L2

Fill in the blank: The ice is melting at the [ ]

by
Screenshot 2025 09 04 at 15.19.55

You can read a Danish translation of this article here. 

There is a good chance that the word poles (or should I say pøules?) came immediately to mind. The Danish politician Villy Søvndal’s speech at the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen in 2009 became an instant meme because of the way he spoke English: with a (strong?) Danish accent.

People being judged (typically negatively) as a result of the accent they speak is not an uncommon phenomenon. Quite the opposite, in fact. Similar stories are found elsewhere. In 2016 Angela Rayner (UK Shadow Education Secretary) received abusive emails after an appearance on Channel 4 because she spoke with her native Northern British accent. Check The Accentism Project … ↪

How do learners make use of foreign language learning materials?

by
Title illustration

How do learners make use of foreign language learning materials? This was the question that I set out to answer in my ph.d. thesis. Along the way, I learned to use to methods for evaluating usability of a product (think-aloud protocols and constructive interaction), learned how to analyze the results quantitatively (which was scary), and found new ways to look at the data qualitatively (conversation analysis). Especially through detailed qualitative analyses of how our study participants made use of the learning materials in our usability test settings, I learned more about the sequential organization of such sessions, how instructions are realized, and how different visual and other aspects of the learning material drafts were made relevant.

In this blog post, … ↪