The research field
Humans are linguistic creatures. We relate to each other and the world through language, and it is with the help of language that we develop our knowledge and process our experiences. Language makes it possible for us to create and convey knowledge and establish traditions. In the strategic research programme ELLA, we investigate different aspects of the human language capacity, including individual linguistic competence in a narrow sense, language use in different contexts, literature, and didactics. We study grammar as well as language as a means of communication and carrier of culture: What constitutes grammatical competence and how is it acquired in different contexts? How is language used in different situations, and how can we understand the relationship between language and culture? How is cultural and contextual knowledge acquired? The programme also includes didactic perspectives, concerning, for example, questions of how different aspects of linguistic abilities, reading and writing, and communicative and cultural knowledge are learnt and how these might be taught.
The research programme gathers researchers with varying academic backgrounds, including scholars working on linguistics and literature in Norwegian/Scandinavian languages, English, French, German, Spanish and other languages, didactics, pedagogy, special education and early childhood studies. The programme is divided into three thematic areas – Language Competence, Language Cultures, and Literature in Context – that run separately but also have joint projects. The wide focus makes it possible in a new way to investigate human language abilities in their entirety, to investigate differences and similarities between different languages and language cultures, and to study the consequences of different factors (such as literacy and previously learnt languages) for language acquisition and learning. The programme promotes comparative projects, but at the same time contributes to research directed toward different language subjects, and to publications written in different languages.