Curious about where an Honours year could take you? Join us for an information session designed to help you explore your options in the School of Languages and Cultures.
You'll get the full picture of what Honours involves. From program structure and entry requirements, to the real benefits of taking the leap, inclkuding sharpening your research skills and standing out when it comes to future career or postgraduate opportunities.
You'll also hear directly from current Honours students, who'll share what the year is really like - the challenges, highlights, and advice they wish they'd had before starting.
This is a great opportunity to ask questions, meet our academic staff, and find out whether Honours is the right next step for you.
Afternoon tea will be provided.
Program*
2:30pm - Information Session
3:10pm - Afternoon tea
3:30pm - Current Honours students' presentations and Q&A
* Program is subject to change
Want to learn more about Honours at SLC beforehand? Visit our Honours Information page for full details.
Honours Presentation Abstracts
Ella John | From High School to University Japanese: Student Transition Experiences with Perception, Adjustment and Self-Regulation
ABSTRACT: Despite Japanese being a popular foreign language choice in Australia, progression from senior high school Japanese to university study continues to decline. One way to understand this issue is to examine students’ transition experiences. This study investigates the relationship between students’ self-perceptions of their own Japanese abilities; and whether self-regulation help explain differences in preparedness and adjustment in the transition period from high school to university language learning.
We employed a sequential explanatory mixed-methods approach combining a series of focus group interviews, alongside three questionnaires, with students who studied Japanese in high school to Year 12 and transitioned to university Japanese programs at UQ. These questionnaires examined language background, self-assessed language use and self-regulation strategies, while interviews focused on delving into experiences within the transition period from high school to university and feelings of preparation, expectations and the reality of university life.
Preliminary findings suggest that the participants’ self-regulated skills correlate well with frequency of language use. Participants also reported challenges during the transition period, particularly in adjusting to new curricula, teaching methods and pacing of university classes. Additionally, feedback from students indicated that placement accuracy and differing levels of proficiency in one class had a big impact on how students perceived their own learning and abilities. We will discuss these findings in light of students’ transition experiences and the potential role of self-assessment and self-regulation strategies in supporting successful adjustment to tertiary language learning. We hope this project can assist with improvement in education settings, particularly in the effectiveness and implementation of self-regulation and other related strategies, alongside gaining a greater understanding of students’ needs and mitigation strategies in the challenging transition period.
Harry Cruice | Dreaming the Same Dream Across the Divide: Autonomy, Collectivity, and the Figment of Emancipation in Beyer’s Spur der Steine (1966) and Fassbinder’s Acht Stunden sind kein Tag (1972–73)
ABSTRACT: Following the defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945, the division of Germany produced two radically different screen cultures, reflecting the divergent political systems of the capitalist West and the state-socialist East. Scholarship on the two German cinemas has remained similarly divided, often considering them as largely separate traditions. Despite their ideological opposition, entertainment media produced on either side of the Wall conspicuously confronts common questions of labour, construction, and emancipation. This thesis examines the relationship between labour and authority, the individual and the collective, and workplace and domestic authority in Frank Beyer’s state-produced DEFA drama Spur der Steine (1966) and Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s working-class television serial Acht Stunden sind kein Tag (1972–73). This thesis contends that both works stage the same structural impasse from opposing ideological positions and concludes that neither capitalism nor state socialism can reconcile the worker as collective subject with the worker as autonomous individual. It examines how each director stages the negotiation of autonomy in the workplace and in domestic life as a matter of everyday political practice. What sharpens the comparison is a historical irony at the centre of the two texts in that Fassbinder’s West German workers campaign for conditions that were ostensibly already met in the East, while Beyer’s film exposes just how contradictory those conditions were in practice. As a result, both works were similarly subjected to forms of censorship and remain marginalised within the cultural memory. Methodologically, this thesis combines archival research with close textual analysis, marrying approaches as cultural historian and film analyst in otherwise isolated disciplines. In doing so, it contributes to an underexplored area of scholarship, as there exists no comparative study of these two works, and very little scholarship on Acht Stunden sind kein Tag despite Fassbinder’s prominence within film studies.
Carina Maclean | Word Order Development in Narratives of Russian-English Bilingual Children
ABSTRACT: This project explores the use of word orders in Heritage Russian in elicited oral narratives produced by Russian-English bilingual children (aged 4-15) in Australia.
Previous observations on Heritage Russian note word orders that differ from those used by monolingual Russian speakers, in addition to varied grammatical and pragmatic competence, more specifically, lessnuanced use of non-canonical word orders to manage information structure.
Crosslinguistic influence has been observed in second language acquisition, and recently, in heritage languages – however, it remains unclear to what extent it affects word order. Russian has flexible word order, whilst English does not, hence some heritage speakers have been expected to use English-like non-canonical word orders more frequently than Russian monolingual speakers.
This study examines word order use for similarity to reported patterns in scholarship on monolingual and Heritage Russian as well as for possible evidence of crosslinguistic influence. Canonical word order distribution in main and embedded clauses, grammaticality, and felicity of word order use in information structure management were analysed together with participant background data.
The data revealed a high degree of grammaticality in word order, but less so in felicity, where canonical word orders were overly depended on. Canonical word order made up 72% of data, and did not show a significant difference in distribution between main and embedded clauses, contradicting previous studies. Core case errors also pointed to reliance on canonical structure. A regression further showed that some points of input correlated with non-canonical use.
Cameron Regan
TITLE and ABSTRACT – to be determined