Una Cunningham
Stockholm University, Department of Language Education, Faculty Member
- University of Canterbury/Te Whare Wānanga o Waitaha, Education, Faculty MemberUniversity of Canterbury/Te Whare Wānanga o Waitaha, Educational Studies and Leadership, Department Memberadd
- Multi- & Bilingualism & Biliteracy, Applied Linguistics, Sociolinguistics, Second Language Acquisition, Pronunciation, Phonetics, and 12 moreTeaching English as a Second Language, Computer Assisted Language Learning, Teacher Education in Teaching English to Speakers of Second/Foreign Languages (TESOL), Educational Technology, Education, E-learning, Teacher Education, Second Language Teacher Education, Teaching English As A Foreign Language, Languages and Linguistics, Language Attitudes, and English As a Second Language (ESL)edit
- Please see my University profile page https://www.su.se/english/profiles/ucunn-1.188989edit
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Research Interests: Psychology and Routledge
Research set in New Zealand, where English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) is recognised as a priority for equitable inclusion, suggests that ESOL teachers find digital inclusion for migrant and refugee students in secondary... more
Research set in New Zealand, where English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) is recognised as a priority for equitable inclusion, suggests that ESOL teachers find digital inclusion for migrant and refugee students in secondary schools challenging, requiring teacher initiative and energy. The challenges and complexities of these contexts are presented with an analysis of a case of one ESOLteacher, classified as an innovator using Rogers (2003) adoption of innovations categories. This anal-ysis is set within Davis’ (2018) Arena framework of the co-evolution of education and digital technolo-gies to identify the digital tools used to support migrant and refugee students’ learning and teachingand related challenges. This case study illustrates the challenges faced by one ESOL teacher whochose to use technology in his context. The most important finding of this study is that in ESOL con-texts digital tools can support teachers to individualise their teaching to increase inclusion, equity,and access in secondary schools. However, this is only possible with great effort from the teachersand support from their schools and communities
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Aim: to bring to light the factors affecting parents’ and children’s language choices and practice
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SwePub titelinformation: Does English-medium schooling affect the Swedish spoken by Swedish students?
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'Linguistic landscapes' is the term used to describe all the visible language in signs and displays seen in particular areas such as a local street and, more recently, educational spaces (Gorter, 2017; Landry and Bourhis, 1997)
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A university set on a beautiful spacious landscape had little need for e-learning until it was stimulated by crises to become more innovative. This case study research provides a rich picture of rapid adoption of social media and... more
A university set on a beautiful spacious landscape had little need for e-learning until it was stimulated by crises to become more innovative. This case study research provides a rich picture of rapid adoption of social media and e-learning as the ‘tide’ of e-learning rose in waves, both rising and falling as changing needs were addressed over five years (2010-2015). The overarching research question was: How has the University changed with e-learning in the wake of seismic activities? The co-evolution of digital technologies and education in this ‘late adopter’ (Rogers, 2003) university is linked with organisational development. Social media does support communication of organisational responses to crises, including increased adoption of e-learning. This paper shows there is a place for social media alongside e-learning tools and that their combined use also fosters resilience for students and academic staff (Dabner, 2012; Mackey, Gilmore, Dabner, Breeze & Buckley (2012). This case...
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Research Interests: Linguistics and Medicine
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This paper investigates the effects of learner training for CALL general use tools on students whose digital literacy is lower than that assumed by the New Zealand university system they are prepar ...
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This study examines what happens when online and campus students participate in real time in the same campus classroom. Before this study, postgraduate students studying online in a course intended primarily as professional development... more
This study examines what happens when online and campus students participate in real time in the same campus classroom. Before this study, postgraduate students studying online in a course intended primarily as professional development for language educators were taking the course through reading the course literature including assigned articles, writing reflective texts in the asynchronous forum and doing the course assignments. They had a very different experience than the campus students who met weekly for discussion of the reading. Some online students were not active enough in the course, and showed low levels of engagement. The online students were invited to participate in scheduled campus classes via Skype on iPads. After some hesitation, four of the six online students took up this real-time participation option. Initial difficulties with the technology were addressed after seeking input from campus and online students. A series of adjustments were made and evaluated, inclu...
Research Interests: Psychology, Distance Education, Mathematics Education, Activity Theory, Computer Mediated Communication, and 15 moreOnline and Distance Education, Beliefs, Blended Learning, Distance Learning, Classroom Interaction, Blended learning in higher education, Online Education and Social Presence, Othering Process, Distance, Asynchronous Communication, Education Systems, Laptop, How to Use Skype as a Learning Tool, Expectation, and Open Distance Learning
This paper presents an online course devised to meet the needs of Swedish primary school teachers who need to teach English to their pupils despite not having studied the language themselves more than minimally at tertiary level. Over a... more
This paper presents an online course devised to meet the needs of Swedish primary school teachers who need to teach English to their pupils despite not having studied the language themselves more than minimally at tertiary level. Over a hundred teachers took the course as an online summer course. The course was on the learning and teaching of English pronunciation and grammar. Since Swedish primary school teachers often have significant Swedish accents and many cannot write a text in English without a number of characteristic grammatical errors, the course was designed to focus on a limited number of features of English grammar and pronunciation that are both frequently difficult for Swedish speakers and particularly salient, in addition to introducing the teachers to general principles of language education. Because the teachers were not all in Sweden at the time, it was deemed desirable to minimize the real-time interaction needed for the course. This produces particular challenges for the teaching of pronunciation. Ten strategies for teaching English pronunciation online at tertiary level were implemented. This paper reports the process of identifying the most prominent non-native features of each teacher’s pronunciation and working intensively to improve their pronunciation for these features. The strategies are presented and their effect on and reception by the teachers is accounted for with reference to previous research in the teaching and learning of pronunciation and in online learning. The lessons drawn from the first iteration of the course and how these have informed the upcoming second iteration are discussed.
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This paper provides an overview of the main findings from a European-wide on-line survey of English pronunciation teaching practices. Both quantitative and qualitative data from seven countries (Finland, France, Germany, Macedonia,... more
This paper provides an overview of the main findings from a European-wide on-line survey of English pronunciation teaching practices. Both quantitative and qualitative data from seven countries (Finland, France, Germany, Macedonia, Poland, Spain and Switzerland) are presented, focusing on teachers' comments about: ● their own pronunciation, ● their training, ● their learners’ goals, skills, motivation and aspirations, ● their preferences for certain varieties (and their perception of their students' preferences). The results of EPTiES reveal interesting phenomena across Europe, despite shortcomings in terms of construction and distribution. For example, most respondents are non-native speakers of English and the majority of them rate their own mastery of English pronunciation favourably. However, most feel they had little or no training in how to teach pronunciation, which begs the question of how teachers are coping with this key aspect of language teaching. In relation to ...
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This paper presents a case study of one College of Business (College of Business and Law from 2013) impacted in 2011 by earthquakes in New Zealand. Analyses from interviews of nine staff and documents were used to describe processes of... more
This paper presents a case study of one College of Business (College of Business and Law from 2013) impacted in 2011 by earthquakes in New Zealand. Analyses from interviews of nine staff and documents were used to describe processes of increasing resilience with e-learning over the worst seismic events. Increasing deployment of the University’s learning management system by staff and students plus audio recordings and video recordings of lectures enabled the College to continue its teaching. The Technology Acceptance Model and the generic model of organisational resilience by Resilient Organisations informed the analysis of the adoption and adaptation of e-learning than continued after the crises in the university.
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The aim of this paper is to bring theoretical concepts from other areas of scholarly research to bear on synchronous online education in a cross-disciplinary effort to shed light on what is going on by introducing systems of thought from... more
The aim of this paper is to bring theoretical concepts from other areas of scholarly research to bear on synchronous online education in a cross-disciplinary effort to shed light on what is going on by introducing systems of thought from other areas. The liminality and associated communitas which are found in synchronous online learning environments are examined for their possible consequences for learning in general and language learning in particular. Like computer-mediated communication, liminality has been associated with disinhibitory effects. Lack of excessive inhibition has been shown to have positive effects on second language production. The position of the online learner as “neither here nor there” or perhaps simultaneously both here and there is investigated and discussed.
Research Interests: Computer Science, Human Computer Interaction, Instructional Design, Educational Technology, Distance Education, and 15 moreHigher Education, Instructional Technology, Hybridization, Computer Mediated Communication, Distance Learning, Hypertext, CMC, Education Systems, Dislocation, Hyperlink, Educational Virtual Environments, Disinhibition, Cultural Intersectionality, Internet, and E Learning
On the nature of foreign accents Cunningham-Andersson, U. and Engstrand, O.
This study aims to pin down some of the pho-netic variation and oddities associated with Northern Ireland English (NIE) in general and the English of rural southwest Tyrone (ERST) in particular, Vowel quality and vowel quantity... more
This study aims to pin down some of the pho-netic variation and oddities associated with Northern Ireland English (NIE) in general and the English of rural southwest Tyrone (ERST) in particular, Vowel quality and vowel quantity relationships are crucial here. ERST may have short or long vowels, depending on factors that are not phonologically interesting in other va-rieties of English. Vowel shifts from Middle English are only partly carried through, lead-ing to sociophonetic variation. Northern Ireland English The Northern Irish English (NIE) accent is quite distinctive in many ways. It is an accent
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Introduction The current study is in preparation for a larger study of the language proficiency of students in English-medium schooling, which investigates, among other things, students' loss and gain in Swedish and English. The... more
Introduction The current study is in preparation for a larger study of the language proficiency of students in English-medium schooling, which investigates, among other things, students' loss and gain in Swedish and English. The focus of this study is the realization of phonological length in the Swedish and English of three bilingual children This study is of a preparatory nature, intended to find a useful method for establishing parts of the language dominance profile of young Swedish-English bilinguals. It is expected that such a profile would include lexical factors, syntactic structure and usage patterns as well as pronunciation and foreign accent aspects which are the focus here. 1.1. Bilinguals as native speakers Bilingualism studies have not traditionally been devoted to the investigation of the speakers' pronunciation (c.f. Moyer 1999). There has been an assumption that if speakers began speaking both their languages before the end of the critical period (e.g. Sco...
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This paper is a presentation of the project Swedish accents of English which is in its initial stages. The project attempts to make a phonetic and phonological description of some varieties of Swedish English, or English spoken in Sweden,... more
This paper is a presentation of the project Swedish accents of English which is in its initial stages. The project attempts to make a phonetic and phonological description of some varieties of Swedish English, or English spoken in Sweden, depending on the status attributed to English in Sweden. Here I show some curious results from a study of acoustic correlates of vowel quality in the English and Swedish of young L1 Swedish speakers. 1
1. Families with Two Languages 2. Expecting a Child in a Bilingual Home 3. The Family Language System 4. Language Development. 5 The Child with Two Languages. 6.Practical Parenting in a Bilingual Home 7. Competence in Two Cultures 8.... more
1. Families with Two Languages 2. Expecting a Child in a Bilingual Home 3. The Family Language System 4. Language Development. 5 The Child with Two Languages. 6.Practical Parenting in a Bilingual Home 7. Competence in Two Cultures 8. Problems You May Encounter. 9. Keeping It Up.10. Looking Back on a Bilingual Childhood 11. Research and Further Reading. Appendix A: Organising a workshop on raising children with two languages. Appendix B: Ways to support a child's development in two languages. Appendix C: Documenting a child's linguistic development. Appendix D: Internet resources
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This book offers quick tips, pinpointing key applications of Internet technology. It covers realistic case studies showing how teachers can use the Internet in school. It provides background information expanding on points developed in... more
This book offers quick tips, pinpointing key applications of Internet technology. It covers realistic case studies showing how teachers can use the Internet in school. It provides background information expanding on points developed in the text. It covers practice points, showing how the Internet can be used to enhance classroom practice. It contains the addresses of over 200 of the most useful sites for the teacher and pupil.
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This paper describes a study of pronunciation learning using loaned MP3-players set in a college of business and tourism in Hanoi. Material was developed to help raise student awareness of a number of pronunciation features in English... more
This paper describes a study of pronunciation learning using loaned MP3-players set in a college of business and tourism in Hanoi. Material was developed to help raise student awareness of a number of pronunciation features in English that are generally problematic for speakers of Vietnamese, such as vowel length and quality, and final consonants. This material was delivered to one group of 50 students as 9 pre-recorded audio lessons on the MP3-players. Another group of 61 students were given 8 traditional classroom lessons. Both groups were recorded before and after the study to establish whether their pronunciation improved on the particular features being taught.
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Postgraduate students studying by distance on a course intended primarily as professional development for language educators were invited to participate in real time in scheduled campus classes in ...
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Vietnamese speakers of English are often able to communicate much more efficiently in writ-ing than in speaking. Many have quite high proficiency levels, with full command of ad-vanced vocabulary and complex syntax, yet they have great... more
Vietnamese speakers of English are often able to communicate much more efficiently in writ-ing than in speaking. Many have quite high proficiency levels, with full command of ad-vanced vocabulary and complex syntax, yet they have great difficulty making themselves understood when speaking English to both na-tive and non-native speakers. This paper ex-plores the phonetic events associated with breakdowns in intelligibility, and looks at com-pensatory mechanisms which are used. Intelligibility The scientific study of intelligibility has passed through a number of phases. Two strands that have shifted in their relative prominence are the matter of to whom non-native speakers are to be intelligible. In one strand the emphasis is on the intelligibility of non-native speakers to na-tive English-speaking listeners (Flege, Munro et al. 1995; Munro and Derwing 1995; Tajima, Port et al. 1997). This was the context in which English was taught and learned – the majority of these studies have be...
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This paper argues that language teachers need to have knowledge of the linguistics of the language they are teaching. It explores the relationship between implicit and explicit knowledge of the tar ...
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Se incluyen cuatro apendices: el primero es un taller sobre la educacion de los ninos con dos idiomas; el segundo describe metodos para reforzar el desarrollo del nino en dos idiomas; el tercero documenta el desarrollo linguistico; el... more
Se incluyen cuatro apendices: el primero es un taller sobre la educacion de los ninos con dos idiomas; el segundo describe metodos para reforzar el desarrollo del nino en dos idiomas; el tercero documenta el desarrollo linguistico; el cuarto recoge una relacion de recursos disponibles en la red