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Alumna Story in Her Own Words: English Studies Propelled My Growth as a Confident and Proficient Teacher

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Zehra Yilmaz, an English teacher from Turkey, made the decision to embark on a journey toward a Master's degree in English Studies at the Faculty of Philology, Vilnius University. Throughout her academic pursuit, she embraced the opportunity to immerse herself in a multicultural academic environment, which not only broadened her understanding of language, literature, and culture but also ignited a multitude of new ideas for her teaching career. Reflecting on her transformative experience, Zehra Yilmaz confidently asserts that her studies in English have significantly elevated her teaching abilities, positioning her as an outstanding and impactful educator.

 

What role do you think English studies play in today's globalized world? How has your education at Vilnius University prepared you to navigate the challenges and opportunities in the field of English education? Where did you hear about Vilnius University and how did you decide to move to study abroad?

English Studies has a significant place in the world of globalization as English has become the language of international communication, particularly in business, and academia. Specializing in English Studies allows for a variety of choices, including global career prospects, academic collaborations, and cultural exchanges. The university fostered critical thinking and research skills, which are essential in navigating the challenges and opportunities in the field of English education. I have expanded my knowledge and research skills by writing more research papers and developing research proposals on subjects. Within the Individual Study Plan framework, I also found the opportunity to choose elective subjects outside the field of study. So, I had the chance to take a comprehensive course like “Language and Education”, which is directly related to the field of my bachelor's degree. 
I first learned about Vilnius University through online research while seeking study-abroad options. Vilnius University popped up in the top English studies rankings, and its academic excellence reputation drew my attention. Then, I discovered that Vilnius University had a rich history, a supportive academic community, and a vibrant cultural scene.

 

Can you tell us about your background and what motivated you to pursue a Master's degree in English studies at Vilnius University?

I hold a Bachelor's degree in English Language Teaching from Istanbul University, which gave me a solid foundation in language acquisition theories, teaching methodologies, and practical classroom experience. During my Erasmus Program experience at Cologne University, I was exposed to a multicultural environment that deepened my passion for English education and intercultural exchange. Motivated by these experiences, I decided to pursue a Master's degree in English studies at Vilnius University.

 

How would you describe your overall experience studying English at Vilnius University? Did it meet your expectations? Why or why not?

When I reflect on my time at Vilnius University, I can confidently say that it has helped me become a better teacher in many ways. Through the linguistics seminars, I was challenged to explore areas I had not considered in detail before, and the literature and culture seminars provided me with new perspectives, enabling me to take a closer and more critical look at literary texts and cultural phenomena. In my role as a teacher, I have been able to revise my teaching practice using these new values and develop a greater sense of confidence. In particular, I have been able to create more critical assessments and formulate new discussion topics for my students, providing them with fresh and interesting ideas to engage with. I believe that these are the ripples of studying at Vilnius University, and I am grateful for the knowledge and skills that I gained during my time there.

 

Could you share an example of a research project or thesis you worked on during your Master's program? How did it contribute to your understanding of English studies?

Certainly! One research project I worked on during my Master's program in English studies focused on the field of British Cultural Studies. Specifically, I examined the challenges of translating poetry by diaspora poets who had experienced migration, refuge, or similar life experiences. The project aimed to explore how the unique cultural and linguistic elements embodied in their poems could be effectively conveyed in another language. By delving into this topic, I believe that I gained a deeper understanding of diaspora identities and the experiences of migrants. One other experience was the pleasant communication I had with my academic supervisor while working on my master's thesis, which greatly helped me resolve the issues I encountered regarding my thesis.

 

As an alumna of Vilnius University, how has your English studies degree contributed to your career progression as a teacher? Are there any specific skills or knowledge areas you acquired that have been particularly valuable?

First and foremost, the depth of knowledge I acquired during my studies, particularly in the field of linguistics, has been instrumental in my role as a language teacher. It has given me a solid foundation in understanding linguistic concepts. This knowledge allows me to effectively analyze and explain language structures to my students, helping them develop a strong grasp of the English language. Certainly, teaching a language is not solely about those fields I mentioned. Learning and teaching a language also requires understanding the culture it embodies. It also entails examining the literature. Therefore, the comprehensive structure of English Studies, encompassing linguistics, literature, and culture, has positively contributed to my profession as well.

 

If you were to give advice to prospective students considering pursuing English studies at Vilnius University, what would it be? Are there any specific aspects of the program or university experience you would highlight?

As an international student, it's crucial to feel a sense of belonging and not be alone while studying abroad. Vilnius University is a place where you will encounter friendly faces, and make you feel welcome.

Opening ceremony of S.Stanevičius courtyard

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You are cordially invited to attend the official opening of S.Stanevičius courtyard at 5 pm. June 22nd. 

You, the Faculty community, are invited together with the University Rector, the University Chancellor, Dean of the Faculty of Philology and all the people who have contributed to the implementation of this long-lasting project. 

S.Stanevičius courtyard is now ready to welcome the University community!

International scientific conference „Kitab Studies – Research Methodology and Source Editing“

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The Institute for the Languages and Cultures of the Baltic of the Faculty of Philology at Vilnius University, the Centre for Kitab Studies at the Nicolaus Copernicus University and the Institute of the Lithuanian Language kindly invites to participate in the international scientific conference Kitab Studies – Research Methodology and Source Editing. The conference is dedicated to celebrate the 55th anniversary of the publication of Anton Antonovichʼs (1910‒1980) monograph “Belarusian Texts written in Arabic Script and Their Graphic and Orthographic System” (1968) and the 85th birthday of Valery Chekmonas (1937–2004).

The conference will be held on October 5–6, 2023 at Vilnius University, Universiteto St. 5, Vilnius.

Purpose of the conference – to unite the scientists in dialogue and discussion in order to continue and develop research of eminent professors A. Antonovich and V. Chekmonas.


Conference topics:


  • The cultural heritage of the Tatars of the former Grand Duchy of Lithuania;
  • The written heritage of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania;
  • Territorial, dialectological and social diversity of the Polish and Belarusian languages;
  • Language and society.

Duration of the presentations


  • Full paper presentations: 20 minutes
  • Keynote presentations: 30 minutes

Conference languages:


  • Lithuanian, English, Polish, Belarusian, and Russian.

Important dates


  • Deadline for the submission of registration form and abstract: 30June 2023
  • Notification of acceptance: 15 July 2023
  • Registration closes: 15 August 2023
  • Conference programme: 22 September 2023

Keynote speakers


  • Prof. habil. dr. Czesław Łapicz (Nicolaus Copernicus University)
  • Prof. habil. dr. Joanna Kulwicka-Kamińska (Nicolaus Copernicus University)
  • Dr. Vladislav Hrybovskyi (Nacional Academy of Sciences of Ukraine)
  • Assoc. prof. dr. Nadiežda Morozova (Institute of the Lithuanian Language)

Scientific committee


  • Prof. habil. dr. Stefan Grzybowski (Nicolaus Copernicus University)
  • Dr. Vladislav Hrybovskyi (National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine)
  • Assoc. prof. dr. Jelena Konickaja (Vilnius University)
  • Prof. habil. dr. Alla Kozhinowa (University of Silesia)
  • Prof. habil. dr. Czesław Łapicz (Nicolaus Copernicus University)
  • Prof. habil. dr. Danguolė Mikulėnienė (Institute of the Lithuanian Language)
  • Prof. habil. dr. Agata S. Nalborczyk (University of Warsaw)
  • Assoc. prof. dr. Grigorijus Potašenko (Vilnius University)
  • Prof. dr. Kristina Rutkovska (Vilnius University)
  • Assoc. prof. dr. Ērika Sausverde (Vilnius University)
  • Prof. dr. Daiva Sinkevičiūtė-Villanueva Svensson (Vilnius University)
  • Prof. habil. dr. Marek Stachowski (Jagiellonian University)
  • Acad. prof. habil. dr. Bonifacas Stundžia (Vilnius University)
  • Prof. habil. dr. Sergejus Temčinas (Institute of the Lithuanian Language)
  • Assoc. prof. dr. Viktorija Ušinskienė (Vilnius University)
  • Prof. habil. dr. Andrzej Zakrzewski (University of Warsaw)

Organizing committee


  • Prof. habil. dr. Joanna Kulwicka-Kamińska (Nicolaus Copernicus University)
  • Assoc. prof. dr. Galina Miškinienė (Vilnius University, Institute of the Lithuanian Language)
  • Assoc. prof. dr. Nadiežda Morozova (Institute of the Lithuanian Language)

Registration and fees


  • Regular registration for presenters: 50 euros*
  • Registration for doctoral / MA students: 40 euros

Contacts


 

We look forward to seeing you at the international scientificconference!

*The fee includes meals, conference materials and publication of the paper in the proceedings. We will be happy to help you find accommodation in a convenient location if you wish.

International Student Readings 2023

The Department of Slavic Studies at Vilnius University is delighted to invite young researchers – undergraduate students, Master's Degree students, and postgraduate students – to participate in The International Student Readings. The Readings are aimed at participants focused on innovation and further development of the field of Slavic and Russian Studies.  

The Readings will take place at the Faculty of Philology of Vilnius University on October 13th, 2023. The participation in the Readings is possible both in offline and online mode (via MS Teams).

The presentations are limited to 15 minutes (10 minutes for the talk and 5 minutes for the subsequent discussion). The working languages of the Readings are Russian, Lithuanian, and English.

A peer-reviewed collection of articles based on the talks is planned for subsequent publication.

Applications for the participation in the Readings and brief abstracts (no more than 600 characters, including spaces) are accepted until September 10th, 2023 by email at . The results of the call for applications will be announced on September 15th, 2023.

The application form for the participation in the Readings >>

For additional information, please contact the organizational committee of the Readings by email at .

Registration to Academia Grammaticorum Salensis Vigesima

The twentieth Salos Summer School of Linguistics Academia Grammaticorum Salensis Vigesima will be held between July 23 and 29 in Salos, Rokiškis District. This time the topics of lectures and papers will centre around research problems connected with the Baltic languages.

This year the school is funded by the Lithuanian Academic Scheme for International Cooperation in Baltic Studies. Attendants from centres of Baltic studies will have all costs of travel, accommodation and board covered from this project.  For attendants not delegated by centres of Baltic studies the participation fee is 120 EUR (100 EUR for members of the association “Academia Salensis” as well as for graduate and undergraduate students).

We will welcome 15 participants from foreign centres of Baltic studies and 15 from Lithuanian educational institutions.    

A list of the centres of Baltic studies can be found here > 

Registration is open till June 1.

As the number of fully funded places is limited, please tell us in the registration form what motivates you to attend the Salos Summer School.

As in previous years, attendants will have a possibility to present papers based on their research. Topics should be connected with Baltic studies.

Please feel welcome to register! Link for registration >

Notification of acceptance will be sent by e-mail before June 15.

Should you have any questions, please mail

Information will regularly be updated on our homepage >


ACCOMMODATION

Attendants of the summer school will be accommodated in the Salos manor, in the same building where the lectures are held. The number of available rooms is limited so attendants will have to share rooms. The number of beds per room ranges from 2 to 10. The rooms are plain but clean and kept in order. Toilets and showers are shared.

There are no restaurants or cafés in the neighbourhood, so full board (three meals daily) is provided by the organizers (the cost is included in the attendance fee). The food is not posh but tasty and prepared with love by local women from Salos, for whom this has already become a tradition. When completing the registration form please indicate whether you have special wishes (vegetarian and the like) – we hope we will be able to satisfy your needs. The village boasts two shops where you can buy sweets, snacks and drinks.


HOW TO GET TO SALOS

Salos manor is situated in Rokiškis District, about 150 km from Vilnius (find it on Google Maps).

For those heading to Salos from Vilnius a bus will be in readiness. It will depart from Vilnius University. Return to Vilnius will be on Saturday.

Follow us on social media: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. A few moments from last year’s conference are captured here. Click here for some photographs of the manor.

Guest lectures of linguistic anthropologist Maria Khachaturyan

This week you are invited to guest lectures of Maria Khachaturyan (University of Helsinki), linguistic anthropologist, Africanist, field researcher.

M. Khachaturyan received her doctorate at the INALCO Institute in Paris - she wrote the grammar of Mano Language (Mande family). Her areas are field research and descriptive linguistics, social meaning in grammar, language contacts, language and religion, anthropological/sociolinguistic aspects of religious translation.


Thursday, May 11th., 17.00, Room 402 


Contact-induced variation in reflexivity marking: convergence, divergence and social meaning

It is commonly assumed in language contact studies that languages spoken by multilinguals become more like one another, which leads to long-term convergence between the languages. This does not lead to a sweeping linguistic uniformity, however: there is still an incredible linguistic diversity across the world’s languages. This diversity is partly due to an opposite process -- the process of diversification of neighboring languages which was called “neighbor opposition” (Evans 2019). However, while the results of convergence and diversification are rather well studied, little is known about the complex and contradictory process of convergence and divergence and the role of social factors in it. In this talk, I present my ongoing study of language contact between the Mano and the Kpelle languages of Guinea and show how, despite the potential of convergence, languages remain distinct. Focusing on variation in reflexive marking, an additional question I raise concerns differences in domains affected by convergence and divergence. Specifically, I discuss whether contact-induced variation in grammatical patterns can have social meaning on a par with linguistic features with concrete exponents, such as phonetic, morphological or lexical variables.


Friday, May 12 th., 15.00, Room 314A-B


Doing things with grammar

A well-known observation from interactional linguistics holds that the context of interaction is not a given but is constituted and sustained by the very process of interaction. Verbal acts do not only presuppose context for their appropriate interpretation, but speech performance can also effectively create that context. In other words, utterances can “carry with them their own contexts like a snail carries its home along with it” (Levinson 2003: 26). In this paper, I argue that certain grammatical categories—and above all, indexicals—are also part of the furnishings of the snail’s home. Indexicals are grammatical categories which are existentially tied to the context of utterance and index a relationship between specific properties of the speech context and properties of the narrated event. Examples of such categories include personal pronouns (e.g. I is understood as the person uttering “I”, Jakobson 1971), or tense (past tense markers denote events prior to the moment of speech). Their use, in some situations, helps reflect the context of utterance as much as it builds the context in other situations, in which case the speakers can effectively do things with grammar. I argue that the framework of presupposition accommodation can be applied for the analysis of these context-creating uses of indexicals. The theoretical discussion is grounded in a discussion of data on pronouns of address in Russian (ty vs vy) and demonstrative reference in Mano (Mande, Guinea).


Friday, May 12 th., 17.00, Room 314A-B (During BUS course "Linguistic diversity and language science" lecture)


Linguistic Fieldwork

In this talk, I will sketch out my journey as a linguist and a filedworker: the pathways to particular questions I address in my research, and unexpected ways in which the answers get shaped; trials, errors, failures and getting back on track; and most of all, the role of people: family, colleagues and language spekears who become colleagues and family.

 

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From the Classroom to the Crypt

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On Thursday, April 20th, a band of Philology Faculty students delved deep into the crypts of the Vilnius Cathedral. The crypt-delvers are enrolled in the course Reading the Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf (lect. Rūta Šileikytė Zukienė) that focuses on studying the text in its authentic Old English. 

The adventurous group found themselves several meters below the cathedral floor; pleasantly toured through the archaeological exhibits of the reconstructed past, the last resting places of high medieval nobility, and then bravely guided into the depths of the Cathedral’s darkened drainage system. Examination of the Cathedral’s underground illuminated the greater context and comparisons between the fiction and history of Beowulf and the cold stony reality of the brick-laden depths.

 

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To provide some context, Old English is the early medieval form of English, and the language of the Anglo-Saxon inhabitants of England amidst the turbulence of the Viking Age. Beowulf takes place in 6th century Scandinavia, but its Old English form is a Christianized retelling of an epic long familiar to pagan Danish poets. As the earliest noble graves in the Cathedral’s crypt testify, religious conversion was synonymous with cultural conversion. An act which creeps slowly over time, as the practices and rituals of a beloved past are not easily forgotten despite new identities under new beliefs.  

 

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Beowulf recounts the adventures of a monster-slaying hero of royal stature. Thought to be indominable, and a bastion of poetic virtue, Beowulf himself existed in a transitioning world of religious identity. But the quality and greatness of his character surpassed Christian/Pagan dichotomies and revealed how bravery and excellence can be derived from both tradition and change. The Crypt exhibits a detailed history of transitioning faith and politics, while traditionally honoring the remains of the noble and faithful in the Royal Mausoleum under St. Casimir’s Chapel and the clerical Crypt of the Chapters. While Beowulf is a fictious work, brought out of Scandinavia to Anglo-Saxon England centuries prior to the Cathedral’s conception, such imperishable adoration and respect for shared tradition and societal change echoes both deep within the hallowed halls and the scripts of legend.

 

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Along with their cherished Old English lecturer, the motely group of delvers hailed from different corners of the Earth. Lithuanian, Armenian, and American, Vilnius University students of the Scandinavian and English departments were accompanied by Erasmus students from both the Netherlands and the United States. The entire collective found themselves deep within the unlit heart of Vilnius, on an academic quest to understand more of this beautiful land and its incredible history. In grand respect for Beowulf and the entombed histories which lie beneath the Cathedral, the students, and their professor, continue their quest to further understand the majesty of this great wide world. 

–– Ian Dotson, 23/04/2023

 

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