ABSTRACT

With a long-term aim of empowering researchers everywhere to contribute to work on language development, we organized the First Truly Global /L+/ International Summer/ Winter School on Language Acquisition, a free 5-day virtual school for early career researchers. In this paper, we describe the school, our experience organizing it, and lessons learned. The school had a diverse organizer team, composed of 26 researchers (17 from under represented areas: Subsaharan Africa, South and Southeast Asia, and Central and South America); and a diverse volunteer team, with a total of 95 volunteers from 35 different countries, nearly half from under represented areas. This helped world-wide Page 5 of 5 promotion of the school, leading to 958 registrations from 88 different countries, with 300 registrants (based in 63 countries, 80% from under represented areas) selected to participate in the synchronous aspects of the event. The school employed asynchronous (pre-recorded lectures, which were close-captioned) and synchronous elements (e.g., discussions to place the recorded lectures into participants' context; networking events) across three time zones. A post-school questionnaire revealed that 99% of participants enjoyed taking part in the school. Not with standing these positive quantitative outcomes, qualitative comments suggested we fell short in several areas, including the geographic diversity among lecturers and greater customization of contents to the participants’ contexts. Although much remains to be done to promote inclusivity in linguistic research, we hope our school will contribute to empowering researchers to investigate and publish on language acquisition in their home languages, to eventually result in more representative theories and empirical generalizations.

摘要

我们的长期目标是让世界各地的研究人员能够为语言发展工作做出贡献，我们组织了第一届真正的全球/L+/国际语言习得夏季/冬季学校，这是一所为早期职业研究人员提供的为期 5 天的免费虚拟学校。在本文中，我们描述了这所学校、我们组织学校的经验以及吸取的教训。学校拥有一支多元化的组织者团队，由 26 名研究人员组成（其中 17 名来自代表性不足的地区：撒哈拉以南非洲、南亚和东南亚以及中美洲和南美洲）；多元化的志愿者团队，共有来自 35 个不同国家的 95 名志愿者，其中近一半来自代表性不足的地区。这有助于在全球范围内推广学校第 5 页，共 5 页，吸引了来自 88 个不同国家/地区的 958 名注册者，其中 300 名注册者（来自 63 个国家/地区）80%（来自代表性不足的地区）选择参与活动的同步方面。学校在三个时区采用了异步（预先录制的讲座，带有隐藏式字幕）和同步元素（例如，将录制的讲座置于参与者背景中的讨论；社交活动）。放学后调查问卷显示，99% 的参与者喜欢参加学校活动。尽管没有这些积极的定量结果，但定性评论表明我们在几个领域存在不足，包括讲师之间的地理多样性以及根据参与者的背景对内容进行更大程度的定制。尽管在促进语言研究的包容性方面还有很多工作要做，