ACLC's Esperantist, prof. Federico Gobbo, has won the Sejong Prize.
Federico Gobbo, has won the Sejong Prize for academically distinguished papers, with his paper Learning Linguistics by Doing: The Secret Virtues of a Language Constructed in the Classroom.
Abstract
The teaching of second languages in school classrooms is often conducted
through the use of ‘direct’ and ‘immersion’ methods, while grammar is reserved
for the first language. However, pupils spontaneously raise important questions
for general and theoretical linguistics which could be better addressed through
an interlinguistic comparison of first and second language grammars in the
pupils’ repertoires. This paper explains the method used in
a pilot experiment in fieldwork. The experiment was conducted in the fourth
class of a Montessori primary school, where pupils constructed from scratch a
posteriori language to be used for
secret communication among themselves―but not to be used withthe rest of the
school. During the process of the construction of this language, all aspects
were discussed in the class: phonetics and writing systems, morphology and
syntax, semantics and pragmatics. The main educational result was the increase
in pupils’ metalinguistic awareness, as well as the confidence that they gained
in their own language proficiency.