Seminars, News and Events

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Seminars

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News

Dr Claudia Finkbeiner (University of Kassel, Germany) will be teaching an intensive MA course (LALS519), Cultural Learning and Language Teaching between 22 February to 5 March 2010.

Marsden Grant Recipient

Laurie Bauer's project on The Morphology of Current English was one of the four Victoria Humanities projects to receive funding in the latest round of Marsden grants.

Laurie is collaborating with Rochelle Lieber from the University of New Hampshire, USA and Ingo Plag from the University of Siegen, Germany, on a new description of English morphology, concentrating on the system as it is at the start of the twenty-first century. All areas of morphology will be covered, including inflection, derivation, compounding and less central matters such as back-formation and blending. We will be using computer corpora for data as well as dictionaries, which are the default tools for morphologists.

Oxford University Press will publish the book, and we expect there to be spin-offs in the form of intermediate articles and, in year three of the project, a colloquium at Victoria.

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Workplace Communication Programme for Skilled Migrants

11 skilled migrants have completed their five weeks of classroom training in workplace communication skills. The current group come from China, the Philippines, Cambodia and South Africa and their professional backgrounds include: 

• law
• accounting
• IT
• human resources
• finance and banking
• marketing
• foreign affairs and trade
• malaria research and testing
• business analysis
• information systems.

The Skilled Migrant Programme is greatly enhanced by its partnership with the Rotary Club of Wellington. The club helps the programme in many ways: with guest speakers, classroom tutors, job mentors and internship suggestions. Each Tuesday, volunteers from the Rotary Club visit the classroom and spend an hour practising mock job interviews and workplace talk role-plays with the class.

Some weeks as many as 10 volunteers turn up to assist the programme and they all take an active interest in the progress of each class member. The interviews are recorded on video-tape and after the session the skilled migrants review their performance and make notes about the improvements they plan to make for the next week. The photo shows one of the Rotary Club volunteers working with a member of the class.

The group started their six-week work placements on 24 August. Thanks to our partners, The Johnson Group and the Rotary Club of Wellington, placements have been sourced across a diverse range of organisations:

• the Department of Labour
• the Environmental Risk Management Authority
• New Zealand Post
• the New Zealand Transport Authority (Web Development)
• the Ministry of Social Development (Work and Income)
• Whitireia Institute of Technology
• the Institute of Environmental Science and Research
• the Wellington Chamber of Commerce
• the Ministry of Education.

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English Language Training for Officials (ELTO) Returns to Victoria

The ELTO programme returns to Victoria University of Wellington this trimester, after a two-year sabbatical between contracts. ELTO which is funded by the New Zealand International Aid and Development, brings government officials from developing countries to New Zealand to improve their English. The current intake is made up of 30 government officials from Cambodia, Laos, Mongolia and Vietnam. The ELTO Programme has been operating since 1992 and in that time nearly 800 officials have successfully participated in the programme.

The government officials study for the first seven weeks at either Nelson Marlborough Institute of Technology or Eastern Institute of Technology and then complete the final thirteen weeks at the English Language Institute. The current theme of study is sustainable economic development.

The programme is managed by Accent Learning, a division of Victoria Link Ltd.

For more information about the programme you can contact Hilary Watson at:

Email address: address

Telephone: +64-4-463 5294

Optimizing a Lexical Approach to Instructed Second Language Acquisition Presentation.

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Frank Boers, presented to LALS staff on Wednesday 7 October 2009. Click here to view the slides from this presentation.

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Events

There are no upcoming events currently scheduled, but you can view past events here.

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