Luděk Knittl
BSc, MA (Sheffield), University Tutor in Czech
Contact details
Telephone: +44 (0) 114 222 7409
email : l.knittl@sheffield.ac.uk
Biography
I come from Moravia, the eastern part of the Czech Republic. Before I started teaching Czech at the Department of Russian and Slavonic Studies in 2004, I had worked for a number of years as a translator, interpreter, tour guide, and facilitator/lecturer in the area of personal development. While at Sheffield, I have completed a Bachelor's degree in Human Communication Sciences and a Master's degree in Language Acquisition.
Apart from teaching at the university, I also work as a free-lance community interpreter in Czech and Slovak.
Reasearch interests
I am interested in various aspects of second language acquisition. Previously, I have done projects on early acquisition of Czech phonology by English speakers, on how biological motion events are encoded by advanced learners of Czech. I have also collaborated on a project exploring the acceptability of certain morphological features in Czech native speakers.
Teaching
My teaching at the Department includes oral practice and language classes, and modules in Czech history and culture at all levels. I also contribute to a School-wide linguistics module.
- RUS121/122 Czech Language and Culture for Beginners I, II
- RUS125/126 Czech and Polish History I, II
- MDL104 Introductory Linguistics for Modern Languges (Second Language Acquisition)
- RUS307/308 Czech I, II
- RUS248 Studies in Czech Culture
- RUS348/349 Czech Intermediate I, II
- RUS381/382 Varieties of Written and Spoken Czech I, II
- RUS385 Project in Czech Studies
In collaboration with colleagues at the department, I have been developing innovative teaching materials for all levels of our curriculum. These include Level 2 "Studies in Czech Culture", Level 1 "Czech and Polish History", both funded through CILASS (Centre for Inquiry-based Learning in the Arts and Social Sciences) grants. I´ve recently completed an advanced course "Varieties of Czech", funded by CEELBAS (Centre for East European Language Based Area Studies). I'm currently working on new interactive online exercises for beginner learners of Czech.
Seminar and conference presentations
- 'Slovesa pohybu v češtině a jejich osvojování z pohledu kognitivní lingvistiky' [Czech verbs of motion and their acquisition in the framework of cognitive linguistics], Summer School of Linguistics, Dačice, Czech Republic, August 2010.
- 'Describing motion events in Czech', Slavic Cognitive Linguistics Conference, Prague, October 2009.
- 'How to tackle history and not kill it: a student battle with the past', Third CILASS (Centre for Inquiry-based Learning in the Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Sheffield) Staff-Student Conference - Inquire, Engage, Challenge and Change, March 2009. (With Karolina Zioło)
- 'Acquisition of foreign language phonology: The first steps in learning Czech by English speakers', British Association of Academic Phoneticians 2008 Colloquium, The University of Sheffield, April 2008, [poster presentation]
Publications
- Bermel, N. & Knittl, L. (2012), Morphosyntactic variation and syntactic constructions in Czech nominal declension: corpus frequency and native-speaker judgments, Russian Linguistics, 36 (1), 91-119.
- Bermel, N. & Knittl, L. (in press) Corpus frequency and acceptability judgments: A study of morphosyntactic variants in Czech, Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory.