The Department by the River

Posted on December 9, 2014 by elmava

As mentioned earlier in the Tale of Two Departments, there are two Departments of English here in Turku. Situated as we are on the University Hill, our department is known as the Department Up the Hill, while our Åbo Akademi sister department (right at the brink of the river Aura) is known as the Department by the River.

This year we have been determined to increase cooperation between the two units. Among other things, this means that we encourage our students to complete optional studies in the other department, allowing this way a wider selection of special fields.

On Halloween in October, we hosted a guided tour of the TY campus to the ÅA students and staff. On an exceptionally sunny and bright December afternoon, it was finally our turn to make a counter visit to the Åbo Akademi campus.

It’s Christmas time at the English Department by the River.

The ÅA Department’s intern Annette Byskata and doctoral student Adam Borch greeted us at the entrance hall of the Arken building, where most of the ÅA Humanities’ units are located. They directed us first to the second floor of the building and into the ÅA English Department’s corridor. We got to see where the Department office is located, but also learned that it will be moved soon because of changes in the admin staff. Also, we saw the Department’s three main lecture rooms (Helikon, Kramer and Donner), and sat down at the Kramer hall to meet the staff, hear about their teaching and to learn how to browse the ÅA website.

Our guide, Annette Byskata, at the Arken lobby.

The Head of the Department, Brita Wårvik, welcomed us to the tour and introduced us to the ÅA syllabus. Anthony Johnson, Jason Finch, and Stuart McWilliams gave us more detailed info on the Department’s literature courses. Signe-Anita Lindgrén, the SLA expert of the department, talked about the teacher track of the Department, while Martin Gill discussed the Department’s culture-oriented teaching. Finally, Brita introduced the discourse studies related courses available. During the Q&A with the staff, we discovered practical facts: e.g. that the ÅA term is divided into quarters differently from TY (something to consider when taking their courses!). Also, many of their courses last only one quarter, where as our courses typically last two quarters. These kind of differences may allow flexibility for TY students wanting to complete courses in a schedule different to ours.

The ÅA staff introducing their curriculum.

After meeting the staff, we were ready to continue with our tour. The next pit-stop was the Humanities library on the first floor of Arken. The librarian Maria Lassén-Seger greeted us at the library entrance and talked to us about the library customs and about the history of the building, which was originally a factory. In fact, the first Finnish tractor was built there! Maria took us to see the linguistics and English sections of the library’s collections before sending us off to the next stop of our tour, the Asa building.

Maria Lassén-Seger urges the TY students to use the ÅA libraries, too.

In the Asa building, Annette and Adam first guided us to the IT centre of ÅA on the first floor, humorously named “the Oracle”. Rumour has it that occasionally the helpdesk’s instructions are as ambiguous as the oracle’s advice in a well-written Greek comedy. Finally, we stopped by the course book library in the Asa building, where the students had the possibility to activate their TY library cards for ÅA use.

Warm thanks again to the staff of the Department by the River for inviting us and for organising such a fun and educational tour for us!

Text by Anna Kalpio
Photos by Anna Kalpio & Adam Borch

The TY group ventures from Arken to the Asa building.

How languages are learnt

Posted on September 22, 2014 by elmava

It’s Christmas in September for anyone interested in language learning and teaching! A few years ago, the Department of English was actively involved in a popular course Language Teaching and Learning, which was a team-taught course for language and education majors. We are happy to announce that the contents of this course have now been published as an up-to-date book textbook. This is a textbook in Finnish with a target audience of teachers, students considering a teaching career and anyone generally interested in language learning and teaching.

The new book Kuinka kieltä opitaan: opas vieraan kielen opettajalle ja opiskelijalle (published by Gaudeamus) was edited by Päivi Pietilä and Pekka Lintunen. The authors come from the University of Turku and Helsinki and represent didactics and different language departments.

The chapters discuss the nature of language skills, learners’ individual differences, theories of language learning and methods of language teaching. There are separate chapters on the teaching and learning of grammar, vocabulary and pronunciation of a foreign language. The book also includes a chapter on the role of culture in language teaching and, as a final chapter, an introduction to language assessment.

Turku University and the Department of English have always been active in teacher education and language learning research. Nowadays researchers are also encouraged to publish in Finnish and with a wide target audience in mind. After all, societal interaction is, in addition to research and teaching, a key function of a Finnish university. The new publication is a way to distribute the latest theories and research findings in a reader-friendly format.

The book includes reflective tasks after each chapter to help the readers in their own learning process and a lengthy list of references for the more research-oriented readers. And if September is too early for you, you can always add the book into your Christmas wish list.

Text by Pekka Lintunen
Editors’ photo by Outi Kitti/Gaudeamus.
The book’s co-editors, Pekka Lintunen and Päivi Pietilä.

More Poetry from Our Students

Posted on April 23, 2014 by elmava

Wizard Battle

Inside enchanted magical valley
Dark, narrow, ominous alley
Dastardly, evil, warlock-meeting
Legendary Thor, coming, greeting

Attacking with spells, fantastic blunder
Powerful, brave, controlling thunder
Using lightning, scary, frightening
Boldly fighting, wrongs righting

Calling strong blizzards
Freezing poor wizards
Impervious to pain
Summoning rain
Until Enemies swimming in water
Old Nordic tales, better than Potter

By Harri Jokinen

Poetry from our students

Posted on April 10, 2014 by elmava

This academic year, our (mostly) first-year students have been assigned poetry-writing as a part of the Academic Writing Skills I course, taught by Henno Erikson Parks and Justin Parks (no relation). Our poetry expert and recent PhD, Elina Siltanen, selected some of the poems to be showcased here on the blog for your enjoyment. Well done, aspiring poets!

High, shelved, silent rows, timeworn
Heavy, dusty books, with delicate black letters on solemn pages
Old paper waiting, listening
Careful steps, hushed words, earnest young students
August room breathing beneath a dark ceiling
Columns soaring, serious white busts judging, smiling
In-between shaky ladders, paths to knowledge

By Hanna Yli-Paunu

The path to graduation is paved with… a new curriculum

Posted on March 7, 2014 by elmava

‘OMG it’s happening again’ may have been many a teacher’s first thought last autumn when planning the new MA degree began at the School of Languages and Translation Studies. This is the third curricular reorganization in ten years, and everyone is worried about the time that planning always takes, which is time away from research and teaching, our primary occupations. After dozens of meetings, the principles of the new curriculum were unveiled on 28 February, 2014, to a full house – there were actually not enough seats in the lecture room for everyone interested in the plan. What, then, does this new regime mean for our students? The English Department has an excellent curriculum now, so what will the reform change in the near future?

Not to worry: for the majority of English students, few things will change much. At the end of your BA degree you still choose the Track which you follow in the Department, but you will also choose a Path within the School: either Language Learning, Research, Language Specialist or Translation (the names of the paths may still be modified). Just as before, you select two Track-foundation courses, ideally in your fourth year, and subsequently the methodology course and thesis seminar that match your interests, organized by the Literature, SLA, Discourse or Philological Track. The rest of the Advanced Studies you can fill with courses from your selected Track and Path, the major change from the current system being that you can also choose some courses, projects and book exams offered by teachers from other language departments.

For new translation students the revised MA degree will look quite different though: practically all teaching on translation and interpretation topics will be fitted into a two-year programme, which means you can fully immerse yourself in the world of international communication at the Master’s level and also get to work with teachers and students from other language departments in a multilingual environment.

Overall, it doesn’t look bad, this brave new degree. However, a lot of details will have to be sorted out in the next few weeks. We will provide more information through official channels later this spring, and the New Curriculum will kick in after the summer.
Janne Skaffari

Upcoming event: MA Thesis Symposium

Posted on February 20, 2014 by elmava

11 March, 10-12
Lecture room X

The first MA Thesis Symposium of the English department was organised last year. Six speakers, from different Advanced Studies tracks, gave a ten-minute paper on their pro gradu projects. The audience consisted of students and staff members, and many good questions were answered after the presentations.

The second MA Thesis Symposium will take place on 11 March, 10-12, in Lecture room X. Five speakers from different tracks have been invited to introduce their thesis projects (a more detailed programme will be published later). This is a great opportunity to hear about very different thesis topics and methods, and will no doubt be very useful especially to those students starting their pro gradu project soon. The event also offers a chance for the speakers to practise giving a talk in front of a friendly audience.

Students and staff from all departments are warmly welcome!

Hard Work Made Easy

Posted on February 7, 2014 by elmava

On the last day of January, 2014, a fifty-strong crowd gathered in the Tauno Nurmela auditorium to listen to the defence of Elina Siltanen’s doctoral dissertation “Hard Work? Reciprocal Communication in Contemporary American Experimental Poetry”.

The opponent who discussed the dissertation with Siltanen was professor emeritus Charles Molesworth (Queens College, The City University of New York). An eminent scholar of poetry, he has published The Fierce Embrace: A Study in Contemporary American Poetry, as well as critical books on Marianne Moore, Gary Snyder and Donald Barthelme, and biographies of Alain Locke and, most recently, Countee Cullen (2012). He has also two poetry titles to his name, Common Elegies and Words to That Effect. In the 1970s, he served as a Fulbright Professor in Turku, and the reunion with former colleagues was an amicable one.

In Siltanen’s study, the focus was on the works of three American experimental poets: John Ashbery (born 1927), Lyn Hejinian (1941) and Ron Silliman (1946). A literary critic herself, she proposes – on the basis of the discontinuous and repetitive character of experimental poetry – new ways of reading poetry that do not require clear-cut interpretations nor consistent subjectivity

Siltanen was one of the pioneers in the inter-university scheme Cotutelle, which is an agreement between two universities for a double degree in both universities; in this case the University of Turku and the Luleå University of Technology in Sweden. For the defence, this posed a technological challenge as the event was simultaneously videoed to Luleå, and the Swedish grading committee was present in Turku and took part in the discussion after the opponent.

The respondent was very lucid in her comments to the questions posed to her first by the opponent and then the committee. Afterwards, several audience members commended the discussion for its clarity, and especially the approachability of the introductory lecture by the doctoral candidate (lectio praecursoria) was acclaimed. It made the hard work easier.

It was with satisfaction that I concluded the defence.

Joel Kuortti
custos

“What a long strange trip it’s been”, is a famous exclamation by Jerry Garcia, which the poet Ron Silliman adapted to his poetry. The sentiment might be shared by Elina and her supervisor, Professor Lydia Kokkkola.

Mixing and Switching

Posted on January 7, 2014 by elmava

”Etkö voisi please auttaa tässä?”
”And then she was like, no ei se mitään.”

As language users – speakers, writers, listeners, readers – we are constantly surrounded by linguistic data, and some of the material we observe is bi- or multilingual. The examples above may not be authentic (as in ‘cited from a corpus of genuine conversation’), but they are certainly realistic (as in ‘I think I have heard something like this before, and not just once’). They exemplify code-switching, the use or two languages, dialects, language varieties or, more briefly, codes in a single communicative situation. People who know two or more languages are prone to code-switch on occasion.

The English Department offered a team-taught optional course on code-switching in the second half of the autumn semester, a unique enterprise bringing together eight teachers and researchers from the five tracks of the department. This ensured that the students were offered multiple viewpoints and approaches, ranging from written code-switching in medieval materials to multilingual practices in the EU to translations of postcolonial literature. One of the surprises offered in the lectures was that the use of students’ first language alongside their second or foreign language in the classroom also counts as code-switching, and that there are language classes in the world where the use of the first language is strictly forbidden – a feature not easily grasped by those who have learned English and other languages at Finnish schools.

The course was well received by the nearly forty students who attended the lecture series. The participants were asked to write a variety of short texts about code-switching during the course and also to report on their own multilingual communication and the language-mixing they observed around them. Many said that they had not realized until this semester that code-switching was so frequent and had so many functions, and that it was such a huge issue that the six weeks of teaching were not nearly enough for a thorough survey. Indeed, several students have already chosen code-switching topics for their BA projects to be able to carry on with koodinvaihto research.

Janne Skaffari

EnglanTY

What the dickens is happening at the Department of English, Turku University

Category Archives: Studies