Celtic languages form a branch of the Indo-European family and include Breton, Cornish, Irish, Manx, Scottish Gaelic and Welsh.
The North American Association for Celtic Language Teachers exists to permit instructors to exchange ideas and research through meetings and an annual publication, to increase links of Celtic language teachers with those of other languages and other umbrella organizations, and to increase opportunities for Celtic language teachers.
NAACLT has held a highly successful annual conference in North America since 1995. Previous events took place in Glendale Community College, California, University of Pennsylvania, St. Francis Xavier University, University of Minnesota and University of Ottawa. This year the conference comes to Europe for the first time, presenting an ideal opportunity for Celtic language speakers, teachers and related researchers in the US to renew their links with colleagues in European areas such as Brittany, Cornwall, Ireland, Isle of Man, Scotland and Wales.
NAACLT'2000 is aimed at teachers of Celtic languages, learners of such languages, and researchers in related fields such as Celtic Studies, Linguistics, Computational Linguistics, Psychology and Sociology. It will comprise a workshop day, two conference days and an excursion day.
Paper submissions for the conference are solicited in all areas of Celtic language teaching and related research, including but not limited to the following areas:
* Teaching methods for Celtic languages and experiences with them
* Experiences and studies of second language learners and their teachers
* Historical studies of Celtic language teaching
* Dialect choice in language learning
* Celtic language acquisition
* Sociolinguistic, psycological and psycholinguistic studies relating to Celtic languages
* Linguistic comparions between Celtic languages
* Celtic languages and gender
* Language learning materials
* Qualifications and accreditation of Celtic language teachers
* Language policy and planning
* Syllabus design
* Assessment and examination
* The application of computer technology to Celtic language teaching
* Celtic language learning and the World-Wide Web
* The design, evaluation and use of Computer Assisted Language Learning packages for Celtic languages
* The provision and evaluation of tools such as lexical analysers, spelling checkers, part-of-speech taggers, parsers, grammar and style checkers, and word-sense disambiguators for Celtic languages
* Computational lexicography and lexicology
* The preparation and use of machine-readable corpora of Celtic languages especially for teaching
* Speech recognition and synthesis for Celtic languages
* The localisation of software into Celtic languages
Submissions in English comprising four or five pages of A4 text (1600-2000 words approx.) should be prepared in an electronic template (Word or RTF) and sent by email to the Conference Email (naaclt2000@ul.ie) by the due deadline (see below). The main text should be in English while the abstract can be in English or a Celtic language.
For Word template click HERE and for RTF template click HERE. If your browser attempts to interpret the template as HTML rather than downloading it, try right-clicking instead. You should then be able to Save As.
Those making submissions from North America are requested to set the page size of their word processors to A4 when working on their papers to ensure that they are the right length. The number of pages is crucial while the number of words is not.
All submissions will be acknowledged.
Submissions from those unable to use the electronic template are welcome. Please contact the organisers (naaclt2000@ul.ie).
Accepted papers will be published in full in the printed proceedings available at the conference. They may also be published subsequently in book form.
The editors of the proceedings reserve the right to alter papers which do not conform to the template or which are more than five A4 pages in length.
During NAACLT, each author will be asked to make a 25 minute presentation describing the key ideas contained in their paper, with five further minutes being reserved for questions. HiBeam computer projection, overhead projectors for acetates and blackboards will be available.