LUNAS - Language Use in Nordic Academic Settings

LUNAS was a Nordplus language supported network (2013-2016) which focused on the role of language in academic settings in Denmark, Sweden and Norway. The network was a platform for the coordination of national research projects investigating academic language use and focusing on corpora of academic language and academic word and phrase lists.

Purpose

The purpose of the network is to ensure the sharing of knowledge and experience between the Nordic countries. Four network meetings and a concluding conference have already been planned, whose aim is to ensure that the research into academic language use in the respective countries will contribute to strengthening the Nordic understanding of  the neighbouring languages, especially  academic language.

The accessibility to the parallel academic word and phrase lists in the Nordic languages will constitute a powerful educational tool, which can help strengthen mutual Nordic language comprehension at all levels of the educational system. The members of the network are linguists who work with describing and analysing academic language and language use in the Nordic languages.

Activities

The network held their first meeting in November 2013 in Copenhagen where Averil Coxhead, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, was invited to present her work on, among other things,  notably the Academic Word List (Coxhead, 2000).

The second meeting in the network was held in Gothenburg in November 2014 with Sylviane Granger, Université Catholique de Louvain, Belgium, who was invited to present her work with academic phrases and EAP.

The next meeting will be held in the autumn of 2015 in Oslo where Norbert Schmitt will counsel the network’s members in testing vocabulary with regard to academic word and phrase lists.

The network’s fourth meeting and the concluding conference was arranged in Copenhagen in May 2016 with international guest lecturers.

The Members of the Network

The following institutions were members of the network during the project period:

The network was run and administered by Professor Birgit Henriksen (birgit@hum.ku.dk) and PhD fellow Anne Sofie Jakobsen (asj@hum.ku.dk) from 2013-2016.