L2 interactional fluency across contexts (ILFACT) is a research project focused on second language (L2) fluency in interactive settings. The project is conducted by members of the FlowLang research group and is funded by the Research Council of Finland (2024–2028). The project aims to provide information about interactional fluency and the factors that affect it, which can help to develop methods for assessing fluency in interactional contexts.
Data collection visit to Germany
Data collection for this project started in Finland earlier this year and continued in May with a visit to Marburg, Germany, where we collected the other half of the data for this project. The data were collected on three consecutive days by the PI Pauliina Peltonen, project researcher Saara Naapila, and a local doctoral researcher, Carmen Kraft, at Philipps University Marburg. The data collection was a success, thanks to our collaborators who hosted us and assisted us in collecting the data. The help of the project’s German collaborator, Professor Sandra Götz, in particular, was invaluable in making the data collection possible. We are also grateful to the local students and their teachers, Victoria Gath and Aoife Holmes-Rein, who volunteered their time to contribute to this project.
The data collection in Marburg was made possible with the help of our collaborator, Professor Sandra Götz (on the left).
Support from the Research Council of Finland allowed Pauliina Peltonen to stay in Germany for four weeks not only to oversee and complete the data collection, but also to visit another project collaborator, Dr. Loulou Kosmala, and to give a guest lecture on social approaches to language learning at Philipps University Marburg.
Pauliina Peltonen giving the guest lecture at Philipps University Marburg.
Researching interactional fluency
The data for the ILFACT project consists of interactional speech samples collected from advanced learners of English in Finland and Germany. The students complete two tasks in pairs in their first language (L1) and in their L2, English. One of the tasks is a problem-solving task where the goal is to reach an agreement on the order of importance of certain items and to solve a problem through discussion. The other task is a topic-based discussion, where the students can freely discuss a topic that they are given.
These interactions are audio and video recorded, and the data are analyzed with a multimodal mixed-methods approach. Due to the multimodal nature of the data, the impact of visual cues on interactional fluency, such as facial expressions and gestures, can be analyzed in addition to more traditional spoken features of (dis)fluency, such as pauses.
The focus on interactional fluency in the project provides a new perspective to L2 fluency research. Fluency is an important part of L2 proficiency, and fluency research has often focused on individuals’ fluency from the perspectives of learning, teaching, and assessment. However, there is little research on interactional fluency, even though everyday language use is often interactive in nature.
Going forward
The project will continue with analysis of the data that has been collected. In a later stage of the project, the data will also be used to analyze perceived fluency with the help of fluency assessments, also collected from advanced learners of English. This part of the project aims to increase understanding of the factors that influence the assessment of interactional fluency, especially with respect to the speaker’s personal speaking style and multimodality.
Overall, the project contributes to research on L2 fluency, the assessment of language skills, and L2 teaching. The results of the project can, therefore, be used to support the development of L2 teaching methods. The project also produces important information on the assessment of language skills, which can be used to develop more reliable and equitable assessment practices.
As part of my postdoctoral research period in the Research Council of Finland funded project Fluency and Disfluency Features in L2 Speech (FDF2; 2020–2024, PI Pekka Lintunen), I spent six months as a visiting researcher at Philipps University Marburg in Germany during January–June 2023. The main purpose of this research visit was to facilitate collaboration with a member of the project’s international advisory board, Professor Sandra Götz.
It’s all about collaboration
My six months in Germany ended up, indeed, facilitating the collaboration with Prof. Götz in various ways. I appreciated the opportunity to discuss various research-related and other matters with her in our weekly meetings. Working in adjacent offices also allowed us to deepen and extend our existing collaboration, notably on a study addressing the speaking style and task mode effects on L2 speech fluency. I am also grateful to Prof. Götz and the Department of English and American Studies for making it possible to invite one of our collaborators, Dr. Loulou Kosmala from Université Paris Nanterre, for a short visit to Marburg. Her visit greatly facilitated the progress of our collaborative work on the links between fluency and gesture, which is based on the interactional data collected in the FDF2 project. Our pilot study has been published as part of the DiSS workshop 2023 proceedings. My research stay in Marburg, therefore, not only facilitated the collaboration with German colleagues, but also brought me closer to my other central European colleagues, including Dr. Kosmala.
Happy hosts (me and Prof. Götz on the left) and our visitor, Dr. Kosmala (on the right)
Getting to know the department
While working at the Department of English and American Studies, I had the privilege to get to know the department’s wonderful staff. I familiarized myself with the research done in the department by participating in their Linguistics colloquium research meetings and got to present our FDF2 project to the group. During lunches and other casual meetings, I learned that one of my colleagues, Aoife Holmes-Rein, hosts a podcast called Grandiose Grammar, including 45 episodes (and counting!) on various aspects of English Grammar.
During my stay in Marburg, I also got to witness the beginning of a great new practice facilitating casual encounters among the department’s students and staff, namely the Language lovers’ lunch club (3LC), launched by Holmes-Rein, Kathrin Kircili and Prof. Götz. The department has an Instagram account (@iaa_marburg) where they post about the lunch meetings and other activities at the department.
In the first 3LC meeting, the topic was language change and lexical innovation. Finnish “sisu” mentioned!
Teaching benefits research
While my visit was focused on research, I was happy to get the chance to give some guest lectures as well. I talked about social approaches to language learning on a course focusing on linguistic theory and the history of linguistic ideas. In addition, I gave fluency-themed talks on two different courses: one focused on spoken English and another focused on English as a foreign language. The participants on the latter course were future teachers of English, so we focused especially on the teaching of speech fluency. Getting to reflect on these topics with various groups of students gave a lot of food for thought also for my own research. I am grateful to all students in Marburg who attended these classes and to Prof. Götz and my dear “roommate” at Marburg, Kathrin Kircili, who kindly gave me the chance to join their courses as a visiting lecturer.
Other activities
A lot of my spare time during the visit was spent exploring my hometown, Marburg, as well as the cities nearby. To make the most of the central European rail network, I travelled both within Germany (for instance to Cologne, Hamburg, and Berlin) and to neighboring countries (France). In addition to these non-work-related trips, I also travelled outside Europe during my stay to participate in the annual conference for the American Association for Applied Linguisticsin Portland, Oregon. At the conference, I presented preliminary findings on the effects of L1 speaking style and task mode on L2 fluency and got to meet colleagues especially from outside Europe.
The Old Town of Marburg.
All in all, the six months I spent in Marburg were really enjoyable and rewarding, both from personal and professional perspectives. I learned a lot during my stay. I know that our collaboration will continue at least remotely, but I hope I can return to Marburg for another visit sometime in the future.
Thank you to Prof. Sandra Götz, the Department of English and American Studies at Philipps University Marburg and the Research Council of Finland for making this visit possible.
Text by Pauliina Peltonen
First photo by Sandra Götz, second and third photos by Pauliina Peltonen
Switzerland. The home of cheese, chocolate, the Alps… and a bustling English Department at the University of Zurich with an overwhelmingly well-stocked library that I could have lived in for the entirety of my four-week stay and I still wouldn’t have even scratched the surface, and a staff that welcomed me with open arms?
As it turned out, yes.
After two years of part-time PhD work, the stars finally aligned and as funding was secured, the distant dream of a research visit to the home Department of one of my supervisors came to fruition. I arrived in Zurich in late April and was immediately met with extreme kindness and willingness to help with anything and everything from everyone I met at my host Department.
A view of the Limmat river from Lindenhof, the former site of a Roman fort and, later, Charlemagne’s grandson’s palace.
My weeks were spent with my nose firmly planted in both primary and secondary sources of my dissertation as well as discussing my research with my supervisor and getting to know some of the rest of the staff more closely. I also had a chance to present my research at one of the Department’s Lunch Talks, where the audience enjoys their lunch while listening to presentations.
The rooftops and church towers of Zurich.
The weekends were for exploring. I wandered the streets of the medieval Altstadt (Old Town) and visited its various churches, including the Fraumünster, the founding charter of which is from 853 and on display in the church’s crypt (not going to lie, this was maybe the most exciting single thing I encountered). I explored the National Museum, the Kunsthaus (art museum), and paleontological and archeological museums, as well as the local zoo. Venturing south, I visited the town of Rapperswil to get a better view of the Alps. Fun fact: Rapperswil is home to the longest wooden bridge in Switzerland!
Lake Zürich, the Rapperswil-Hurden wooden bridge, and the Alps in the distance.
Another fun fact: If you decide to cross Lake Zürich via said bridge and take the train back to Zurich from the other side, once the wooden bridge ends after 841 meters, you are actually nowhere near the closest train station and you might find yourself walking for 5 kilometers in 23 degree heat, growing increasingly desperate and losing hope of ever reaching your destination with each step.
Against all odds, I survived to tell the tale.
All in all, I enjoyed my visit immensely. In addition to achieving all of my academic goals, I became a huge fan of Swiss bakery culture and the efficiency of public transport, expanded my knowledge of Swiss chocolate brands, and discovered that melted cheese, mashed potatoes and pickled onions make a delicious combination.
I would like to thank the English Department of the University of Zurich and the Kone Foundation for making this visit possible.
When the staff of the English Department have just moved into their brand-new premises in the newly renovated Arcanum building on the University’s lower campus at the beginning of 2023, this may be a convenient moment to take a brief look at the previous oases on the itinerary of the departmental caravan from its beginnings to the present day. There have been altogether five stops on the way to Arcanum.
Taking the founding of the chair for English Philology in 1945 as the date of the founding of the Department, it was first located, together with the entire academic community of the new Finnish-speaking university of Turku, in the premises of the old Hotel Phoenix, a colossal late nineteenth-century building on the market square. Phoenix itself no longer exists, for it was demolished 1959.
The building Phoenix in springtime in mid-1950s (photo from the Central Archives of the University of Turku)
Any available space for the departments in the building, originally designed for an entirely different purpose, must have been very limited, for the many functions of the new establishment, including teaching, administration and library, were housed under the same roof. As a result, there was a pressing need for expansion.
In the next phase, the University makes a move closer to the location of the old Academia Aboensis (1640) around the Cathedral. The oldest of the modern buildings on the current University hill date back to the 1950s. The Library was completed 1954 and the Main building 1958. From the mid-fifties until the mid-seventies, the English Department had its own library in three of the seminar rooms on the top floor of the Library building, within the space of present Feeniks library. In addition, there may have been some temporary space available for office hours, and the like, on the second floor of the Main building until the early 1960s.
Along with the increasing numbers of students and staff in the English Department during the 1960s, there was an acute need for more office space. At this point in the mid-1960s, the premises in Hämeenkatu 1, previously occupied by the Department of Dentistry, became available when a new building for dentistry was completed in Lemminkäisenkatu 2 in 1965.
The premises in Hämeenkatu 1 consisted of one long corridor with a number of rather small rooms on either side, originally designed for the needs of dental practices. The rooms were shared between several humanities departments, including history and philosophy. English had four rooms. One of them was the department office, and another was reserved for a visiting Fulbright professor. The other two were mostly used for office hours and consultation. Working at (and from) home was very much the norm for the staff at the time, and any joint meetings of staff and students were held elsewhere on campus.
Many of the long-standing problems of inadequate facilities and insufficient working and teaching space were resolved when a whole new building was constructed for the Humanities in Henrikinkatu 2 in 1975. The H-shaped building was originally called Humaniora II, Humaniora I having been Fennicum in Henrikinkatu 3, completed 1969. Humaniora II was renamed Juslenia, and it became a home for the Department until 2012. For the first time, most of the Indo-European language departments came to be in the same building, together with several other humanities subjects from archaeology and history to literature and cultural studies.
Having individual offices for the members of staff was one of the highly appreciated innovations of Juslenia. Also, having several teaching rooms close by in the same corridor was another welcome novelty we had not experienced earlier. Similarly, there was an easy access to the seminar library on the same floor as the Department. Yet another big change was the much-needed social space for the staff in the form of a coffee-room. With its iconic round table, this new facility had a lasting and enormously important positive impact on our social and academic interaction.
Over the years, with our initial enthusiasm gradually waning, we became more and more aware of the shortcomings of the building. Many of these had their origin in the stark contrast between the original design of the building and its practical realisation. As a result of an economic setback coinciding with the building project, the University was unable to carry out the construction, as originally envisaged. Among other things, one entire floor, containing a cafeteria/restaurant, had to be deleted from the plan altogether. Also, the surface area of each of the remaining floors had to be drastically reduced. Consequences of such dysfunctional adjustments could not pass unnoticed. They would be apparent, for example, in an awkward organization of the space, just as well as the crudish design of the interior and the limitations of available facilities. In the end, the pros for tearing down the entire building outweighed the cons for repairing it.
Still, in spite of its unevenness and roughness, Juslenia always brings to mind happy and pleasant memories, probably because we stayed there for such a long time, close to forty years. The final fall of Juslenia was complete in 2019, but in the Department, we had already lived through the upcoming loss by ceremonially cutting a gingerbread replica of the building into pieces of cookies at a Christmas party before leaving the building.
Gingerbread Juslenia (photo by Mari-Liisa Varila)
Our penultimate stop before Arcanum takes us to Rosetta and its sister-building Signum, both charming old buildings from the turn of the twentieth century. After the property had become part of the University, it was renovated on several occasions for different purposes, most recently for housing the departments of English, French and German translation. Both buildings had offices and teaching rooms, and a joint library of the translation departments in Signum. After the merger of the translation departments with the respective philologies in 2010, the latter, with English among them, moved into Rosetta/Signum a couple of years after. All departments moved out of these premises by the end of 2022.
There are many positive things to be said about Rosetta/Signum as a workplace. First and foremost, there was an atmosphere of a handsome old building about them, which was very nice. The staff rooms varied in size, but were on the whole quite comfortable, and much the same can be said about the teaching rooms. There was also a joint common room for those working in the building. My impression is that colleagues were generally quite pleased with the place and what it had to offer.
One aspect of the Rosetta building that was sometimes criticised had to do with the interior of its architecture, especially the number of doors everywhere. With the offices aligned along both sides of the numerous corridors with separating doors at both ends made the building a bit like a labyrinth, where students and visitors might have had difficulties finding their way around.
Aerial view of Rosetta and Signum (behind). Photo by Hanna Oksanen, copyright University of Turku Communications
Finally, we’ll get to Arcanum. From what I have seen so far, the building is superior to all the earlier ones in a number of ways. It is not only a modern building to begin with, but one that has been very recently renovated and refurbished completely for the needs of its users. Everything is conveniently accessible and close at hand. The teaching rooms are pleasant and spacious with excellent, up-to-date facilities. Another truly great improvement is the fact that all departments of the current Faculty of Humanities are for the first time in the very same building. This is a tremendous asset for the spirit of cross-disciplinary interaction and cooperation and will, no doubt, amply prove its worth in the years to come.
Arcanum in winter. Photo by Suvi Harvisalo, copyright University of Turku Communications
It has sometimes been said that the walls are less important in Academia; it’s more important what goes on within the walls. This is true, of course, but only up to a point. The splendid premises of Arcanum rather indicate a very close interaction between the outside and inside. When the walls are constructed in harmony with the wishes, efforts and needs of the people inside, they connect rather than separate. It is a great joy to see that our long journey from Phoenix has been brought to such a happy close in Arcanum.
P.S. I am grateful to Teppo Jakonen and Janne Skaffari for their help in the preparation of this contribution. Teppo very kindly assisted in finding the photographic illustrations.
This autumn, the School of Languages and Translation Studies has had a visitor from the University of Namibia (UNAM), Dr Meameno Shiweda, who is a specialist in teacher education. In this blog post, Meameno and Janne Skaffari talk about similarities and differences in what and whom they teach and, more broadly, in the educational systems of our two countries.
Janne: How does one become an English teacher in Namibia?
Meameno: Anyone with an interest in teaching English can enrol in a teacher training program for junior/senior primary or junior/senior secondary levels, provided that they have good grades in five subjects, and a minimum of a C grade in English at Namibia Senior Secondary Certificate. A minimum C grade in another language is also a requirement. C is roughly the same as cum laude or magna in your matriculation exam.
J: It is quite different from Finland, where you apply to study English as your major or minor at university, and teacher training is basically a minor subject that corresponds to one year’s work. It is often completed as part of the MA degree. This route is for secondary-school English teachers, but for primary schools, you do not necessarily need more than a primary-school teacher’s university degree in Education. When does English begin in your program? Our majors do English Department courses from the first semester on.
M: Throughout their four years of teacher training, our students receive a mix of English modules and teaching-methods training. English majors also commence from the first semester onwards, and they are taught by English subject specialists from various departments in the School of Education. The first year begins with phonetics, phonology and children’s literature, and in the second year they focus on speaking and youth literature. The third year is reading and writing, while the fourth and final year is adult literature and grammar.
J: Oh, grammar comes that late! What kinds of observations have you made about teaching and studying during your visit?
M: The length of time a student studies English before having to determine whether or not they want to become English instructors is an important observation I have made here. Additionally, I have learned that prospective teacher-training students are interviewed to gauge their level of preparedness for the teaching profession, as opposed to our practice at UNAM.
J: We think it is important that students have time to become familiar with their major and minor subjects at the BA stage and then focus more on a particular career during MA studies.
M: I’ve learned from my experiences here and from talking to colleagues that getting extensive English training before concentrating on a teaching job is more realistic.
J: Yes, we really hope it helps! Students also get to see that there are other career opportunities.
M & J: We wish all our students – in Namibia and Finland – good luck with their studies and future careers!
The bleak midwinter is approaching, so isn’t a throwback to last spring a wonderful idea? At the end of April, I left Turku to spend a month in the north-east of England. I had visited Durham for two days in 2015, transcribing little bits of English surviving in some Latin manuscripts, and written in my notes: “I’d like to come back”. This became possible when I got a library fellowship from the Durham University Institute of Medieval and Early Modern Studies.
This was definitely an intense work trip,
but I did have time to explore the city as well. Although Durham is small, with
a population of about 50,000, it bears many similarities to a city the readers
of this blog know well: there is a large medieval cathedral, a river and a
castle, and a disproportionately large number of students. Durham is full of
instagrammable spots, and getting to know the pathways and shortcuts particularly
around Palace Green Library, located between the cathedral and the castle, was
an absolute pleasure.
Durham University is one of the oldest in the UK and ranks among the top 100 universities in the world. It has about 18,000 students. Since it was Easter term – reserved for examinations – they seemed to spend most of their time reading in libraries. As I resided in college, I was able to make other observations about undergraduate life, too. It is quite different from Finland, particularly as college accommodation means you spend a lot more time together with the other students, starting with breakfast each morning. There was a pleasant sense of community, which I hope the students appreciated.
In addition to doing research and enjoying life
in a beautiful old town, I was also able to make weekend trips to cities like
Newcastle and Manchester and to smaller places such as Bishop Auckland and
Tynemouth. A particular highlight was Hadrian’s Wall, which runs across the
north of England. Having spent hours and hours examining 800-year-old
manuscripts indoors, a bit of more ancient history out in the country towards
the end of my trip was, quite literally, a breath of fresh air.
I would like to thank Durham University,
IMEMS and the Library Fellowship for making this trip possible.
Text and photos by Janne Skaffari
More pictures on Instagram; look for captions mentioning a certain ‘Dr X’.
This spring has been very memorable, as I have had the pleasure of being a Visiting Professor in Kalisz, Poland. A visiting professor can refer to various kinds of things in the academic world. In this case, I was invited to the Faculty of Pedagogy and Fine Arts of the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań. This Faculty is located in Kalisz and educates, among others, students of English and pedagogy whose career goal is to become a teacher of English.
The fascinating thing about Kalisz is that it is considered the oldest city in Poland. Coming from the oldest city in Finland, this gave me a nice opening to all my meetings with the students. Due to my work responsibilities in Turku, I was not able to stay in Kalisz for longer periods at once. Instead, my teaching was intense: 6-8 hours of teaching while I was there. I led a workshop on Teaching and Learning Spoken English for third year students and a Workshop on Effective Learning for three first year groups of students. In addition, I met many members of staff for informal discussions on the Finnish education system and our shared research interests. I was lucky to visit Kalisz, as second language acquisition is a prominent research field at their Faculty.
My visit was part of their University of the Future programme that is funded by the EU. As part of this project, they invite international scholars to educate their students. Compared to Finnish students, the Polish students I met were mostly one step more shy and one step more insecure about their English skills, but fortunately I am familiar with both of these emotions. Much of my time was spent on convincing that making mistakes in a foreign language is ok and I thought that their English was very good. One first year student said that I was the first foreign person he had ever used English with (as they do not have native speakers as teachers). The students were very concerned with their grammar and pronunciation skills. Poznań is famous for their intense pronunciation teaching, as they spend two years on pronunciation skills. It was interesting that the materials they use are mostly the same as we have used at our university.
Towards the end, the students started to feel more relaxed with me. During our final meeting, when students presented their own projects, they even tested my pronunciation skills. I had to pronounce, for instance, trzy, wszystkiego, źdźbło and Szczebrzeszyn – and I did! I also got to discuss Kimi Räikkönen’s career, Finnish heavy metal music scene, and the lyrics to “Ievan polkka” (one student had learnt to sing it in Finnish earlier but did not understand what it meant). The most difficult question in my final exam was “Describe why you are a good learner of English”. Local teachers told me that traditionally Polish people like to focus more on what they do not know – another thing that I understand well coming from the Finnish setting. I look back on my time in Poland with fond memories.
One might assume that literature research would not necessitate fieldwork, but sometimes it is useful to those of us working with such esoteric topics as contemporary US poetry as well. In early May, I visited the State University of New York at Buffalo, and particularly their library’s Poetry Collection, in search of more materials for my research project, Difficult Relations: Reading for Emotion in Recent American Experimental Poetry.
SUNY-Buffalo, or UB as the locals like to call it, hosts the Poetry Collection, “the library of record for 20th- and 21st-century poetry in English”. The collection, started by Charles Abbott in 1937, is hidden away from the public in closed stacks, so visitors desiring to peruse books have to give a list to the staff, and they will pull it out for use in the library’s reading room. Like in many archives and special collections, use of the materials requires care, and only computers or pencils can be used for note-taking. Photographs are not allowed without special permission.
The reading room is a large hall, guarded over by a portrait of James Joyce. Incidentally, the UB Poetry Collection is also home to the world’s largest collection of Joyce-related materials, like first editions, correspondence, notebooks and photographs. Oscar Silverman, who worked at UB, had visited a Joyce exhibition in Paris in 1949 and got the idea to bring the collection to UB. Joyce is a pervasive presence in the Poetry Collection reading room, watching over it all like a grandfather of modern English literature that he is.
My 10 day visit to Buffalo was a handy one-stop method for browsing through many important works published in the last 15 years or so. Many of these were published in limited editions or are otherwise difficult to find from overseas. While I order what I can from online stores, it was very useful to have it all at my disposal at once. It also allowed me to observe the sheer materiality of recent poetry works, viewing as I did items ranging from large anthologies and collections to thin and plain chapbooks and even little cards on which poems had been printed. In a tangible way, it brought the liveliness of contemporary poetry culture into view.
UB is also home to a fairly substantial population of Canada geese, one of which is pictured here. Text and photo by Elina Siltanen
The International Conference on English Historical Linguistics (ICEHL) was organised for the 20th time in Edinburgh on 27–30 August. The conference gathers together English scholars from around the world, studying English from Old to Late Modern.
Almost all of our researchers from the Philological Track made it to ICEHL. Matti Peikola, Mari-Liisa Varila, Hanna Salmi (currently at the University of Stockholm), Aino Liira, and Sirkku Ruokkeinen gave papers in the workshop “Paratextual Communication in a Historical Linguistic Perspective”, organised by Matti Peikola and Birte Bös (University of Duisburg-Essen). Matti Peikola and Peter Grund (University of Kansas) presented a paper on orthographical variation together with Johanna Rastas. Aleksi Mäkilähde gave a paper on the metatheory of pragmaphilology. Susanna Mäkinen gave a paper on references to fugitives in runaway slave notices. I gave a paper on the different translations of The Mirror of Alchemy. We were a busy lot!
This was my first ICEHL, but I hope it won’t be the last. The conference was packed astonishingly full of great papers and interesting discussions; the programme can be found here. I have never been to a conference with so many excellent papers on fascinating topics that were relevant for my own research. I was especially excited by papers on topics such as medieval Latin-English code-switching, spelling variation and standardisation in the early modern period, and multilingualism in late modern medical discourse.
Despite the busy academic programme, there was also time for social events. The conference ceilidh on Tuesday 28 August was especially memorable: it was wonderful to dance and to watch a crowd of other scholars skipping merrily along to the live traditional music. Lots of us also found time to climb up to Arthur’s Seat, the majestic hill right next to the conference location.
ICEHL also involved a final day of activities on Friday 31st August. Most of us Turku philologists – unsurprisingly – chose to go to Lindisfarne, the monastic Holy Island where the Anglo-Saxon Lindisfarne Gospels were produced. The weather was astoundingly warm and sunny; we had a glorious day trip filled with island beauty, the island’s old history, and clean sea wind. It was a fitting and excellent ending to a week’s worth of English historical linguistics.
If you trust Wikipedia, fieldwork refers to “the collection of information outside a laboratory, library or workplace setting”. However, philological ‘fieldwork’ often takes place within a library – but instead of reading secondary literature, we examine primary materials. I’m currently a visiting scholar at Queen Mary University of London. During my stay here, I work on 16th-century manuscripts and printed books in the British Library.
Although early materials are increasingly accessible in digital form, and many early texts are made available in editions, not all research questions can be asked of these substitutes. Codicological, palaeographical, and bibliographical research methods entail close examination of books and texts as material objects. Analysing the physical construction of a book or the scribal hands present in a manuscript, for example, may also provide crucial evidence for studying the contents of a book.
To access special collections, one usually needs to register as a reader (instructions can be found on library websites). After registering, you can then order items to study them in reading rooms. You can bring your laptop, notes, and pencils, but nothing that might damage the books such as pens or sharp implements. White gloves, although sometimes seen on TV, may also cause damage to the books. They are thus generally not used in professional libraries. Clean, dry, and careful hands are the better option!
The University of Turku library also holds early materials. Last spring, students taking the Book History course organised by the Departments of English and European and World History had the chance to try their hand at being book detectives. My small group studied a selection of incunabula (books printed before 1501), practising the specialised skill of writing bibliographical descriptions of early books. Here they are at work!
