This chapter discusses the main foundations of a collaborative learning strategy and offers a new methodological model built on this pedagogical approach, and enriched by the element of building shared expert knowledge in the field of translation. The main aim of the collaborative model it advances is to evaluate the effectiveness of its application in translation didactics at the higher education and professional training levels. The model is indebted to the socio-constructivist approach, cognitive psychology and discourse analysis. The chapter explores the synthesis of collaborative learning with the interpretation of collaborating utterances so as to expose the process of building translation sub-competences. The practical experiment involved the qualitative micro-analysis of data gathered from pre-activity scripts, recorded collaborative interactions and post-activity scripts. The proposed model constitutes a new version of an educational learning method which should appeal to the growing expectations of higher education and the professional translation sector in the area of expert competences and high social skills.

Thinking and language emerge through interactivity, or sense saturated coordination (Steffensen, 2013) that couples agents to their social and physical environments. The term “languaging” directs attention to the fact that bodily and situational processes in the here-and-now and their organization across different spatial and temporal scales are fundamental in communication and sense-making (e.g. Love, 2017). In order to illustrate these claims, we analyse a video recording of the board game ‘Codenames’ played by a group of six students. By applying elements of Norris’ Multimodal Analysis, Linell’s idea of Communicative Project and the notion of Recurrent Languaging Activity (Newgarden and Zeng, 2016) we zoom in on the linguistic contingencies players deploy in their dialogical exchanges, as they realize their goals and strategies in the game, and use the Jeffersonian coding system to present the linguistic interactions observed in selected fragments of the recording. We hope that the combination of these tools will enable us to address the micro-scale of dialogical interactional dynamics exhibited by participants cooperating in a problem space. Our interest will be in the way the players as languaging agents orientate to verbal patterns or ‘repeatables’ which organize their interactivity (sense-saturated coordination) as they move along dialogically towards the desired results. In this way we aim to interrogate the claim that “linguistic knowledge should be conceived of as practical knowledge – or knowing-how – rather than theoretical knowledge – or knowing-that” (Herik et al., 2019: 60). On a more theoretical level, this should find echo in Mulcaster’s 500-year-old insight that “languaging enables us to understand” and, in so doing, enables us as humans to engage actively with each other.

In the current paper, I try to elucidate the notion of education and how it is conceived by those whom it most concerns, i.e. students. I look at duoethnographic conversations as sites in which the participants share with a partner their views, opinions, and experiences of education. While revealing conceptions and beliefs, they ponder what this notion means to them personally. Interacting with partners of difference they may confront their own views with those held by that partner. These varying definitional nuances will be depicted in the form of semantic profiles which are subjective variants of how we conceptualise a given notion. It is worth noting that the adopted methodology originates from social sciences, in particular health and educational research. Here, however, it will be coupled with linguistics to yield a more interdisciplinary result.

Conceptually, the four perspectives approach is seen as a “common lore approach” (Bolton, 2014: 182) to case formulation, a micro-genre of case reporting as utilised in psychology/psychiatry. Its main aim is to detail the case, along with its precipitating factors and follow-up treatment, continuously emphasizing the uniqueness of the case (Sim, Gwee & Bateman, 2005: 290). In this chapter, this discipline-specific generic macro-scheme will be drawn upon as a tool to study the specialised discourse of clinical-diagnostic case reporting from an applied perspective. It will be shown that although the two micro-genres represent two conceptually different disciplines, the emphasis on the individual patient can be seen as a common ground and can be translated into particular linguistic resources, which may be of interest in the context of Language for Specific Purposes courses. This analysis is made possible thanks to a qualitative approach to the data, combined with some insights from a computer-aided analysis of the corpus, which consists of case reports derived from the prestigious Lancet journal.

The chapter takes a look at projective techniques and their application across disciplines. It goes back to the psychoanalytical foundations of the concept and traces its historical development. Various types of projective techniques are presented, followed by a critical discussion on the advantages and disadvantages of their employment in research. The very concept of “projection” is attributed to Sigmund Freud (Breuer & Freud, 1895). It involves transferring (projecting) unconscious and frequently suppressed beliefs to another person or object in order to protect one’s ego. The term “projective techniques”, advanced by Frank (1939), might be basically defined as questioning techniques “that depersonalize the question to the respondent thereby desensitizing the respondent to the answer they give and deactivating their conscious defences about the answer they give” (Das, 2018: 10) The first applications of the techniques took place within the field of clinical psychology, where they were mostly used in psychoanalysis or personality assessment. Within a decade they were adopted in management and marketing research. In fact, nowadays their usage in consumer and marketing communication research is in its heyday and is often considered to be superior to other research methods (cf. Kaczmarek et al., 2013). To some extent, projection techniques have been also adopted in linguistic research (e.g. Labov attitude research), however, contemporarily their use in this field is rather marginalised. This could be explained by certain controversies surrounding their application in psychometric testing as well as a massive paradigm shift towards the quantitative research approach in the last decades of the previous century. The main premise of this chapter, however, is that their use in the field of applied linguistics (as defined by Evenson 2013) should be revisited, as they offer a unique potential for obtaining deep, meaningful responses from respondents. This is particularly valid in the case of research into sensitive issues such as, e.g. one’s ethnic, cultural or family background. The full potential of projective techniques will be illustrated by a study on the language portraits (Busch, 2018; Kusters & Meulder, 2019) of plurilingual language learners at the tertiary level of education, in order to show how they can reduce social desirability bias and enhance reflection and self-expression through verbal and visual modes.

This chapter applies the notion of dual character concepts, which were originally proposed by experimental philosophers and cognitive psychologists (Knobe et al., 2013; Del Pinal & Reuter, 2017; Reuter, 2019), to discuss how racist and xenophobic hate speech could be more easily identified, especially for the purpose of raising public awareness about it and its prosecution by law enforcement bodies. This type of research has not been developed extensively so far, apart from a few studies which delve into the reality of blacks who suffer from racism at the hand of white racists, e.g. Shelby (2002), Ikuenobe (2011; 2018). Most terms and concepts are either descriptive or normative in character, but some terms and concepts are “part descriptive, part normative” and these parts are “related but independent” (Reuter, 2019: 1). Some of such combinatory concepts also contain the idealized social function which the person, object or notion is expected to feature (Leslie, 2015). Finally, when a normative term denotes human attributes, it often includes the component of “the commitment to fulfil the idealized function associated with that role” (Reuter, 2019: 4). What I intend to illustrate in this chapter is that individuals who spread hate speech argue that the offensive terms which they use should be treated as only descriptive in character, and thus they try to avoid judicial or social responsibility for propagating hate. This line of argumentation is substantiated using the example of the word Ukrainian and its negative synonym banderowiec. The latter is used by Poles who are prejudiced against Ukrainians, especially in social media, to offend Ukrainian migrants and refugees residing in Poland. When they are accused of insulting this national minority, they argue their innocence or ignorance, claiming that they are not aware of the value-ascribing potential which the hateful words bear. This way, they escape not only public contempt but also, what is worse, they are often acquitted in court. Studying hate speech slurs as dual character concepts may not only increase our knowledge and awareness of the essence of hate speech, but primarily could provide law enforcement personnel (police officers, judges) with a more precise terminological apparatus for their daily functioning, especially the argumentation in cases tried (Domselaar, 2018).

The aim of this chapter to integrate focus group interview methodology into language research, in particular into the search for the manifestation of critical language awareness (CLA) among plurilinguals. The author confines its study to translingual practices, which are perceived not only as an “instinct” resulting from the knowledge of many language systems by one mind (multi-competence) but are perceived as CLA, empowering them as plurilinguals. The analytical framework for the research invokes the so-called “narrative turn” and the tenets of ecolinguistics, as breaking the rules of the positivist way of conducting linguistic research, which is incompatible with the dogma of the post-modern era. Referring to the concept of interdisciplinarity, the author applies the focus group methodology, derived primarily from social sciences, to the study of applied linguistics and ultimately reflects on its suitability and benefits for the research area.