Written by Olga Donskaia
A professor’s cathedra, a research institution, or a parliament floor? How far can your language skills take you? Not only do professors of the English Philology department of VU know the answer to this question, but they are also eager to show students the way to their dream careers. On December 5, Anglistikos Akademija invited the students from Vilniaus licėjus to get a glimpse of what one can learn at the English Philology programme.
Have fun with CORPORA
In her presentation titled “Where does the language that linguists study exist?”, Dr Rita Juknevičienė showed the examples of the practical applications of Corpus linguistics. She explained to the students what corpora are and how one can use a corpus to state with confidence that Taylor Swift has changed as a performer or to predict a Eurovision winner.
Professor Juknevičienė introduced two effective and easy-to-use online tools that can help students enhance their English skills. Skell is an online corpus of the English language with the most frequent collocations and word usage examples. It is an extremely useful tool for writing essays in English. The second tool, Voyant, creates colourful visualizations of the most frequent words in a text. There are many fun and effective ways to use it in text analysis.
Time to DEBATE
Dr Liudmila Arcimavičienė provided an insight into Vilnius University's debate culture and taught a short master class. The professor briefly discussed with the students the key elements of debate performance: structure, content, and delivery. The students were divided into two groups representing the Government and the Opposition to debate whether the wrong emoji can ruin a friendship. The groups presented the status quo and their arguments. The Opposition won. The friendships are now considered safe. The best representatives received their awards.
In conclusion to her interactive presentation, Dr Arcimavičienė quoted Sigmund Freud: “Words were originally magic, and the word retains much of its old magical power even today”. Indeed, “words call forth effects and are the universal means of influencing human beings”, and studying English Philology is a way to become friendly with words and to learn how to use their power.
The students found the event extremely useful and entertaining. Here is what they said:
Arnas: ‘What especially caught my attention was the idea of corpora. They are important for AI and language models, areas I really enjoy learning about’.
Meda: ‘Sužinojau kas yra filologijos studijos ir, kad anglų kalbos studijos apima ne tik gramatiką ar literatūrą, bet ir kultūros, komunikacijos bei kalbos technologijų sritis’.
Mangirdas: ‘The tour of it was very intriguing and I loved seeing all of the beautiful architecture, mosaics and murals’.
Atėnė Marija: ‘Pačios studijos pasirodė labai įdomios - pradėjau manyti, kad norėčiau studijuoti filologiją’.
Nojus: ‘I think this trip was a very good idea and I rate it a 10/10’.
