Name Activity "Applied Language Studies" "The research unit for Applied Language Studies investigates language skills processes and products in tertiary education. Language awareness raising and language training in higher education typically take place in an academic context. However, they also attempt to serve future professional objectives, i.e. academic and specific (business and medical) purposes. Currently, the following topics play a central role: language awareness teaching, learning and learner variables (e.g. attitudes, perceptions, metacognitive knowledge and skills), genres such as academic literacy (e.g. academic writing and reading), forms of academic and professional communication, and learner contexts (institutionalised versus informal learning)." "Applied Linguistics" "The Department of Applied Linguistics (TTKA) of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel offersBachelor's and Master's programs in Applied Linguistics, Translation, Interpreting andJournalism. The TTKA Department has two internationally oriented Research centers that want to highlight the multilingual context of Brussels: BIAL, The Brussels Institute of Applied Linguistics, and BIJU, the Brussels Insitute forJournalism Studies." "Brussels Institute for Journalism Studies" "Jelle Mast" "The Brussels Institute for Journalism Studies (BIJU) takes a distinctively multi- and interdisciplinary approach to the subject of journalism, bringing together scholars from diverse disciplinary backgrounds such as linguistics, literary studies, communication studies, political sciences, law studies, and logopedics, around the heterogeneous subject of journalism. As such, our research agenda is premised on the multifaceted nature of journalism, with a primary focus on news production and journalism practice, and on the news product or 'text', essentially located within broader socio-historical, political, judicial, technological and economic contexts. Additionally, we look into different sorts of media, both print, broadcast and online journalism, and mainstream as well as alternative news outlets, while accounting for the multimodality of journalistic discourses. In terms of journalism's topical areas, BIJU's multidisciplinary profile covers a broad range of domains, including (international) politics, law, environment, lifestyle, culture and sports. Research projects within BIJU fit one or more of the following main research strands: Journalism & Discourse Questions and issues related to journalism's role in shaping public discourse, and thus in the representation and social construction of 'reality', which includes gender, national, and cultural identities. Journalism & Genre Questions and issues related to the (ever-evolving) codes and conventions defining journalistic genres and styles, and to the forms and implications of hybridity. Journalism & Practice Questions and issues related to (developments in) methods of gathering and disseminating news, and the legal and moral issues involved in the process. These strands comprise several different methodological approaches, which may be variously combined within individual research projects: discourse analysis (including linguistic and critical variants), framing analysis, systematic-quantitative content analysis, semiotics, aesthetic genre analysis, interpretative approaches, and qualitative interviews." "Brussels Platform for Digital Humanities" "Wouter Ryckbosch" "The digitization of information sources and research methods exerts an ever increasing influence on the various disciplines within the domain of Literature and Philosophy. For several years, researchers have clustered internationally around the emerging field of ""Digital Humanities"" (DH) to investigate how the technological development of new digital resource series and research methods can broaden and renew the domain of Arts and Philosophy. This field has developed very successfully in recent years, and has gained in importance and visibility within the human sciences.In concrete terms, the development of Digital Humanties as a discipline has led to the delivery of new research methods, new search strategies, new research questions and new, more collaborative forms of collaboration. The methods developed from the DH are an important addition to the traditional methods. This yields many opportunities for research innovation in some of the fields in which the faculty of Arts and Philosophy at VUB strongly stands. For example, in contemporary linguistics (LIST), translation studies (LIST), literature (LIST), philosophy of science and history (HARP) and socio-economic history (HARP) extensive use is being made of innovative digital research methods. Techniques from the field of Digital Humanities. It is expected that the field of Digital Humanities will continue to grow strongly in the coming years by developing more and more advanced digital applications, expanding ever larger digital data files, and expanding into new research domains. It is therefore important that the Faculty of Arts and Philosophy responds to this ever-growing evolution within the humanities.These opportunities also present a number of challenges at the same time, with which the digitally active researchers within LW are also confronted. After all, the increase in scale and growing complexity of DH require: a) a greater structure and bundling of expertise, experience and training in digital techniques, b) a more targeted input of ICT-trained DH specialists, and c) a more careful planning of financial and time investments in research infrastructure, and d) extensive support in both the application of research projects that use DH, and in carrying out research that is based on research methods and techniques from the Digital Humanities. By striving for better coordination and collaboration between DH researchers in various disciplines from the Arts and Philosophy, we hope to be able to meet these challenges together. By sharing experiences, combining complementary expertise, expanding interdisciplinary and collective infrastructure, and pooling investments, we believe that an interdisciplinary and research group on research groups around Digital Humanities can offer significant added value for the research community of the VUB. The Brussels Platform for Digital Humanities (DIGI) wants to take on this role. DIGI will also be the central point of contact for the participation of the VUB in DARIAH-VL1 (Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities - Flanders, ESFRI), and in this way reinforce partnerships with colleagues from other Flemish university institutions that already have DHP expertise centers (Ghent Center for Digital Humanities at the UGent, platform {DH} at the UA, and the DH Task Force at the KUL4) and Europe.The Brussels Platform for Digital Humanities (DIGI) aims to be a transversal platform that brings together and supports members who use DH from various existing research groups. This will be done by grouping and building technical knowledge with an interdisciplinary focus, and offering a series of seminars and workshops focused on methodological and infrastructural topics. This research group therefore aims to be complementary to the existing research groups. The composition of the research group shown below is provisionally limited to the founding members, and will be extended after incorporation with more members from all levels (ZAP, post- and pre-doctoral)." "Center for Applied Linguistics" "The research group Centre for Applied Linguistics (CTL) carries out pluridisciplinary research. Important research domains of CTL are:-          cross-cultural research (mainly verbal and non verbal communication)-          communication needs and problems of specific populations (mainly business-oriented, possibly targeting a specific sector and/or job category)-          semi-autonomous blended learning (effectiveness and efficiency of language education and didactic methods, in particular those including the use of ICT in support of semi-autonomous learning)" "Center of Applied Linguistics" "Our main activity : the language needs of employees of small and medium sized companies (how to describe them? how to find an adequate solution for their problems ? how to create effective language learning material for that type of public ? how to test their communicative competence and their intercultural awareness?) - the possibilities and limits of new technology enhanced language learning (NTELL). In our view it should be selfstudying multimedia condensed material, for instance on CD ROM/internet." "Centre for Applied Linguistics" "Niet beschikbaar" "Centre for Computational Linguistics, Psycholinguistics and Sociolinguistics (CLiPS)" "Reinhild Vandekerckhove" "The research of CLiPS is interdisciplinary between linguistics, psychology, and computer science (Artificial Intelligence). Current research can be divided into three main areas: Psycholinguistics, Language Acquisition (coordinator: Steven Gillis). The main research topic is how very young children learn the language they hear. This process actually starts before babies use conventional words and phrases. That is why we study babies' vocalizations from birth onwards, focusing on how they become more and more 'word-like'. Once they start using words, we analyze the phonological development (the sound and syllable patterns words consist of, stress and intonation, 'speech errors') and morphophonological development (for instance, how do they learn diminutives or plurals?), and syntactic development (e.g., how do they learn the basic word order of Dutch?). Moreover, we study how young children learn the meanings of words and how they know how to use these new words correctly. A major area of research in language acquisition is the extent to which the language environment of the child provides enough information with which to learn language. At present we have an outspoken interest in language acquisition in children with different degrees of hearing: normally hearing children's language acquisition is compared with hearing impaired children with a conventional hearing aid and deaf children with 'received hearing' due to cochlear implantation. The research mainly focuses on the acquisition of Dutch as a first language. But there is also a firm emphasis on crosslinguistic studies in which the acquisition of particular phenomena is studied in typologically diverse languages. Psycholinguistics, Language Processing (coordinator: Dominiek Sandra). The focus is on the nature of the mental representations and processes underpinning online language use in experienced language users, more particularly in the domains of reading and spelling. In the study of reading our attention is primarily directed towards visual word recognition. The issues that we have addressed in recent years concern the role of morphological structure in lexical access and the question whether lexical access in bilinguals is language-selective or not. These topics are studied in reaction time experiments, using a variety of experimental paradigms. In our study of the spelling process we attempt to explain why descriptively simple, rule-governed word forms (Dutch verb forms) give rise to so many spelling errors among experienced spellers. Experiments and error corpora form two sources of empirical data. The central explanatory concepts in this research line are occurrence frequency of orthographic patterns at the lexical level and analogical processing at the sublexical level. Finally, we study the possibility of explaining language processing in morphosyntactic and syntactic domains in terms of exemplar-based analogy instead of rule application. Here, we rely on experimental and modeling work. Computational Linguistics (coordinator: Walter Daelemans). Basic research in Computational Linguistics at CLiPS is concerned with the study of computational methods for the representation, acquisition, and use of language knowledge. We focus on the application of statistical and machine learning methods, trained on corpus data, to explain human language acquisition and processing data, and to develop automatic text understanding systems that are accurate, efficient, and robust enough to be used in practical applications. We develop specific machine learning algorithms suited for the properties of language data (few regularities, many irregularities and exceptions), and develop new methodologies for simulation of these language data. Our strategic research is in the domain of Language Technology, the development of language processing tools to alleviate information and translation bottlenecks. Research focus here has been on text analytics (extracting knowledge from unstructured text data). Recently, the group has developed research initiatives on language technology for African languages, and on Digital Humanities (especially the areas of computational stylometry and language technology for the study of old variants of Dutch)." "Centre for Information, Documentation and Research on Brussels" "Dimokritos Kavadias" "BRIO, the Centre for Information, Documentation and Research on Brussels, is an interuniversity research consortium with research centres of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel and the Hogeschool-Universiteit Brussel (HUBrussel) as founding partners. Its mission is to create a platform for exchanging ideas and information on several aspects of the Brussels Capital Region, in interaction with the Flemish surrounding municipalities and other levels of government, and to stimulate new research on the matter. Therefore an important pillar of BRIO is the development and the maintainance of a specialised scientific virtual documentation centre on Brussels: www.briobrussel.be and another on the Flemish Periphery: www.docu.vlaamserand.be. It also resulted in different research projects, the organisation of colloquia, the publication of a series entitled Brusselse Thema's (Brussels Themes). Recent research topics are: - language use and language situation - language and identity - language policies and legislation - federalisation all analysed as a combined action of social, economic, demographic, political and psychological factors." "Centre for Linguistics" "Rik Vosters" "The main objective of the Centre for Linguistics (CLIN) is to promote basic research in theoretical and applied linguistics and the application of this research in the wider society. Research at CLIN addresses a broad spectrum of issues related to the structure, use, learning and teaching, historical development, and the social and political contexts of languages. Recent work includes studies on morphology, syntax, semantics and pragmatics, dialectology, sociolinguistics, sociohistorical linguistics, bilingualism and bilingual education, sign language, aphasia, second language acquisition, and methodology and practice in language teaching. Applications of research at CLIN include consultancy for private and public organisations in the areas of language and education policy, curriculum design, language teaching material development, language assessment, speech pathology, and natural language processing. The Centre has currently 35 members, 11 of whom have a tenure position at the university. CLIN is part of the Linguistics and Literary Studies department (TALK)."