 59 partners from Canada, the United States, France and Japan working in a variety of disciplines, including linguistics, anthropology, history, geography and computer science.

Right: Raymond Mougeon

Other members of the involved in the project include HĂ©lène Blondeau of the University of Florida, Annette Boudreau and Rodrigue Landry of the UniversitĂ© de Moncton, Yves Frenette of the University of Ottawa, Françoise Gadet of the UniversitĂ© de Paris Ouest Nanterre La DĂ©fense (Paris X) and Ruth King of 91ŃÇÉ«.

The way French is spoken in places as diverse as Gatineau, Shediac and New Orleans can tell a lot about how Francophone communities evolved in North America. "We are looking at three fields of expansion from France: New France – now known as Quebec – Louisiana and Acadia," says Mougeon.

"If we just focused on Canada, we would miss some important components of the North American francophonie, mainly Louisiana, probably one of the most interesting colonial settings, because it involved not only colonization from France, but also secondary migration from Acadia – basically the French language continued to live, but in a completely different setting from the original."

According to Mougeon, the project team plans to reach beyond linguistics to include history and sociology. "We believe that you can only understand the evolution of language if you can actually place it in its broader socio-historical setting.”

The study will use innovative approaches, by presenting individuals and their language as a central factor in the changes that society undergoes and by examining the relationship between the cognitive and cultural aspects of language. Relying on extensive documentation, the study will seek to identify the concerns of present-day francophone communities, in majority, minority or multicultural settings.

The research will also help produce a major corpus of French in North America, which will include informal exchanges between individuals in the form of private correspondence or spontaneous conversation. This publicly accessible tool will be useful as a starting point to systematically compare francophone communities.

Mougeon has conducted research on the diversity of spoken French in Ontario, the demo-linguistic vitality of the Franco-Ontarian community, the sociolinguistic history of French in Quebec and France from the colonial period to the present day and the sociolinguistic competence of French-immersion students. He is the author or co-author of several publications and has participated in 36 research projects with funds representing over $5 million in research grants, including those from SSHRC, the Ontario Ministry of Education and the Association of Canadian Studies.

By Marika Kemeny, Glendon communications officer.

Republished courtesy of YFile– 91ŃÇɫ’s daily e-bulletin.

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These benefits come from having a brain that’s constantly juggling two – or even more – languages, said Ellen Bialystok, [Distinguished Research Professor in Psychology, ] at 91ŃÇÉ« in Toronto, who spoke at the AAAS annual meeting. For instance, a person who speaks both Hindi and Tamil can’t turn Tamil off even if he’s speaking to only Hindi users, because the brain is constantly deciding which language is most appropriate for a given situation.

This constant back-and-forth between two linguistic systems means frequent exercise for the brain’s so-called executive control functions, located mainly in the prefrontal cortex. This is the part of the brain tasked with focusing one’s attention, ignoring distractions, holding multiple pieces of information in mind when trying to solve a problem, and then flipping back and forth between them.

“If you walk into a room, there are a million things that could attract your attention,” Bialystok said. “How is it we manage to focus at all? How does our mind pay attention to what we need to pay attention to without getting distracted?”

To test one’s ability to identify pertinent nuggets while being bombarded with extraneous information, scientists use something called the Stroop test. Subjects are presented with a word for a particular colour and asked to identify the colour of ink it’s printed in. So if the word is “blue” and it’s printed in blue, no problem. If, on the other hand, the word “blue” is printed in red, they have to sort out which piece of information – the colour of the ink, or the colour being spelled out – is the one they need.

“This is extremely hard to do, because it’s terribly difficult to block out the information from the word,” Bialystok said.

In monolingual speakers, this kind of mental curveball will add 240 milliseconds to their reaction time – a significant delay, in brain reaction terms. Bilingual people, on the other hand, take just 160 extra milliseconds to sort this out. Bialystok theorizes that it’s because they’re used to prioritizing information in potentially confusing situations all day.alz

Those advantages aren’t just useful for schoolchildren – they last over the course of a lifetime. A study published last year in the journal Neurology surveyed 211 patients diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and found that those who spoke only one language saw the onset of their first symptoms four to five years earlier than their bilingual peers. While knowing two languages doesn’t fight the disease, it does strengthen those parts of the brain that are susceptible to dementia’s early attacks, allowing them to withstand the assault much longer.

Republished courtesy of YFile – 91ŃÇɫ’s daily e-bulletin.

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