Masterclasses and Themed Sessions

1. Issues in Research Data Management for child language corpora (Ziyin Mai, Carleon Mendoza, Yuqing Liang, Stephen Matthews, and Virginia Yip)

Rationale: The masterclass discusses principles and practice in Research Data Management (RDM), an area in which universities and funding agencies have increasingly high expectations. RDM involves cycles of data collection, processing and storage, sharing and reuse, each of which raises ethical, technical and security issues. The focus is on the construction and management of language corpora, illustrated by corpora documenting the longitudinal development of bilingual and trilingual children in homeland and heritage contexts.

How can speech data and transcripts be processed, stored and archived securely? Principles, practical steps and pitfalls will be illustrated with child language data from a number of longitudinal corpora constructed by the Childhood Bilingualism Research Centre. These corpora consist of transcripts, audio and video recordings of naturalistic speech produced by bilingual children in Hong Kong, heritage Chinese children in the USA as well as monolingual children in Beijing. The sudden outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic prompted us to develop a protocol to collect web-based data following the 3R principle (remotely, reliably and responsibly). We present some data collection and management practices that help ensure the creation and sharing of corpus data in a FAIR way (findable, accessible, interoperable and re-usable) and raise awareness about the importance of managing corpus data efficiently and effectively. We also show how archiving the corpora in the CHILDES repository is an effective way to share data in the spirit of open science.

Audience: The masterclass is intended for students working or planning projects in language acquisition as well as areas such as language documentation.

3. Incorporating Dictogloss into Classroom Practice (Adrian Leis)

Rationale: Originally introduced by Australian linguist Ruth Wajnryb under the title Grammar Dictation (1990, Oxford University Press), dictogloss is a versatile teaching technique that integrates listening, grammar awareness, and collaborative output. It supports the development of a wide range of skills, including listening comprehension, note-taking, teamwork, grammatical knowledge, and inferencing.

This masterclass will begin with a brief speaking task to activate participants' schema and introduce the main topic. The core dictogloss task will follow, involving content prediction, focused listening, group discussion, and text reconstruction, followed by an analysis phase. The second half of the session will explore extensions of the task that promote creativity and further collaboration. The workshop will conclude with a group discussion on ways to adapt dictogloss for various classroom contexts.

Dictogloss offers a communicative, learner-centered approach to language instruction and aligns well with task-based pedagogies. This session will provide participants with firsthand experience of the technique, practical strategies for scaffolding it across proficiency levels, and adaptations for online and self-access learning environments. Emphasis will be placed on usable, classroom-ready tools and ideas.

Audience: This masterclass is aimed at language educators, teacher trainers, curriculum designers, and applied linguistics students. No prior experience with dictogloss is required, though participants with teaching experience will benefit most from the hands-on, reflective approach.

5. De-mystifying BayesVarbrul – Multivariable Statistical Analysis (Xia Hua and Felicity Meakins)

Exchange in ideas between language evolution and biological evolution has a long history, due to a shared theoretical foundation between language and biology as two evolving systems. Both systems evolve in terms of the frequency of a variant in a population for each of a large number of variables, that is how often a particular variant of a language variable is used in a speaker community and how many individuals in a biological population carry a particular variant of a gene. The way these frequencies change has been modelled under a similar mathematical framework. Here, we show how we can use concepts from genome wide association studies that identify the source of natural selection and the genes under selection in a biological population to study how social factors affect the usage of language variables in a speaker community or how some social groups use some language variables differently from other groups. Using the Gurindji Kriol language as a case study, we show how this approach unifies existing mathematical and statistical tools in studying language evolution over a large number of speakers and a large number of language variables, which provides a promising link between micro- and macro-evolution in language. The approach is named BayesVarbrul and is ready to apply to datasets other than the Gurindji Kriol dataset, including existing corpus data. In this masterclass we will show you how to set up a dataset for analysis and implement BayesVarbrul. Knowledge of R and multivariate analysis will be an advantage for this masterclass. The code and the instructions are available at https://github.com/huaxia1985/BayesVarbrul.

References: Hua, Xia. 2022. BayesVarbrul: a unified multidimensional analysis of language change in a speaker community. Journal of Language Evolution 7.40-52.
Meakins, Felicity, Lindell Bromham & Xia Hua. 2024. Depending on gender: The role of Gurindji women in contact-induced language change. Asia-Pacific Language Variation 10.183-208.
Meakins, Felicity, Xia Hua, Cassandra Algy & Lindell Bromham. 2019. The birth of a new language does not favour simplification. Language 95.294-332.

7. Contact Effects without Substance: Inside contact-stimulated lexical and grammatical development (Marianne Mithun, Santa Barbara)

The potential power of contact in shaping language is becoming ever clearer as we learn more about more languages. Though the most immediately obvious effects of language contact are often similar words, it is now recognized that contact effects can reach deeply into lexical and grammatical structure. The precise nature of these effects depends of course on the nature of the contact itself, involving such factors as its intensity and duration, the relative numbers and attitudes of the groups of speakers, the ages at which children are exposed to other languages, and more. Though in some cases the development of contact effects might be traced through philological and historical records, for most they can only be hypothesized on the basis of what is known about the modern languages and relations among speakers. Here some likely trajectories of contact-induced developments on lexical, morphological, syntactic, and discourse structure are discussed and illustrated with examples from languages Indigenous to North America.

1. Linguistics Undergraduate Teaching & Assessment (Lauren Gawne, Jill Vaughan, Izzy Burke, Rosey Billington, Ksenia Gnevsheva, Jess Kruk, and Katie Jepson)

Assessment is the way students demonstrate they have met learning outcomes (Biggs 1996), and therefore assessment design is a major focus in well-designed accredited education. Linguistics provides many opportunities for authentic assessment (Wiggins 1990), but the rise of large language models (LLMs) and other forms of AI are disrupting some long-standing assessment practices and requiring new ways of working. Even beyond AI, the online space has drastically changed how students find and engage with content (Crosslin 2016).

Building on the success of the inaugural Linguistics Undergraduate Teaching workshop in 2024, this session continues the conversation about teaching practice with a focus on assessment. This session focuses on the Australian context, but we invite relevant talks from colleagues teaching internationally as well. We invite 10 minute lightning talks that focus on a specific topic within assessment, ideally showcasing a specific element of effective practice in your program or a specific challenge you are facing.

Abstracts may be on topics including but not limited to the following:

• Authentic assessment of linguistic skills
• Navigating assessment integrity in the era of LLMs and other AI (Forbes & Guest, 2025)
• Student-collected data in linguistics assessment
• Formative and programmatic assessment (Baartman, et al. 2022)
• Engaging students in assessment feedback

3. Lookiiiiiiiiiiing at Stylised Sustained Prosody around Australia (Kathleen Jepson, Rasmus Puggaard-Rode, and John Mansfield)

In many Indigenous Australian languages, a remarkable prosodic pattern has been described, where an extremely long vowel with relatively level pitch is used to iconically signal the extension of an event in time or space (see e.g., Bishop & Fletcher, 2005; Fletcher, 2014; Mailhammer & Caudal, 2019; Simard, 2013; Walsh, 2016). This pattern is mostly found in narratives. From the perspective of prosodic typology this is notable because it is unusual for the form and function of a prosodic pattern to converge in this way across multiple languages. While the phenomenon has been treated in varying degrees of detail in descriptions of Australian languages for decades, there is limited detailed analysis to allow us to understand the extent to which phonetic patterns are truly similar, nor explore the detailed commonalities and differences of semantic functions (cf. Jepson, Puggaard-Rode, & Mansfield, 2024b). We refer to the phenomenon as "stylised sustained prosody" (SSP) to capture the lengthening of the vowel as well as the relatively stable pitch (other terms have included e.g., "narrative high monotone", "stylised sustained high contour", "Linear Lengthening Intonation").

Building on interest in a preliminary typological study of SSP presented at ALS 2024 (Jepson, Puggaard-Rode, & Mansfield, 2024a), this themed session aims to broaden the conversation about this striking pattern, seeking to include perspectives from a variety of linguistic subdisciplines and a wider variety of languages spoken around Australia. The discussion time would provide an opportunity to draw out points of interest across the presentations, contributing to an eventual goal of building a network of collaborators to work on this topic together in a larger typological study.

Abstracts may fit into the following non-limited categories:

• Description of SSP, e.g., impressionistic; acoustic incl. duration-distance/time relationship
• Functions of SSP already described (e.g., a meta-analysis), and beyond
• Comparison of SSP use across narrative genres
• Grammatical restrictions on the use of SSP, e.g., parts of speech; types of verbs
• Typological comparison of an aspect of SSP
• Indigenous perspectives of SSP, e.g., in storytelling practices
• Theoretical perspectives on SSP

5. Reciprocal and Reflexive: relationships between linguists and language communities (Gari Tudor-Smith, Alice Gaby, Tula Wynyard)

This themed session explores relationships between Indigenous language communities and linguists and the ways mutually beneficial partnerships are formed for the goals of both language maintenance/revitalisation and scholarly interest. Long-standing, respectful collaborations exist in some communities, but in others, these relationships are newly developing or unexplored. For language revitalisation in particular, the massive task of accessing and understanding language from archival material is sometimes unfeasible without linguistic support and skills development. Language strengthening programs can be greatly enriched by language teaching pedagogies and applied linguistics, but their implementation is still emerging in many First Nations languages. In recent decades there has been a movement of Indigenous peoples seeking out training in theoretical and practical linguistics skills, in order to build on their language practices. This relationship is two-way: First Nations peoples' skills and ways of knowing are shaping the field of linguistics as well as tailoring linguistic research to align with community goals.

We encourage submissions from Indigenous community language workers, as well as collaborative submissions from academics and Indigenous communities working in partnership.

Questions the session is seeking to address include, but are not limited to:

• How can communities access linguistic and institutional support?
• In what ways can communities benefit from linguistic and institutional support?
• How can universities and organisations better provide practical support to communities who currently are receiving little or no structural support?
• How are communities and universities or organisations working in collaboration for mutual benefit?
• What types of professional development have community members engaged in to broaden their capacity?
• How can linguistic typology help you to understand and interpret historical sources for language revitalisation or strengthen community language programs?
• How are applied linguistics and teaching pedagogies enriching language strengthening programs?
• How can universities and organisations ensure the work they do is empowering to communities and promotes self-determination? i.e. data sovereignty, ethics, Indigenous-led projects and copyright/ICIP
• Linguistics as a discipline has historically been siloed - how can we work to recognise and privilege Indigenous knowledge systems and make connections to other disciplines and beyond academia? i.e. Connections between groups (kinship, political), travel, trade, music, semantics of words.