No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the author.
Teaching and researching language and culture, second edition
Abstract
Language and culture are concepts increasingly found at the heart of developments in applied linguistics and related fields. Taken together, they can provide interesting and useful insights into the nature of language acquisition and expression. In this volume, Joan Kelly Hall gives a perspective on the nature of language and culture looking at how the use of language in real-world situations helps us understand how language is used to construct our social and cultural worlds.The conceptual maps on the nature of language, culture and learning provided in this text help orient readers to some current theoretical and practical activities taking place in applied linguistics. They also help them begin to chart their own explorations in the teaching and researching of language and culture.
... The environment and culture will be different for every student teacher and those supporting them, and it is important that these contexts are considered [11]. The influence of the sociocultural factors such as cultural norms, beliefs, and power dynamics impacts learners, and student teachers are actually developing language required for teaching [12,13]. Therefore, such sociocultural factors will impact upon not only what mentors communicate during professional conversations but how they communicate and with whom. ...
... This trusting environment will support student teachers to "debate, argue, and challenge" [28]. Alongside discussions, positive feedback and examination of teaching practices, including repetitive elements, will make them more likely to become embedded [13]. Research has found that student teachers value being able to discuss their views and share ideas during such conversations [24]. ...
... For instance, there can be a significant concern regarding insufficient time available for effective professional conversations, particularly when several other factors are central to the discussion [24]. Others consider the barriers posed by the dominance of the person leading the conversation and who may fail to allow for adequate response time, or this individual losing focus during the discussion, and interrupting or appearing impatient during the conversation [13]. Although structuring the conversation has been noted as a positive, an over-reliance on any particular framework could negatively impact the opportunity to discuss a broader range of topics or fail to probe deeper on specific issues [23]. ...
Professional conversations are significant in teacher education, yet policy makers and practitioners differ in their understanding of what these involve. The purpose of this study was to identify and understand the critical elements of successful professional conversations; the elements that effectively contribute to critical reflection and evaluation of teaching practice. Insight is provided by 10 participants who took part in a discussion group, in-depth interviews and written reflections. All participants are involved in professional conversations for a teacher education programme in Wales, in their capacity as either a student teacher, practice tutor or mentor. Findings highlight that some of the significant elements needed for an effective professional conversation include adequate preparation time for the conversation itself, knowledge of programme requirements and professional teaching standards, along with knowledge about the student teacher's school context – these can all be described as 'hard' inputs; whereas the 'soft' inputs include effective listening and questioning skills, and being able to offer challenge to the student teacher. Similarly, outputs of professional conversations can also be recognised as 'hard': effective reflections contributing to progress against the professional teaching standards; and 'soft': collaborative working relationships that are honest and positive with two-way learning for the mentor and the student. It is concluded that the softer skills of questioning and understanding the student teacher's expectations must be developed effectively for professional conversations in teacher education to have a positive impact on all those involved. Received: 20 September 2024 | Revised: 5 November 2024 | Accepted: 16 December 2024 Conflicts of Interest The authors declare that they have no conflicts of interest to this work. Data Availability Statement Data sharing is not applicable to this article as no new data were created or analyzed in this study. Author Contribution Statement Alison Glover: Conceptualization, Methodology, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing, Visualization, Project administration, Funding acquisition. Catharine Bleasdale: Conceptualization, Methodology, Investigation, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing, Visualization, Funding acquisition. Grace Clifton: Conceptualization, Methodology, Investigation, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing, Visualization, Supervision, Project administration, Funding acquisition. Angela Thomas: Conceptualization, Methodology, Investigation, Data curation, Writing – original draft, Writing- review & editing, Visualization, Project administration.
... The aim of learning a foreign language is to be able to communicate in the target language, understand the traditions and customs of the target speech community, and acquire fluency (Sun, 2013). According to Hall (2011), "language acquisition is a process by which a human mind, with its innate, coherent, and abstract system, imposes order on incoming linguistic and non-linguistic data" (p. 48). ...
... Language is not merely a combination of grammatical forms, but also a combination of beliefs, behaviors, and norms. Hall (2011) stated that language is a social phenomenon representing people's social, political, and cultural contexts. One of the basic components of any language is its culture. ...
... The notion of communicative competence has expanded to include intercultural communicative competence (Hall, 2011). Intercultural communicative competence is defined as "the knowledge, skills, and abilities to participate in activities where the target language is the primary communicative code and in situations where it is the common code for those with different preferred languages" (Byram, 1997, p. 61). ...
Culture and language have long been focal points of investigation, and both have been intensively discussed in the academic literature, but little attention has been paid to the influence of EFL students’ linguistic backgrounds on their attitudes toward the target culture, especially in the Saudi context. This mixed-method study aimed to explore the impact of learners’ linguistic backgrounds (mainly their language academic achievement levels and contexts of language learning) on their attitudes toward the target culture. The data was collected using an online questionnaire. A total of 84 students from the Faculty of Language and Translation at King Khaled University participated in this study. A Pearson correlation coefficient test and thematic analysis were used to interpret the data. The results showed a significant relationship between the participants’ linguistic backgrounds and their attitudes. The results also indicated that the participants had an overall positive attitude toward the integration of the target culture into language learning. In light of the findings, EFL students’ linguistic background should be taken into consideration before embedding the target culture into language learning.
... Overall, the findings seem to indicate that the L1Ps contributed to understanding participation and interaction as multifaceted phenomena (van Compernolle, 2015), as their engagement in the negotiation of meaning shaped both the teachers' and students' understandings of what is important to learn (Hall, 2012). This was illustrated by the diversification of interaction in the learning situations, which shaped the interactional practices (van Compernolle, 2015) and led to new knowledge and skills (Hall, 2012;Wertsch, 1998). ...
... Overall, the findings seem to indicate that the L1Ps contributed to understanding participation and interaction as multifaceted phenomena (van Compernolle, 2015), as their engagement in the negotiation of meaning shaped both the teachers' and students' understandings of what is important to learn (Hall, 2012). This was illustrated by the diversification of interaction in the learning situations, which shaped the interactional practices (van Compernolle, 2015) and led to new knowledge and skills (Hall, 2012;Wertsch, 1998). ...
... Put differently, the teacher's role temporarily changed to that of a learner, in front of the students. According to Hall (2012), student participation increases when the teacher shows interest by asking them genuine questions. Here, the teachers' openness to learn from the L1Ps may have encouraged student-initiated questions in the overall class interaction. ...
Developing collaborative skills can help foreign language (FL) teachers to provide diverse and meaningful learning opportunities that reflect today’s increasingly complex and changing communicative situations. This study examined how language teachers collaborated with L1 students to expand meaning-making practices in FL learning in higher education. Individual interviews were conducted with ten Language Centre teachers from three universities, two in Finland and one in the Czech Republic. The qualitative content analysis of the data showed that the teachers involved the L1 students actively across different levels of courses and activities to bring their knowledge, views, and experiences in the classroom. The result was an increase in interactional variety and a positive effect on student participation, particularly when the teachers gave space to learning opportunities afforded by the interactions. However, while collaborating with the L1P’s led the teachers to better understand the students’ needs and interests regarding the quickly evolving subject matter, their role in managing the more complex and shifting classroom situations grew more important. Therefore, creating authentic FL learning experiences with the L1 students requires teachers to combine efficient management skills with flexibility and a willingness to learn. Keywords: foreign language learning, classroom interaction, relational expertise, mediation, affordance, higher education
... The question of "what ideas and values the people, places and things represented in those images stand for" is also investigated (Van Leeuwen, 2001: 92). For Stuart Hall (2013aHall ( , 2013b, to represent is to depict something, but it also means to symbolise it. I deem this crucial because this paper is essentially concerned with what is depicted in these films and the broader implication of that depiction. ...
... Hence, I use semiotics to unravel the multi-layered meanings in the selected films. In that sense, the concepts of denotation and connotation, used by film scholars such as Metz (1974) and Hall (2013aHall ( , 2013b, become very important. According to Berger (2012a, b: 18-19), connotation refers to "the cultural meanings that become attached to any form of communication; it involves the symbolic, historical, and emotional matters connected to it. ...
... As Joan Kelly Hall (2013a, 2013b: 32) explains, social identities "embody particular histories that have been developed over time by other group members enacting similar roles." She elaborates further that "their histories of enactments, these identities become associated with a particular set of linguistic actions for realising the activities and with attitudes and beliefs about them" (Hall, 2013a(Hall, , 2013b. Moruti wa Tsotsi (Senyaka Kekana) reiterates his obsession about the love for making money when he says: "I like silence when we talk about money." ...
Nigeria has over 500 indigenous languages, out of which only three (Hausa, Igbo, and Yoruba) are emphasized by the government in its education policy to be studied from primary up to junior secondary school level. As a result, curricula are developed in these three language subjects and books are published to meet the educational needs, translating into the gradual extinction of other indigenous languages. Unfortunately, however, serious politicking is being played within the three major languages by their original speakers, such that each of the three languages is not developing beyond the geopolitical zones where it is spoken as the primary language of communication due to unhealthy ethnocentric rivalry among the speakers of the languages. This makes it difficult to have an acceptable Nigerian language beyond the geopolitical zones where it is used as a medium of communication. Nigeria should re-trace its steps in the direction of indigenous language development through the formulation of indigenous language policy. There should also be a research and development center in the three major Nigerian languages and in all the recognized Nigerian languages that have achieved some level of codification. The government should encourage and subsidize publications in the local languages through loans to publishers and bulk purchases by the government.KeywordsIndigenous languageLanguage politicsDevelopmentPublishing
... The second approach, interactional sociolinguistics, also requires long-term study in order to create familiarity with the context and often involves emic perspectives (Hall, 2002). It differs from ethnography in that recurrent events need to be identified and recordings made, and these recordings need to be analysed through repeated viewings in order to provide insights into relationships between self and society (Schiffrin, 1996). ...
... Conducting a conversation analysis does not involve collecting emic perspectives; instead, the focus is on the interaction itself. Thus, instances of a certain phenomenon are collected, transcribed and analysed inductively in great detail (Ellis & Barkhuizen, 2005;Hall, 2002). Since each interaction is viewed as unique in conversation analysis, there is no attempt to identify generalisable patterns from the data. ...
Discourse analysis, especially ethnomethodological approaches, has become a powerful tool for investigating classrooms. However, such analyses run the risk of relying on subjective researcher interpretations of data and of unconscious biases influencing the findings. In this paper, we will present a case study of an attempt to investigate problematic teacher questions which highlights these risks. The main implication of this case study is that discourse analyses must take into account multiple perspectives on the discourse.
... Other researchers (e.g. Bourdieu, 2000;Hall, 2002;Ochs, 1996) point to the social nature of one's identity, which they see as defined through the interactions and discourse with one's social context, that is, the social groups that one belongs or relates to. Weinreich (2003) similarly argues that identity is situated in one's social context. ...
... The Singapore students' ICLI experience and their interactions with the TL community in Chiangrai had thus, particularly in the case of Jin, not just led to the reaffirmation of their identity, but, significantly, also to its reconstruction through the assimilation of new values and thus modifications to their aspirational self. This finding seems to confirm the literature's view of the dynamic nature of identity and how it is constantly constructed and re-constructed in interaction with one's social context, including the TL community during an ICLI programme (Bourdieu, 2000;Chan, Kumar Bhatt, Nagami, & Walker, 2015;Hall, 2002;Lave & Wenger, 1991;Ochs, 1996;Weinreich, 2003) ...
... ,Hall (2002) e Santos (2008 e 2005 que a veem "como o conhecimento subentendido que as pessoas exteriorizam ao interagirem no contexto em que estão inseridos"(Santos, 2005, p. 30). ...
Este artigo compartilha reflexões sobre experiências identitário-culturais de três docentes de Língua Inglesa da Rede Estadual de Ensino Público de Mato Grosso, pertencentes à Diretoria Regional de Educação de Sinop, participantes do Programa de intercâmbio internacional na Inglaterra, em 2023. É um estudo qualitativo, de cunho etnográfico-interpretativista. O corpus analítico compõe-se de dados coletados via questionário, diário de bordo, registros fotográficos e entrevistas. A análise aponta que o intercâmbio proveu ricas experiências, a partir da percepção de distintas realidades, o que favoreceu a constituição identitário-cultural de como os intercambistas percebem a si mesmos e significam distintos usos de língua.
... A core, fundamental piece of language acquisition is that culture shapes not only our use of language but also our perceptions and reality (Hall, 2012). ...
Spanish and French majors at our small, private, Southern U.S. liberal arts institution must study abroad for an entire semester, yet students embark and return with widely disparate levels of language and intercultural learning. To more fully foster learning-laden semester-long study abroad experiences we changed the curriculum and now majors take a three-semester sequence of courses before they leave, while abroad, and upon return. In this pilot study we assessed students’ intercultural competency using the Intercultural Development Inventory both pre- and post-study abroad experience. We also used their assignments to triangulate and contextualize the IDI scores. As a result of the data, we contend that intercultural learning a) must be scaffolded and supported throughout the entire language, cultures, and literatures curricula, and b) any results on indirect standardized scales need to be compared with direct assessments. Based on the data, we revised the three-course sequence to help students process their intercultural journey. Given the nature of the changing international education landscape, some implications, beyond our department, of the small pilot study are also provided. Abstract in Spanish En nuestra universidad privada en el sur de Estados Unidos es obligatorio que los estudiantes especialistas en español y francés estudien en el extranjero para un semestre entero (típicamente cuatro meses). A pesar de tal, estudiantes van y vuelven con niveles de idioma y aprendizaje intercultural muy desiguales. Para fomentar que los semestres en el extranjero fomentaran más aprendizaje, nuestro departamento cambió los requisitos para la especialización. Ahora necesitan tomar un curso antes de que vayan, un curso en línea mientras están en el extranjero y un curso al volver. En esta investigación evaluamos el desarrollo intercultural de los estudiantes usando el Intercultural Development Inventory (IDI), antes y después de sus estudios en el extranjero. También usamos sus tareas para verificar los resultados del IDI. Insistimos que el aprendizaje intercultural a) tiene que ser integrado durante toda la especialización y, b) los resultados de pruebas estandarizadas, como el IDI, se necesitan comparar con trabajos estudiantiles para comprobar tales resultados. Discutimos las modificaciones a los cursos que hicimos a base de este estudio e implicaciones que el estudio nos dio que pueden aplicar a otros departamentos e instituciones.
... This, in turn, sparks their interest and gives them fresh ideas to engage in other important critical and creative tasks. Hall (2012) stated that patterns and structures that are used frequently and reliably in activities are more likely to be stored and remembered. ...
When identifying learning styles, attitudes, and self-awareness/perceptions for future directions in mastering English language skills, it is important to take into account psychological and sociolinguistic elements as well as other external factors that can impact students’ abilities and understanding. This study employed a Likert-based survey approach to examine significant challenges encountered by students, and the quantitative and qualitative findings were analyzed and interpreted by the professors. The researchers were able to observe that visual aids, class participation, positive attitudes in academic activities, positive attitudes towards other students' contributions and non-verbal reactions, and being team players are important factors in achieving success in the classroom. It was evident that students showed moderate performance in these areas. However, the researchers, who are an English language educator and a psychologist, still view the students' individual and group evaluation feedback as a way to create support methods for boosting student engagement and personal development, ultimately leading to higher ratings, and for encouraging reflective practice among professors.
... A further consideration, as mentioned earlier, is that reflective thinking involves language and communication. Language is part of culture (Hall, 2013;Kramsch, 1998;Sharifian, 2015) and shapes the way teachers think, speak, and act. It is produced and formed by the requirements of a culture as it changes, implying both language and culture are volatile, shifting to mirror both each other and the everchanging world. ...
In recent decades, the concept of reflective practice has grown in popularity and importance in the fields of education and TESOL. Evidence suggests that teachers who systematically engage in this kind of practice gain new insights into their teaching and are able to improve the teaching–learning process in their classrooms. Indeed, in some contexts, including North America and Europe, a vast body of empirical literature is available which reveals that reflective practice is beneficial because it empowers teachers and transforms them into agents of change. However, in multiple settings in the Global South, the concept of reflective practice has either been proposed just recently or is only now being introduced. This means that in this region, it remains relatively underexplored and enigmatic; hence, considerable information is required about the opportunities that reflective teaching creates for practitioners and the challenges they may encounter while engaging in such practice. This introductory chapter thus sets the stage for the chapters to follow. It conceptualizes the notion of reflective practice, emphasizing the importance of teacher learning and professional growth. Different types of reflection and models of reflective practice are presented, and their significance for the effectiveness of teacher education programmes is discussed. This is followed by a synopsis of emerging research on reflective teaching in Asian contexts. Next, a principled approach to reflective practice is proposed. The chapter closes with a brief description of the purpose, structure, and readership of the present volume.
... 95). Consequently, the relationship between language and identity has become a significant area of research in bilingualism and second language acquisition, as evidenced by studies conducted by Hall (2002), Norton (2000), and Schumann (1978). ...
In an increasingly interconnected world, proficiency in English is becoming indispensable, prompting Taiwanese universities to implement English language requirements ranging from one to four years. This initiative aligns with a national bilingual education program aimed at bolstering the English proficiency of college students to enhance their international competitiveness. Consequently, English-medium instruction has become prevalent in various university courses, facilitated by the Freshman English course serving as a transition to English-mediated teaching. While linguistic development is emphasized, the dynamics of identity perception among students cannot be overlooked, as language identity profoundly impacts their learning experiences and growth. This study delves into the identity perception of college freshmen in Taiwan, where bilingual education is heavily emphasized by the government. The purpose of the study is to investigate how Taiwanese college freshmen perceive their identity as they participate in English language learning. In addition, this study aims to examine the influence of gender and college major on the individual differences in identity perception among college freshmen engaged in English language learning. Employing Gao et al.’s (2005) Likert-scale questionnaire on self-identity change, the research surveyed 360 freshmen from a university in northern Taiwan. Data analysis performed with SPSS includes two stages. At the first stage, descriptive statistics revealed that participants exhibited agreement on self-identity changes in four categories: self-confidence, zero, productive and additive. At the second stage, a multivariate analysis of variance demonstrated significant main effects of gender and major on identity changes. Female students exhibited higher self-confidence, additive and productive changes compared to male students. Furthermore, liberal arts majors experienced more pronounced self-confidence, additive and productive changes than their counterparts in business, science, and engineering majors. A Post Hoc test unveiled significant differences, with business majors scoring higher than science majors in subtractive and split changes, while science majors differed significantly from liberal arts majors in zero change. The study’s implications extend beyond theoretical understanding, informing pedagogical practices to enhance language learning experiences.
... The sociocultural space of Second and Foreign Language acquisition is increasingly gaining attention with intercultural competence becoming a key goal of language learning (Arabski & Wojtaszek, 2013). While the traditional views on the flow of culture in language learning were unidirectional where culture has minimal influence on the language learning process, the contemporary approaches to culture, triggered by sociocultural approaches, perceive culture as residing in meanings and shapes accumulated by our linguistic resources (Hall, 2015). The CEFR companion volume recognizes developing competencies for democratic culture such as valuing cultural diversity and accepting otherness as important goals of language learning and the framework has included a special scale for facilitating a pluricultural space in language learners (Council of Europe, 2018). ...
Despite the abundance of studies investigating translanguaging pedagogy, recontextualizing learning material has rarely been a concern of recent studies. The present study employs content analysis and critical discourse analysis to examine two global CFL textbooks used in Sri Lanka to evaluate their compliance with translanguaging practices. Three imperative aspects of translanguaging pedagogy, namely representation of culture, instruction language, and nationalism and socio-cultural polarization were the key areas of concern in content analysis. In the culture domain analysis, references from the textbooks were fed into 10 child codes and 3 parental codes in NVivo12. The results demonstrated that there is a critical inequity in the representation of local and global cultures in the textbooks which is especially distinct in the interlocutors and their nationality options. Socio-cultural polarization of the source culture with the West was evident in the critical discourse analysis and adaptation was predominantly promoted as a unilateral affair where the foreign learner continually adapts to the target culture. The study proposes that contextual sensitivity and ideological impartiality should be ensured in recontextualizing textbooks for translanguaging practices in Sri Lanka from three aspects, namely incorporation of L1 into textbooks, integration of multiculturalism and freeing textbooks of ideological and hegemonic practices.
... The concept of identity is multidimensional, and studies generally distinguish between various terms depending on the scope of the sense of belonging in question. According to Hall (2002), personal identity refers to both one's sense of individuality as well as their sense of distinctiveness, and this suggests that all "layers" of identity are linked to interpersonal relations, interactions, and communicative experiences. This study focuses on an emerging second language identity amongst adolescents aged 13 to 25 -second language (L2) is defined here as a language learned and used in addition to one's first language (L1), and the main L2 that is the focus of this study is English. ...
This paper examines the effects of virtual communication on language use among Latvian students aged 13-25, aiming to investigate whether language proficiency, language attitudes and identity construction are mediated by language dominance and global trends foregrounded by the dominant use of English on social media. The research material consists of 1) Bilingual Language Profile (Birdsong et al. 2012), a questionnaire that targets a variety of sociolinguistic factors and assesses language dominance; 2) a questionnaire on language use across various domains as well as language ideologies. The questionnaire results indicate Latvian language dominance in terms of language history and active use, but English is regarded as a beneficial language and used as a receptive language in entertainment and with peers. The findings of the study suggest English is associated with a multilingual identity, however, this does not seem to impact the expression of adolescents’ national identity.
... Thus, language and culture are indispensable to each other. Therefore, researchers, for example, Byram (2009) andHall (2013), emphasized on intercultural competence in second language acquisition. However, it is debatable to understand, which cultural competencies will be considered in English language teaching, especially when the context is similar to Kachru's (1985) outer circle, where English has been indigenized (Thumboo, 2001), or when the context involves English being used as a lingua franca. ...
The study aims to explore the cultural facets of learning and using English language in a Pakistani context. Drawing on information collected from participants, the study also indicates the present status of the indigenisation of English in Pakistan. This mixed-method research used a convenience sampling strategy to collect data from 476 students through a questionnaire and from 15 teachers through semi-structured interviews. The findings of the study revealed that there is little explicit focus on culture during the teaching and learning of the English language. The collected data also show that students learn the target culture more than the local culture, mainly due to the use of foreign teaching materials. Moreover, both students and teachers seem ambivalent about the Indigenisation of English in Pakistan, although a shift in the status of English can be observed in its teaching and learning processes. The study further suggested to develop materials based on the local context in order to incorporate local culture and make English more indigenous.
... Thus, language and culture are indispensable to each other. Therefore, researchers, for example, Byram (2009) andHall (2013), emphasized on intercultural competence in second language acquisition. However, it is debatable to understand, which cultural competencies will be considered in English language teaching, especially when the context is similar to Kachru's (1985) outer circle, where English has been indigenized (Thumboo, 2001), or when the context involves English being used as a lingua franca. ...
The study aims to explore the cultural facets of learning and using English language in a Pakistani context. Drawing on information collected from participants, the study also indicates the present status of the indigenisation of English in Pakistan. This mixed-method research used a convenience sampling strategy to collect data from 476 students through a questionnaire and from 15 teachers through semi-structured interviews. The findings of the study revealed that there is little explicit focus on culture during the teaching and learning of the English language. The collected data also show that students learn the target culture more than the local culture, mainly due to the use of foreign teaching materials. Moreover, both students and teachers seem ambivalent about the Indigenisation of English in Pakistan, although a shift in the status of English can be observed in its teaching and learning processes. The study further suggested to develop materials based on the local context in order to incorporate local culture and make English more indigenous.
... Culture is difficult to define, which makes it difficult to teach about it in second language classes. Language and culture are interwoven, it is impossible to teach a language without culture, and culture provides the required framework for language use-all ideas that are now popular in language teaching (Hall, 2021;Kramsch C, 1996). Language and pedagogical factors are two ways that culture affects language education, according to (Matrix., Genc & Bada, 2005) It has an impact on the language's semantic, pragmatic, and discourse levels linguistically. ...
The objective of this research is to find out whether or not local culture topics are preferred by the students in their prewriting activities and in writing the first draft of their essays. Bringing students closer to their own culture through the use of the Local Culture Supplementing Model or local culture as a teaching resource. Additionally, it is hoped that students would develop their essay-writing abilities or perhaps create articles on Toraja to highlight the region's distinctiveness. Students' writings and those of the younger generation can help Toraja culture advance in the writing world. Regarding the findings of this preliminary study, more than 75% of students indicated that they used the following strategies when writing essays: 1) Students needed topics on the local culture for prewriting; 2) Students require topics about local culture for drafting their essay.
... As a result, a learner's social identity is diverse and contradictory (Peirce, 1995). Learning is successful when students can construct an identity that allows them to assert their right to be heard and become the subject of the discourse (Hall, 2011). In addition, gender, socioeconomic status, and social background are all critical social identity categories in our academic and social environments because they allow people to express who they are and how they interact with others (Barrera, 2011). ...
Identity is not an invariable attribute of an individual, but it is a partially versatile, adaptable, and multi-aspect construction representative of oneself. Learning is successful when students can construct an identity that allows them to assert their right to be heard and become the subject of the discourse (Castaneda, 2011). With the shift from face-to-face conduct of classes to flexible learning modality during the pandemic, Facebook has been commonly used as an alternative platform in conducting virtual classes that becomes the digital habitat of both teachers and students. The researchers argue that Facebook's closed group creates virtual communities of practice (VCoP), which served as an efficient tool in the teaching and learning process during the time of pandemic. To date, very few studies exist that investigate the same or related focus of the present study in the Philippines. Thus, through qualitative method using hermeneutic phenomenology by conducting semi-structured interviews with 15 freshmen BA English language students. This study explores the roles established by students in their Facebook closed groups and the ways they employ in the groups to connect academically with their teachers and classmates. Findings revealed that the identities employed by students are learner-teacher interaction, sense of belongingness, and active commenter in learning tasks. The findings also revealed that the respondents used Facebook as an extension of the teaching and learning process, as compliance with academic objectives, and as an integrated online learning platform. Future studies may include other platforms such as Google classroom and Moodle for a wider scope of investigation.
... In this regard, "it is a natural pragmatic process that is applied to all language use" no matter what language it is considered to be (Widdowson, 2014, p. 235). Hall (2002) believed that the mother tongue always exists in the learner's mind in the process of learning a second language. ...
Many researchers have identified learning strategies that university students adopt to overcome difficulties in programs taught in English, among which translation is a potentially helpful one. This study explores Chinese undergraduate students’ perceptions of translation as a learning strategy when learning content in the English-medium instruction (EMI) context. Although a number of studies have investigated translation used by learners in second or foreign language acquisition, those studies were rare in the EMI context of tertiary education, particularly in China. By focusing on students’ perspectives, this study provides an insight into how translation is used to assist academic learning in EMI context and highlights its effectiveness. Data consisted of semistructured interviews with 14 volunteer Chinese undergraduates of various majors. It is found that most of the participants resorted to translation to deal with language-related problems, especially in English reading and writing activities. They usually translated utilizing various machine translators, which did not always have a fulfilling effect on students’ learning. Although the majority considered translation helpful for academic learning, it might not be the preferred solution to subject-related confusion for Chinese undergraduate students learning in the EMI context.
... what a speaker implies) and paralinguistic (e.g. pitch tone), can act as a social identity marker for an individual, which is an accumulation of the persons' experiences including age, gender, class, social identity, etc 35,36 . Such patterns of information exchange and dialogue may also affect the length of a conversation. ...
Recent immense breakthroughs in generative models such as in GPT4 have precipitated re-imagined ubiquitous usage of these models in all applications. One area that can benefit by improvements in artificial intelligence (AI) is healthcare. The note generation task from doctor-patient encounters, and its associated electronic medical record documentation, is one of the most arduous time-consuming tasks for physicians. It is also a natural prime potential beneficiary to advances in generative models. However with such advances, benchmarking is more critical than ever. Whether studying model weaknesses or developing new evaluation metrics, shared open datasets are an imperative part of understanding the current state-of-the-art. Unfortunately as clinic encounter conversations are not routinely recorded and are difficult to ethically share due to patient confidentiality, there are no sufficiently large clinic dialogue-note datasets to benchmark this task. Here we present the Ambient Clinical Intelligence Benchmark (aci-bench) corpus, the largest dataset to date tackling the problem of AI-assisted note generation from visit dialogue. We also present the benchmark performances of several common state-of-the-art approaches.
... What's acceptable/polite or not?) Designing culturally appropriate activities could afford a context for language material that does not fit the parts-of-speech classification, such as hesitation markers (e.g., mmm, well), conversation maintainers (e.g., I see, excellent, absolutely, no way). Advanced culturally based activities could engage students in individual or group research projects on literacy practices in multilingual environments, on social activities in a local community, on classroom discourse and language learning, on perceptions of identity and agency in narratives of bilingual speakers, on a bilingual child's use of language in play activities (Hall, 2013). Materials development that includes local sociocultural perspectives has multiple benefits in the teaching of language, communication, mutual understanding, tolerance, and respect for others. ...
Materials development practices, defined as anything that could be used in the English as an additional language (EAL) classroom, are a major curriculum component that is conceptualized within different curriculum models. They are further differentiated according to their linguistic and sociocultural features. Their historical development reflects changes in language development and foreign language education that resulted from local and global economic, political, scientific, ideological, and technological changes. Their current development follows the rise of English teaching as a profession, the recent access to and legitimization of spoken English, the search for enhanced teaching and learning opportunities through pragmatic analyses of authenticity, and the emergence of a new “local” that marks the end of “distance” in online materials for hybrid, blended, flipped, and distance education curricula. Overall, the issue of global vs. local materials design is shaped by the history of the profession and may resolve itself because of emerging global and technological realities.
... From a socio-cultural perspective, language and culture are inseparably interrelated in such circumstances for young EFL learners, where social interaction is the foundation for constructing language, thinking, and culture (Hall, 2013). Hirsch (1983) also defines all language as a cultural act since cultural literacy is the background knowledge required for meaning comprehension. ...
According to recent research, incorporating intercultural elements into digital learning resources used in English-language activities is considered one of the most efficacious approaches for improving intercultural literacy among young learners. However, there is limited knowledge available regarding the utilization of digital materials in developing intercultural literacy during lead-in phrases for young learners. The present study aims to fill this gap by investigating how technology can be used to create intercultural literacy among young EFL students in typical Vietnamese international elementary schools during EFL warm-up activities. This study was carried out in three stages: (1) an informal interview conducted by the researcher with two EFL teachers from two different internal schools about their teaching contexts and knowledge of intercultural literacy; (2) sixteen observations of English lessons over a semester using warm-up activities to enhance young learners’ intercultural literacy (n=65), and (3) in-depth interviews with the same two teachers. The teachers’ interactionally oriented narratives derived from the interviews and the intervened-lesson observations in their classrooms were thematized to specify the types of warm-up activities using digital resources and their functions on activating young learners’ prior knowledge of intercultural features. Meanwhile, the observation checklist was employed to determine whether these embedded features had made changes to the teachers’ teaching methodology. The paper also discussed the implications for enhancing EFL young learners’ intercultural literacy via digital learning paths informed by the teacher’s intercultural language communicative teaching approach.
... This is because of pressure that makes them nervous; however, more grammar skills, choice of words, or fluency would help them recover from nervousness or failure. According to Hall (2002), "[e]ssential to the construction and oganisation of individual language knowledge are the distribution and frequency with which sequences of actions and their specific linguistic components are encountered in these communicative activities" (p.56). It is also important that professors should scaffold students' struggles in carrying out their thoughts during the exams by having a professor' nod, a gesture of listening to students well, and other forms of non-verbal encouragement. ...
Oral exams are oftentimes a dilemma for some students despite enough training. In this paper, student participants were asked how they performed in weekly speaking-based activities and oral exams, what specific difficulties they encountered, and what ways they could develop fluency by using a Likert-based survey method with quantitative and qualitative results. It was found that the students performed moderately well. However, the professor's 1) class activity management and 2. feedback and students' 3) self-awareness, 4) oral exam challenges, and 5) speaking fluency improvement need a revisit for quality teaching and learning. The results would provide the vehicle for understanding some issues in teaching and learning which require compensatory techniques to increase their oral exam performances to an excellent rating among these factors. This paper also offers insights to guide professors or teachers in developing materials and teaching techniques so that students can further improve their fluency in the target language.
... Dalle risposte ottenute, sembra di poter affermare che la maggior parte degli intervistati ha consapevolezza che insegnare ILS non significa soltanto contribuire allo sviluppo delle abilità linguistico-comunicative dei discenti, ma anche fornire loro la competenza culturale e interculturale di una lingua straniera (tra gli altri, cfr. Hall, 2012). Il binomio linguistico-culturale, infatti costituisce uno degli aspetti portanti della didattica dell'ILS, dato che i discenti non sono esposti direttamente al contesto socioculturale della lingua di studio e «poiché la competenza pragmatica riguarda il fulcro dell'attività comunicativa, ossia l'uso concreto della lingua per agire in un contesto sociale, non stupisce che essa occupi un posto centrale in tutti i modelli di competenza comunicativa interculturale» (Mariani, 2015: 112). ...
Tra la popolazione che lascia l’Italia per risiedere all’estero ricopre un ruolo interessante la figura dell’insegnante di italiano come lingua straniera. Tale profilo rappresenta l’Italia e l’italianità non soltanto attraverso il proprio personale patrimonio linguistico e culturale, ma è depositario e portatore privilegiato della lingua e cultura italiana insegnate nelle diverse istituzioni estere. La letteratura scientifica si è interrogata su questa figura professionale in ambito L2 e in ambito LS, ma l’attenzione della ricerca si è concentrata quasi esclusivamente sul portato linguistico-educativo, privilegiando le caratteristiche professionali e formative e occupandosi in secondo piano degli aspetti relativi alla sfera più personale, di “cittadino e cittadina” più che di professionista. Questa ricerca si propone di investigare le caratteristiche che possano definire l’insegnante di italiano a stranieri a tutto tondo, con lo scopo di mettere a fuoco il profilo di chi ha il compito di veicolare la lingua italiana nel mondo. La metodologia della ricerca adottata è stata di tipo qualitativo e ci si è avvalsi di un’indagine realizzata mediante un questionario su Google Moduli, diffuso attraverso social media e inviato a vari/varie insegnanti operanti in istituzioni di diverso ordine e grado. Le risposte ottenute da un campione di centinaia di intervistati permettono di ottenere l’inquadramento di un profilo su cui vale la pena di riflettere in merito alla formazione di taglio glottodidattico e linguistico-educativo in Italia, in modo da avvicinare la formazione accademica alle esigenze professionali e alle aspirazioni individuali in merito alle scelte di vita. “I studied cinema and didn’t think i would teach Italian”. The Italian language teacher abroad: profiles, training and proposals The role of Italian teacher as foreign language that leaves Italy to teach abroad is interesting. This profile represents Italy through the own personal linguistic and cultural heritage, and it is a privileged depositary and bearer of Italian language and culture taught in many foreign institutions. Scientific literature placed question about this professional role in second language and in foreign language, but the attention of research is concentrated almost exclusively on linguistic and educative point of view, first privileging professional and educative features and after taking care of personal feeling as “citizen”. This research proposes to investigate skills of Italian teacher for foreigners, and the aim will be to define the right profile to convey Italian language around the world. The method of this research is qualitative, and survey was done through a questionnaire on Google, widespread on social media and sent to many teachers of various institutions. This research tries to focus on educational linguistics perspectives. Furthermore, obtained answers from hundreds interviewed allow a framing profile, professional needs and individual ambitions of life.
... Furthermore, this course also follows the project-based learning (PBL) approach with students carrying out a project throughout the 16-week semester. In the PBL approach, it is recommended that projects focus on identifying problems and ways of addressing them (Hall, 2012). This means that while this course is not explicitly designed according to the tenets of CP, it shares similarities with problemposing education. ...
Concepts such as active citizenship and critical consciousness are increasingly relevant to enable students to meet the challenges of tomorrow. Additionally, self-reflection is a powerful tool to observe the development of abstract concepts such as these. This qualitative exploratory study examined the extent to which university students in Colombia enhanced their critical consciousness and a sense of active citizenship through projects focused on cases of violence against social leaders in their region. During the project, 93 students in four academic cohorts wrote a total of 155 reflections related to their experiences. These were analyzed using qualitative content analysis with the AtlasTi software. The results evidenced a shift in students’ critical consciousness including a deeper understanding, a recognition of significance, an acknowledgement of privilege, and an awareness of the connection between local and global issues in relation to the topic of the project. In addition, traits of active citizenship were observed such as a sense of collective responsibility, a desire to contribute, a sense of empowerment, and growth in empathy. This research demonstrates the potential for authentic locally based project topics for developing active citizenship and enhancing critical consciousness as well as reinforcing the potential for reflections to demonstrate such development.
... The language people use often reflects their lived experience and social history (Hall, 2012); therefore, it is worth exploring the grammar and vocabulary I use in my journals. ...
An undergraduate student evaluates his four-year self-directed language learning journey at a university in Japan, and—together with the learning advisor he shared his learning journals with—puts forward a proposition about how the process of transformational learner development works. The paper begins with a year-by-year autoethnographic account of self-directed study, through analysis of journal entries. Next, the authors draw on Kato and Mynard’s (2015) Learning Trajectory in Transformational Advising to develop a revised model. This model hypothesizes that following a transformational experience, learners need to rebuild their worldview, which can be a draining process. This reconceptualization of what happens after a transformational learning experience is of use to educators and course designers, in order to ensure learners are given appropriate support, and to students in assisting them to understand their current situations.
... Many experts have cast their attention to the intrinsic relation between language and identity, such as Hyland 2010or Hall 2012. Individual identity, Bauman (2001 states, is the situated outcome of a rhetorical and interpretive process in which interactants make situationally motivated selections from socially constituted repertoires of identificational and affiliational resources and craft these semiotic resources into identity claims for presentation to others. ...
This paper focuses on the intrinsic relation between language and identity in literature. Characters in all fictional worlds have their own language and way of speaking. Their linguistic features shape their identity and characterisation and help the reader identify all characters in a literary work. Hence, this project aims at analysing the resulting identity of fictional characters with a focus on linguistic variation and the use of language. The study has two main objectives: to analyse the male characters’ speech and its evolution in the novel, and to analyse the extent to which their translation may have an impact on the characters’ literary identity. In order to achieve the aforementioned objectives, this paper analyses the language of the main male characters of the Victorian novel Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891) and its translations into Spanish. The male characters seem to function as opposition to the characterisation of the novel’s main character, Tess Durbeyfield. In addition, they use a very distinct language, which will contrast with the rest of the characters. Thus, this paper aims at verifying whether this contrast as well as their distinguishable characterisations are maintained in the target texts. As will be seen, translating distinct language is essential in fictional characteri-sation as well as in the reception of foreign literature, in this case, English literature in the Spanish context.
... Sport is one of the key spheres of social identity which manifests the way we understand and associate ourselves in terms of similarity and difference to others [Weeks, 1990]. Modern social identity theory [Hall, 2012] asserts that identity is expressed through language. It is an active linguistic and semiotic negotiation of the individual's relationship to society and its constructs. ...
Nationalism and sport are often interwoven and, subsequently, the competitive nature of sport competition can also mirror the contentious nature between international athletes. Evidence of such inter-group conflict may manifest itself through ethnolinguistics and is reinforced through social identity theory. Data analysis for the English and Russian languages was evaluated in four categories. Data includes Word Association Network entries for the four opposites of the sport event schema in Russian and English: 1) strong – weak; 2) success – failure; 3) ahead – behind; 4) winner – loser. Semantic analysis established asymmetries of the lexical oppositions relative to sport competition, which reinforce the manifestation of social identity in ways that elevate the status of one group while degrading the perception of the other. The authors believe that this study exposes that the congruence between semantics and ethno-linguistics which is rooted in social identity. The four authors have equally contributed to this study. The contribution included a literature review on the subject of the study and showing how rivalry in sport is influenced by social identity and ethno-linguistics, which helped to identify the dearth of research into cultural implications underlying sports. The authors also collected dictionary definitions of the items of the sports event schema and performed analysis of the data in the English and Russian languages.
... (Allen et al., 1984). As Hall (2002) states, collecting and analyzing data through ethnographic methods is relatively new in applied linguistics. It is used to find information more clearly about the implementation of communicative approach principles in teaching Sunrise. ...
In modern education, English language teaching has been going through various methods and approaches stating the journey with grammar- translation method, direct method, audio- lingual method, content-based, task-based and participatory approaches, and reaching communicative language teaching (CLT). Having appeared since the 80s, CLT still maintains its popularity in English language teaching contexts. It is one of the most popular and dominant approaches used in the world of teaching English. In Kurdistan, CLT has been used and adopted in the 2000s. English courses have been redesigned following the communicative approach principles. EFL student-teachers are supposed to implement CLT while they practice teaching during the assigned period of time. They took a course named methodology in which the focus is on CLT. In addition, fourth year students had another class called 'View' in which students visit schools to observe teaching English. To the researchers' knowledge, no studies have investigated the extent to which this approach has been applied by student-teachers at the College of Education and Basic Education. The purpose of this study is to observe and describe how the communicative approach is being applied by EFL student-teachers in high school classrooms. Therefore, the problem of the study can tacitly be expressed in the following question: to what extent the CLT approach is implemented among the student teachers in teaching Sunrise. The study is a qualitative study because it describes the student teachers' behaviors while teaching Sunrise. Two tools have been utilized. An observation scheme COLT (Communicative Orientation of Language Teaching) is used to collect the data. Nine students are observed for one lesson in 2020. Besides, a questionnaire is delivered to twenty EFL instructors at the College of Education and Basic Education. In the light of the findings, it becomes apparent that CLT is not implemented by the majority of the student teachers. Finally, Recommendations are suggested to solve this problem.
... The final aspect to be considered here is that of researcher bias. A research project should always grow from an area of interest for the researcher (Hall, 2012) and so it is inevitable that the researcher(s) undertaking a project will have views about the topic under investigation and these biases risk contaminating the data. Thus, the sets of questions for both the survey and the interview were developed and revised 8 | P a g e over some time to eliminate potential bias. ...
Teachers whose lessons are based on communicative language teaching (CLT) (Richards & McCarthy, 2006) or similar approaches are often discouraged from engaging in too much teacher talking time (TTT) for the fear that otherwise, the result might be a lecture. Nevertheless, some of them may not be aware of what or how to critically cope with that. For example, a simple internet search reveals many articles offering teachers exactly this advice, sometimes with specific percentages about the proportion of lesson time that should be taken up with teacher talk. CLT and Task-based Learning (TBL) (Nunan, 2004) are two methodologies that generally regard TTT as something to be kept to a minimum. The first one has strong leanings towards centering students and many activities using that methodology promote student-student interaction. Likewise, the latter heavily focuses on the interaction between students. In these methodologies, the amount of TTT might equate to a lack of learning opportunities for learners; hence lessons may be regarded as less effective if TTT is deemed high (Paul, 2003:76 (Esfandiari & Knight, 2013:20-21). However, limiting teacher talk runs the risk of 'underestimat[ing] the value of the teacher as both a source of input and an interactional pattern' (Thornbury, 2006:225). In light of these points, this paper proposes a reflective analysis concerning when and how to make sound use of TTT, as the sole reduction of TTT does not amount to an automatic improvement of productivity in a lesson (Hitotuzi, 2005:105) In this paper, we address a series of research questions regarding what teachers think about the amount of TTT they engage in. We draw on qualitative data from an online survey and the transcripts of follow-up interviews of survey participants who consented to a short, semi-structured interview with one of the researchers. In both the survey and the interviews, our main interest is how the participants themselves view the amount of time they spend talking in lessons. We ask them how much they believe their teachers talk during their lessons and whether they are happy with that amount. In addition, we are interested in whether specific lesson stages influence the amount of importance TTT has for the practitioner-participants. We also explore what might have contributed to the formation of the participant's views, including initial teacher education or continuing professional development activities.
The article discusses the enhancement of students’ research competence within the context of teaching the Kazakh language. Developing learners’ research skills is becoming a significant factor in higher education system. This research seeks to undertake a detailed examination of students’ attitudes toward the Kazakh language, identify existing obstacles, and design effective strategies to assist the development of research competency within the context of Kazakh language and culture studies. This study examines both foreign and local studies to provide a methodology for teaching languages and culture. It also attempts to promote a successful integration of research approaches into the learning process for Kazakh language acquisition. This study paper applies a qualitative method, using semi-structured interviews, to collect thorough data on students’ opinions and experiences with developing research abilities while learning the Kazakh language. The methodology intends to explore the many features of competence, language acquisition issues, and the significance of research activities in improving students’ language proficiency.
The growth of English language learning in Pesantren (Islamic Boarding School) leads to a challenge as the subject contains the culture of target language. Integrating English language instruction into traditional Pesantren education requires a comprehensive understanding to avoid conflicts with religious values and traditional pedagogical methods. There are cultural constraints as human relationships in Pesantren based on social hierarchies which embed the philosophy of “total obedience” affecting the students who tend to be less engaged with the material and less motivated to express their thought. Therefore, this paper explains teaching culture at English language learning in Pesantren in Indonesia. This conceptual paper aims at designing the material and teaching plan of English learning for the students at the age of the first year of secondary school. They share the same culture as the Javanese ethnic group, with the same local and national language. Their level of CEFR (Common European Framework of Reference for Languages) is A2 - Elementary English as they have been learning English since the late year of primary schools. The sequence of tasks in cultural teaching in English language teaching comprises of four stages; preparation, collection, implementation and reflection stage.
This chapter explores the determinative influence that Chinese culture exerts on the syntax of the Chinese language. Meaning conveyed in Chinese character writing depends as much on context as on syntactic organization. Sentences are constructed as such and follow one another in an order that often lacks grammatical focus. By contrast, in Western languages the grammatical relationships are analytical: Main sentences and subordinate clauses of a sentence are arranged according to syntactical rules. I argue that the uniqueness of Chinese language syntax derives from the Chinese view of the cosmos, that is, spontaneously generated and self-regulating with no creator. In such a universe, the relations between the parts and the whole, and between yin and yang are reciprocal. Applying this concept to the Chinese language, a sentence often has more than one verb (predicate), which builds up a sequence of actions, each related to others of equal importance. Some paragraphs are punctuated solely by commas instead of periods. Chinese linguistic scholars have called this syntactic peculiarity scattered perspectives, noting a parallel in traditional Chinese painting. Parallels can also be seen in traditional architecture and in classical novel structure. Becoming familiar with cultural context helps achieve greater success in language learning.
explores the complex relationship between cultural diversity and language acquisition in English teaching. It examines how diverse cultural backgrounds intricately shape learners' approaches to and proficiency in English. Applying cross-cultural perspectives becomes necessary to optimize learners' potential and enrich their English language learning journey. The discussion emphasized the importance of recognizing and valuing diverse cultural perspectives in the classroom. It explores strategies for creating an inclusive learning environment that promotes intercultural dialogue among students, promoting a deeper understanding of linguistic and cultural diversity. By recognizing the profound impact of cultural backgrounds on language learning, educators can tailor their approaches to cater to diverse learners, thus enhancing the overall effectiveness of English language education. This abstract underlines the importance of integrating multicultural perspectives into pedagogical practices to create an enriching and inclusive space for language acquisition.
French-language textbooks have long faced criticism for their limited use of authentic resources and their failure to meaningfully incorporate cultural elements into language teaching, letting foreign language learners struggle to grasp the non-literal aspects of language, known as the “invisible culture.” These hidden cultural components encompass beliefs, values, social norms, and non-verbal cues, influencing communication and language use. Experienced language users may take these elements for granted, making them challenging for learners to grasp without adequate exposure to French. Understanding these hidden cultural elements is essential for successful language acquisition and cross-cultural communication, enabling learners to genuinely and authentically interpret and express themselves. Without positive evidence of a concept’s culturally specific values, learners must rely on cultural knowledge from their first language/culture, which results in the direct transfer of cultural assumptions which hinders their ability to make authentic sense of the target language. Taking inspiration from the Cultura project, this study uses the multiliteracies framework to bridge the gap between first and second-language intercultural representations, helping learners develop semantic aspects of cross-cultural literacy through visualization tasks using Instagram, a photo-based social media platform. Intermediate-level French students provided written impressions of three culturally specific word pairs: snack/goûter, suburb/banlieue, and freedom/liberté. They searched for these concepts on Instagram, selected images that best represented their understanding, and created e-posters. Participants then analyzed and compared these e-posters across languages, refining their definitions during discussions. This approach successfully developed certain semantic aspects of the invisible culture within the target language, highlighting the benefits of exposing learners to diverse text types.
This study examined how young people perceive the revitalization of indigenous languages in multicultural environments. The research team gathered data from a stratified random sample of 200 participants hailing from diverse rural and urban areas in Ghana and Sierra Leone. Employing a convergent parallel mixed-methods design, the study employed questionnaires and interviews to gauge local community perceptions toward indigenous language revitalization in Ghana and Sierra Leone.
The team also conducted focus groups to gain qualitative insights. The two data sets were analyzed using both descriptive and inferential statistics, as well as thematic qualitative analysis to reveal the perspectives of study participants on the
importance of indigenous language in maintaining cultural legacy. The findings underscored the significance of indigenous languages beyond communication, emphasizing their exposure to external threats such as cultural assimilation and the dominance of foreign languages. The research team calls on the Ministries in charge of culture in Ghana and Sierra Leone to prioritize initiatives aimed at recovering and safeguarding indigenous languages, as a critical step for cultural transmission and preservation.
As discussed in Chap. 1, Syria and Malaysia exhibit significant disparities across various dimensions such as the ethnic composition of their populations, geographical location as well as linguistic and cultural attributes.
The process through which systemic evidence about social processes can be traced is known as discourse analysis (DA). DA examines speech, writing and other signs to elucidate different social functions. It studies language in use in a particular social and cultural context. Through this a social identity also emerges and we assign ourselves to different groups with our values, beliefs and attitudes that are projected in our speech. According to Ochs (1993: 288) social identity is "a cover term for a range of social personae, including social statuses, roles, positions, relationships, and institutional and other relevant community identities one may attempt to claim or assign in the course of social life". This paper analyses an interview of a Chinese university teacher of the Department of Computer Science, Pennsylvania State University taken by a M.A. student of Applied Linguistics from the Mainland China of the same university and shows how sociocultural perspective on human action/words influences language use and vice versa and construct social identity.
El objetivo de esta investigación es revisar el concepto de literatura con el fin de elaborar una definición operativa para los curricula de enseñanza del inglés (EI) lo suficientemente amplia como para que incluya tanto los textos canónicos como las obras contemporáneas, disidentes y/o de vanguardia que probablemente serían excluidas por los círculos literario-educativos más conservadores. Dada la naturaleza teórica de este trabajo, hemos seguido un enfoque documental con la intención de destacar los elementos más importantes a considerar en la conformación de nuestra propuesta de re-conceptualización. Adicionalmente, sugerimos probables vías de investigación en esta área que podrían ser seguidas en otras investigaciones.
Corné van der Vyver Corné van der Vyver, Afdeling Afrikaans vir Taalonderwys, Fakulteit Opvoedkunde, Noordwes-Universiteit Opsomming Die riglyne vir luister en praat, soos voorgeskryf deur die Nasionale Kurrikulum-en Assesseringsbeleidsverklaring (DBO 2011) vir Afrikaans Huistaal Graad R tot 12 vir Suid-Afrikaanse leerders, is ondersoek. Die gevolgtrekking is gemaak dat daar 'n leemte met betrekking tot storievertelling in die kurrikulum is wat oorbrug moet word. Die doel van hierdie artikel is om vas te stel watter rol vennootskappe kan speel in die versterking van storievertelling as vaardigheid en onderrigstrategie in 'n gemeenskap. Bronfenbrenner se bio-ekologiese model was 'n nuttige instrument om meer duidelikheid te kry oor hoe die individu beïnvloed word deur die interaksie van die meso-, ekso-en makrosisteme van die individu se sosiale en kulturele konteks. Hierdie vlakke funksioneer soos 'n deurlaatbare membraan, en daarom beïnvloed die rolspelers in hierdie konteks mekaar onderling. 'n Kwalitatiewe navorsingsmetodologie is gevolg deur gebruik te maak van deelnemende aksieleer en aksie-navorsing. McAdams se lewensverhaalmodel dui daarop dat identiteit self 'n lewensverhaal is wat altyd ontwikkel, en daarom is die lewensverhale van die deelnemers deur middel van onderhoude, photovoice en joernaalinskrywings versamel om hulle eie identiteit te ontbloot. Hierdie maniere van storievertelling het die deelnemers opnuut bewus gemaak van hulle eie sterkpunte te midde van moeilike maatskaplike omstandighede en van verkeerde keuses in hulle verlede. Deur storievertelling is die deelnemers ook onderrig hoe hulle hul sterkpunte kan gebruik om ander in die gemeenskap te onderrig wanneer die deelnemers hulle eie lewensverhale vertel. Sodoende oorbrug storievertelling die gaping in die kurrikulum deur die gemeenskap opnuut bloot te stel aan storievertelling asook die waarde van storievertelling as onderrigstrategie. Op hierdie manier is storievertelling dan nie nuut vir leerders wanneer hulle daarmee gekonfronteer word op skool nie en dien die vennootskap tussen gemeenskap en skool as versterking van storievertelling as onderrigstrategie.
This research took place in the Bebuak village, Kopang district, Central Lombok regency. The purpose of this study is to describe the lexicon of verbal violence in Sasak language nicknames in Bebuak village in everyday communication. The theoretical approach used is the anthropolinguistic approach. While, the methodological approach to research uses qualitative descriptive methods. For data collection using observation, record and interview. There are two results which can be drawn from this research. The first result is verbal abuse on nicknames in the Sasak language of the Bebuak people is calssified into two form, words and phrases. The second result is classification of the nickname function which consists of three function; the function of jokes/familiarity, the function of ridicule/insulting and the function as a differentiating identity. There are three sociocultural implications for Sasak society, namely the impact related to language ethics, which if the regulation is violated will get customary sanctions in the form of apologizing (mengaksama), fines (dedaosan) and not being spoken to for acertain time (kasepekang). Second, it is related to the norms inherent in the Bebuak community, namely the fading of the culture of manners in language and third, it relates to the psychis of the victim of verbal abse nicknames, where the victim will feel inferior, uncomfortable and embarrassed when the nickname is used in public places.
The present study aims to find out the elements of the foreign culture in the English Textbooks being taught at Intermediate level in the Punjab (Pakistan)and to see how the content of English Textbooks affect the Intercultural Communicative Competence of the English language learners in EFL/ELS classes. This research is qualitative in design and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) Model has been employed to find out the socio-cultural elements in the English Textbooks. The data of the research is the randomly selected text of the English Textbook-1 which is taught in the public colleges of the Punjab at Intermediate level. It is often supposed that the English textbooks are designed and added to the curriculum of the non-native speakers of English to enable them learn English as a foreign language. This study focuses to find the elements of the foreign culture. Some randomly selected chunks from the English Textbook-1 have been analyzed on textual and contextual levels to find out the aspects of the target culture in it.
Within the conceptual framework of the Sociolinguistics of Globalization and Critical Applied Linguistics, and drawing upon poststructuralism and postmodernism, this research enquiry employs Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) to examine educational discourses in the Tunisian context. It is set to problematize language idealization and culture essentialization in the Tunisian EFL curriculum. To proceed with the investigation, intertextually-related corpora (the Education Act, the English Programs, a sample EFL textbook, EFL audio-materials) have been critically analyzed by using a number of research tools: CDA, Social Semiotic Analysis, English Users’ Nationality Analysis, Content Analysis and Postcolonial Discourse Analysis. The findings reveal a top-down macro-micro-discourse structure of homogeneity that underlies the Tunisian EFL curriculum. The overarching macro-discourse of nationalism, due to its inherent centripetal force, seems to generate micro-discourses of linguistic normativity, cultural ethnocentricity, subjugated subalternity, and as a corollary, a “curriculum of the hero.” An alternative dialectical macro-micro-discourse structure of heterogeneity, commensurate with the sociolinguistic reality of the Expanding Circle, is recommended. The alternative model, inherently centrifugal in orientation, is contingent upon a macro-discourse of transnationalism, which impacts, and is mutually impacted by micro-discourses of linguistic variation, cultural heteroglossia and agentive subalternity. The alternative macro-micro-discourse structure is expected to generate a curriculum of criticality whose cogito is “I am in the text, therefore I am.” It ultimately suggests moving towards language and culture pedagogy that empowers subalternity to speak and act outside colonial relations of power. The implications of the alternative model for reconciling acrimonious dichotomies and endorsing a pedagogy of criticality and “third space” are delineated. Limitations and recommendations for future research are outlined to open up new pathways for further interrogation of the Tunisian EFL curriculum in order to expand an area of research that is still underexplored.
Key words: language, culture, curriculum, discourse, homogeneity, heterogeneity, (de)idealization, (trans)national paradigm, deconstruction, multi-inter-trans-culturality, apriority, posteriority, intertextuality, hegemony, subalternity, Expanding Circle, hybridity, third space, mimicry
English language education nowadays is not merely about the instruction and acquisition of linguistic knowledge and skills. Instead, it has progressed to the real-life applications of the target language, which further requires a mastery of cultural knowledge and skills. In terms of culture, English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners, compared to native speakers of English, own their unique native culture. Yet, since language teachers tend to focus on the delivery of English cultural knowledge, EFL learners' native culture is sometimes shadowed in the mainstream English classrooms worldwide. To this end, this exploratory paper aims to advocate attention to the importance of EFL learners' native culture awareness and share some practical teaching and learning experiences in an English course called Multimedia and Foreign Language Learning. The paper outlines the pedagogical design of the course in China, providing classroom examples and practical suggestions to course designers, educators and instructors. We expect to give insights into integrating native culture into foreign language education in university settings. Keywords: native culture awareness, project-based learning, pedagogical design, EFL learners Language and culture are inseparable (Kramsch, 2013). Language, in effect, is one of the most essential representations for understanding people's customs and beliefs (Blum, 1981). Language in EFL learning should never be limited to our traditional
O artigo objetiva refletir sobre a relação entre língua(gem) e cultura, em especial no que se refere ao processo de ensino-aprendizagem de Língua Inglesa, a partir da visão de pais, professores, diretores e alunos de escolas públicas da rede municipal de ensino de Sinop, uma cidade localizada ao norte do estado de Mato Grosso, que o caracterizam importante, já que veem o conhecimento desta língua, não só como um instrumento vantajoso na inserção ao mercado de trabalho, mas também, como bem cultural.
Jaime Bayly se encuentra entre los escritores más destacados de la narrativa peruana contemporánea y es considerado pionero del discurso literario no heteronormativo. Su novela "La noche es virgen", objeto de varios estudios, cuenta las experiencias de un periodista bisexual en el ambiente limeño de los años noventa. Este artículo propone su lectura en clave autobiográfica para identificar los espacios simbólicos en los que se pueden observar infracciones conscientes de las normas sociales y culturales por parte del protagonista. Todo ello con el objetivo final de determinar las dificultades que enfrenta Tomasz Pindel, el traductor de la obra al polaco, describir sus estrategias e indicar las consecuencias de sus decisiones que determinaron la recepción de la novela en Polonia.
In this chapter we contextualise, describe and discuss a language learning and teaching project designed and implemented at the Language Centre of the London School of Economics and Political Science. The project entitled En un lugar de Loñdres is based on the use of London’s linguistic landscape as a source of authentic input in second language acquisition. We explain the rationale and context for using the study of the linguistic landscape as learning input and outline the development of learning activities designed to facilitate the learners’ understanding and engagement with the linguistic landscape and London’s Spanish speaking communities. We conclude that the project succeeded in enhancing language learning and contributed to learners’ political and social awareness.
This study reports on successful and unsuccessful efforts at communication between teachers and students who do not share a common language. A top-down processing model is proposed to account for the phenomena, with scripts the highest level and code the lowest. Significantly, commonalities in scripts allowed interpretation of meaning with minimal understanding of linguistic forms. Conversely, communication was impeded by cultural differences in scripts for school, including setting, roles and responsibilities, activity organization, curriculum sequence and content, and rules/expectations for behavior. The structure of classroom interaction provided constraints on intentions and expectations which facilitated communication in this setting.
Research on classroom discourse presents a bleak picture. Teachers dominate talk. Students may ask procedural questions and be procedurally eugaged, but they are rarely substantively engaged. To elucidate conditions that do encourage substantively eugaged student talk, this study examined the discourse in an English as a second or other language (ESoL) classroom in a best-case scenario that contrasted dramatically with more typical school settings. It sampled student critical turns (SCTs) across a six-week literature-rich science unit. Each SCT was a longer conversational turn in which students responded to and in turn elicited response from other students. Each SCT was coded in terms of (1) participant roles and (2) communicative Junctions. Results indicate that SCTs most often functioned to facilitate interpretation. They did so by elaborating on previous utterances. The teacher created a climate that engendered SCTs by similarly facilitating interpretation. This facilitation was achieved by strategic placement of questions. Because findings show that the teacher played a crucial role in extended dialogue among students, they challenge research and theory that denigrate teacher talk in a blanket fashion.
Classrooms around the world are becoming more multilingual and teachers in all subject areas are faced with new challenges in enabling learners' academic language development without losing focus on content. These challenges require new ways of conceptualizing the relationship between language and content as well as new pedagogies that incorporate a dual focus on language and content in subject matter instruction. This article describes three professional development contexts in the U.S., where teachers have engaged in language analysis based on functional linguistics (for example, Halliday & Hasan, 1989; Christie, 1989) that has given them new insights into both content and learning processes. In these contexts, teachers in history classrooms with English Language Learners and teachers of languages other than English in classrooms with heritage speakers needed support to develop students' academic language development in a second language. The functional linguistics metalanguage and analysis skills they developed gave them new ways of approaching the texts read and written in their classrooms and enabled them to recognize how language constructs the content they are teaching, to critically assess how the content is presented in their teaching materials, and to engage students in richer conversation about content.
This article describes a longitudinal ethnographic research project in a Grade 1 classroom enrolling L2 learners and Anglophones. Using a community-of-practice perspective rarely applied in L2 research, the author examines three classroom practices that she argues contribute to the construction of L2 learners as individuals and as such reinforce traditional second language acquisition perspectives. More importantly, they serve to differentiate participants from one another and contribute to community stratification. In a stratified community in which the terms of stratification become increasingly visible to all, some students become defined as deficient and are thus systematically excluded from just those practices in which they might otherwise appropriate identities and practices of growing competence and expertise.
Health care professionals use case presentations to communicate patient information among themselves during treatment and management. It is a critical genre of performance for medical residents to master for professional success. This genre is characterized by uncertainty and unique rhetorical moves, grammar, vocabulary and discourse strategies. As the format is established but not universal, international medical graduates (IMGs) in the United States anecdotally report case presentations to be the most difficult of communication tasks due to their lack of familiarity with the genre, problems with grammar and vocabulary, and the inability to organize, summarize or articulate their findings into the prescribed, interactive format. Many report crippling anxiety. For communication skills trainers, reviewing the literature in health communication and applied linguistics greatly informs the training of case presentation delivery. This paper describes the communicative tasks required of residents, followed by the components and genre particular to case presentations and how the task is perceived by residents compared to their attending faculty. Next, it explains the linguistic features unique to the task. Finally, it describes an individualized program established to train IMGs to approach the case presentation with the attitude of confidence and the deliberate manner of speaking required for professional discourse.
In this commentary, I consider variability as an ordinary and irremediable feature related to the indexicality not only of transcripts but first of all of transcribing. In this sense, it is not just a characteristic of transcripts as texts, which can be assessed in a kind of philological comparison comparing formal features of autonomous and fixed textual objects, but a characteristic of transcribing as a situated practice. Practices are irremediably indexical, reflexively tied to the context of their production and to the practical purposes of their accomplishment. Thus, a transcript is an evolving flexible object; it changes as the transcriber engages in listening and looking again at the tape, endlessly checking, revising, reformatting it. Transcribing relies in a fundamental way not only on the possibility of fixing the relevant details in a complex multilayered representation but also on the possibility of manipulating them, playing them again and again, at different paces, positions, fragments, while transcribing their finely tuned coordination, their synchronization, the fine articulation between different projections and sequential implicativenesses. These manipulations are one of the ways in which transcribing is accomplished as a situated practice.
Repetition is often associated with traditional teaching drills. However, it has been documented how repetitions are exploited by learners themselves (Duff, 2000). In a study of immersion classroom conversations, it was found that playful recyclings were recurrent features of young learners’ second language repertoires. Such joking events were identified on the basis of the participants’ displayed amusement, and they often involved activity-based jokes (Lampert, 1996) and meta pragmatic play, that is, joking about how or by whom something is said. Two types of recyclings: intertextual play and role appropriations were both important features in informal classroom entertainment and in the formation of a community of learners (cf. Rogoff, 1990). In a broad sense, both types of joking contained subversive elements in that they created play zones or ‘time-out’ (cf. Goffman, 1959; Jefferson, 1996) within classroom activities. Moreover, role appropriations were subversive in that they inverted classroom hierarchies.
This paper explores L2 novices' ways of soliciting teacher attention, more specifically, their summonses. The data are based on detailed analyses of video recordings in a Swedish language immersion classroom. The analyses illuminate the lexical shape of summonses in conjunction with prosody, body posture, gestures, and classroom artefacts. As demonstrated, a simple structure of summoning provided a handy method for soliciting and establishing the teachers attention, and facilitated the novices' participation in classroom activities from early on. Importantly, however, the local design of the summonses was influenced by the competitive multiparty classroom setting. The analyses illustrate how the novices upgraded their summonses by displaying a range of affective stances. Different aspects of the students' embodied actions were employed as ways of indexing affective stances, for example 'tired', 'resigned', or 'playful', that in the local educational order created methods that invited the teachers attention and conversational uptake. These locally available resources allowed children to upgrade their summonses and to indicate their communicative projects, in spite of their limited Swedish (L2) resources. The findings are discussed in terms of their implications for understanding participation in L2 classroom interactions as being a matter of delicately calibrated collaborative accomplishments.
In this paper, I present a fine-grained analysis of a videotaped lesson segment of a Form 2 (Grade 8) English reading lesson in a school located in a working class residential area in Hong Kong. The excerpt was taken from a larger corpus of similar lesson data videotaped in the class over three consecutive weeks. The analysis shows how these limited-English-speaking Cantonese school children subverted an English reading lesson that had a focus on practising skills of factual information extraction from texts and negotiated their own preferred comic-style narratives by artfully making use of the response slots of the IRF (Initiation-Response-Feedback) discourse format used in the lesson. The analysis shows the students' playful and artful verbal practices despite the alienating school reading curriculum which seems to serve to produce an uncritical labour. The implications for teaching are discussed.
The impact of information and communication technologies (ICTs) is changing the nature of literary narratives for children and the contexts in which they experience and respond to such narratives outside of school contexts. However, in the main, teachers do not feel confident or comfortable in the world of digital multimedia. Children's literature can bridge this intergenerational digital divide in the English classroom. This paper introduces frameworks that may assist teachers in negotiating curricular and pedagogic approaches with children using digital resources for developing literary understanding and literacy learning.
This paper is based on an ethnographic project carried out in primary classrooms in the North West of England. The focus of the project was on ways in which the 'roles' of new bilingual classroom assistants were being defined through the organisational practices and communicative routines of daily life in these classrooms (practices and routines primarily orchestrated by monolingual class teachers). We looked at these classroom processes by incorporating insights from classroom observation, from participants' own accounts and from our own analyses of audio and video-recordings of different types of teaching/learning events. We present an account of bilingual teaching/learning events in which the bilingual assistants were able to use the children's home or community language and draw on 'funds of knowledge' (Moll et al., 1992) associated with worlds beyond the school. In our analysis of these events, we focus in particular on: ways in which they drew on the bilingual resources within their communicative repertoire in negotiating their relationship with the children; ways in which they linked home and school contexts for learning; and verbal and non-verbal ways in which knowledge of the world beyond the school was contextualised in classroom discourse.
This paper suggests elements of an agenda for future sociolinguistics among minority groups, by seeing it as a mutual relationship that involves benefits to researcher and researched. We focus on two aspects of the relationship. One is the political, economic and social benefits that can accrue to a minority group as a result of the research. Research planned and conducted along with the minority group can result in knowledge and other outcomes that are of direct benefit to the group, and can help to ensure that short-term advantages are not gained at the cost of long-term problems. The other is the role of ethical commitment in the research itself. Universities and other bodies have designed ethical procedures that can be used as more than restrictions or an administrative hurdle. They can, in fact, operate as a blueprint for good-quality research. We argue that as sociolinguists we must engage, through commitment to the people we study, with the moral and ethical issues, which are inseparable from the study itself. Such engagement results in more profound scholarship, since as they are expressed by and within the community's discourse, the resulting descriptions will exemplify more closely the issues we are trying to describe.
In this article, we investigate how mentoring relationships founded on inquiry as stance can work to emphasize the conditions that promote the development of teachers of science as inquiry. Drawing on data collected through semi‐structured interviews, we have developed two narrative case studies based on the two mentoring relationships that exist between three teachers: Will, Dan, and Cathy. Will entered the teaching profession in 1966, and has acted as a mentor for Dan since he commenced teaching in 1982. Similarly, Dan has mentored Cathy since she commenced teaching in 1999. By following two generations of mentoring relationships, we have gained insights into the potential for inquiry as stance to assist the promotion of the professional development standards of the National Science Education Standards. Our data and analysis clearly point to the need for mentoring relationships to exist within larger inquiry‐based communities if they are to produce rapid and sustained changes to teacher practice.
Educational practices are constituted through the junction of cultural artifacts, beliefs, values, and normative routines known as activity systems. Classroom activity is a particularly important nexus for understanding cultural processes in that thinking and doing are linked in social practice. An activity‐based, problem‐oriented approach to understand development in school contexts focuses analysis on the cultural practices of learning environments. Studying classrooms and other learning contexts as cultural activity reveals how different microcultures for teaching and learning emerge, and it links forms of participation to the kinds of cognitive forms individuals construct to accomplish cognitive and social functions. Ongoing studies of the literacy practices of formal and nonformal learning environments serve as the context for examining culture in educational activity.
Researchers in the field of academic literacies have shown that, for many students, entering higher education involves a renegotiation of identity, that the education system privileges certain literacy practices over others, and that studying seems to have little in common with the ways of knowing, valuing and communicating which students bring with them from other domains of their lives. This lack of relation raises an important theoretical issue for literacy studies: if literacy practices are socioculturally situated, to what extent are the boundaries between one context and another impermeable? In order to address this question, this paper draws on research in the broader context of post-compulsory education in the UK, investigating the interface between students' literacy practices in their lives beyond college, and those involved in participation, learning and demonstrating learning on their vocational and academic courses. It examines boundary crossings firstly between the literacy practices of research and of teaching in the collaborative research methodology, and secondly between literacy practices in different domains of students' lives. It argues that the characteristics of literacy practices with which students identify in their lives beyond college can be harnessed as resources for learning and for transforming the communicative landscape of further and higher education.
This article analyses the European Union's Futurum discussion forum. The EU hoped that Futurum would help close the acknowledged gap between institutions and citizens by facilitating a virtual, multilingual, transnational public sphere. Futurum was both an interesting example of how the EU's language policies shape the structure of deliberative experiments and of a public debate about their relative value. We combine various quantitative measures of the discussions with a critical discourse analysis of a thread which focused on language policies. We found that although the debates were predominantly in English, where a thread started in a language other than English, linguistic diversity was more prominent. The discourse analysis showed that multilingual interaction was fostered, and that the debate about language policies is politically and ideologically charged.
This volume contributes to the burgeoning field of research on stance by offering a variety of studies based in natural discourse. These collected papers explore the situated, pragmatic, and interactional character of stancetaking, and present new models and conceptions of stance to spark future research. Central to the volume is the claim that stancetaking encompasses five general principles: it involves physical, attitudinal and/or moral positioning; it is a public action; it is inherently dialogic, interactional, and sequential; it indexes broader sociocultural contexts; and it is consequential to the interactants. Each paper explores one or more of these dimensions of stance from perspectives including interactional linguistics and conversation analysis, corpus linguistics, language description, discourse analysis, and sociocultural linguistics. Research languages include conversational American English, colloquial Indonesian, and Finnish. The understanding of stance that emerges is heterogeneous and variegated, and always intertwined with the pragmatic and social aspects of human conduct.
This chapter addresses a number of issues which relate to the construction over time and space of professional discourses within the practice of nursing. Discussion of these issues draws on the now well-established construct of communities of practice, first developed by Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger (Lave and Wenger, 1991; Wenger, 1998) and now extensively adopted across a range of social, educational, human and management disciplines. One objective of the chapter is to draw on the discussion of nursing practice to offer a critical perspective on this construct.
In this chapter, I argue that elements of theories developed within the field of the critical and social study of language could develop the theory of communities of practice, by offering a clearer understanding of the role of language within the process of negotiation of meaning. We have already mentioned in the introduction the need for a more fully developed theory of language within the theory of communities of practice. This chapter explores models from critical social linguistics which elaborate notions left unexplained in Wenger's model and offer theoretical and methodological tools for addressing some significant issues which remain unexplored, demonstrating this by reanalysing some of the example material from Wenger's 1998 book. PRACTICE AND MEANING I will begin by exploring the place of language within the theory as it currently stands, particularly the implicit importance of language as a form of meaning making within Wenger's development of the concept of practice. The concept of ‘practice’ is central to his conceptualisation of learning in communities. He defines practice as “doing, but not just doing in and of itself. It is doing in a historical and social context that gives structure and meaning to what we do” (1998:47). This concept of ‘social practice’ offers a way of analysing human activity which brings together the cognitive and the social aspects of human existence.
One of the most cited features of the supposed migrant “ethnolect” in Australian English is the pronunciation of word-final -er. This article presents data from sociolinguistic interviews that support the view that there is a pronunciation difference between Anglo and non-Anglo speakers in Sydney, and that this difference is most pronounced in Greek and, to a lesser extent, Lebanese speakers. The variant the Greek and Lebanese speakers tend to use more than the Anglo speakers is backed and lengthened, and commonly used in words with final High Rising Tone (HRT). There is some evidence that Greeks are leading a change to a more backed variant. I show that length, backing, and HRT make up a style of speaking that I call “new (er)”. This style is indexical of being Greek for some, but more basically creates a stance of authoritative connection. These findings are significant for understanding the spread of new linguistic features, and how the meanings of some linguistic variables contribute to linguistic change.
In this article, Elizabeth Marshall and Kelleen Toohey use critical discourse analysis to examine educators- efforts to incorporate funds of knowledge from the communities and families of Punjabi Sikh students in a Canadian elementary school. Using MP3 players, students first recorded and then translated their grandparents- stories of life in India into picture books to serve as cultural resources in their school community. In retelling their grandparents- stories, students drew on a multiplicity of ancestral, globalized, and Western discourses in their textual and pictorial illustrations. The authors examine what happens when the funds of knowledge that students bring to school contradict normative, Western understandings of what is appropriate for children and how school might appropriately respond to varying community perceptions of good and evil.
The abstract for this document is available on CSA Illumina.To view the Abstract, click the Abstract button above the document title.
This study investigates the interface of recent macro- and microlevel changes in Hungary by examining transformations in educational discourse in the context of history lessons at secondary schools with English immersion (dual-language, or DL) programs. The macrolevel changes are linked to sociopolitical transformations in the late 1980s and the rejection of Soviet-oriented policies and the discourse of authoritarianism. Parallel microlevel changes have also surfaced in the innovative English-medium sections of some experimental DL schools. These changes have come about with the breakdown of a traditional, very demanding genre of oral assessment known as the felelés (recitation) and its replacement by short student lectures and other, more open-ended discussion activities. This ethnographic study explores the discursive constitution of English-medium classrooms and the socialization of students attending one progressive Eastern European secondary school into the use of a foreign language to discuss historical material. The research provides a contextualized analysis of classroom discourse practices by examining some of the sociocultural, linguistic, and academic knowledge structures that are integral to and instilled within one curricular area and school system in the wake of political and educational reform.
This article combines the perspectives of bilingual teachers, teacher assistants, school administrators and an outside researcher on the 10-year development of a K-3 Navajo bilingual/bicultural program at Rough Rock Elementary School. Growing out of an original collaboration with the Kamehameha Early Education Program, Rough Rock expanded KEEP’s notion of cultural compatibility to include instructional content rooted in the local language and culture. Here we examine transformations in curriculum and pedagogy emerging from the Rough Rock program, and the social and political process by which those instructional changes occurred. Lasting instructional reforms, we argue, involve more than changes in curriculum and pedagogy, but must also reconstitute the relations of indigenous educators to the larger school power structure. Bilingual teachers must “own” the program and their work in it; change must occur from the “inside out.” We conclude with a consideration of the implications of the Rough Rock program for Navajo and other indigenous schools.
This ethnographic report “thickly describes” (Geertz, 1973) the participation of ESL children in the daily classroom events of a mainstream first-grade classroom. Data for this paper come from a yearlong study of one classroom in an international school on a college campus in the U.S. Using a language socialization and micropolitical orientation, the report describes how, through socially significant interfactional routines, the children and other members of the classroom jointly constructed the ESL children's identities, social relations, and ideologies as well as their communicative competence in that setting. The sociocultural ecology of the community, school, and classroom shaped the kinds of microinteractions that occurred and thus the nature of their language learning over the course of the year.
After a brief overview of the reasons for using “sociocultural,” as opposed to “cultural‐historical,” “sociohistorical,” or some other term, it is argued that an adequate account of the agenda for sociocultural research must be grounded in the notion of “mediated action.” Drawing on the writings of Vygotsky, Bakhtin, and others it is argued that mediated action must be understood as involving an irreducible tension between the mediational means provided by the sociocultural setting, on the one hand, and the unique, contextualized use of these means in carrying out particular concrete actions, on the other. In this view, any attempt to reduce the basic unit of analysis of mediated action to the mediational means or to the individual in isolation is misguided. It is suggested that by using mediated action as a unit of analysis the human sciences will be in a better position to address some of today's most pressing social issues.
The workplace is one of many sociocultural contexts where novices within a culture, like immigrant women, become socialized into new discourse systems and cultures. As second language (L2) speakers, the process of language socialization in the workplace involves double socialization: as a novice in a new work environment and as novice operating within a new language and culture. Focusing on L2 requesting behaviour, this ethnographic case study deals with the important issue of the pragmatics of higher-stakes social communications. The contextualized examples provided here illustrate how, through exposure and participation in social interactions and with the assistance of experts or more competent peers, an immigrant woman came to internalize target language and cultural norms and develop communicative competence in ESL in the workplace. More specifically, she learned to make requests more directly than she had been accustomed by adopting certain sociolinguistic strategies and expressions. The research on which this paper is based represents a new direction in TESOL workplace-oriented research, combining interlanguage. pragmatics, ethnography, and language socialization.
With the rapid expansion of communication, the mobility of people and the expansion of immigration, it is generally agreed, in language education, that ‘intercultural communicative competence’ (ICC) should be an essential component of ‘language competence’ or vice versa. It also implies that there could not be intercultural communication without the integration of intercultural competence in language teaching. But, there is a need to study this issue logically and coherently. Accordingly, this article reviews existing theories and models. It also proposes a conceptual framework for the development of ICC which involves cognitive, affective and psychological factors. The three essential domains of ICC are: intercultural knowledge, intercultural skills and intercultural being. They capture the interrelations that are embedded in language, thought and culture. The paper argues that language competence needs to address not only the linguistic, sociolinguistic and pragmatic/discourse elements of langue but should integrate (inter)cultural interactions and transactions between individuals in the learning process.
The paper highlights certain significant limitations of current cross-cultural communication theory through an examination of an episode from the film Crosstalk. It demonstrates the need to go beyond the text to both nonverbal social and mental dimensions, to distinguish between surface levels of apparent misunderstanding and underlying levels where participants remain finely tuned in to what is going on, and to extend accommodation and repair notions by, among other things, better recognizing hearers’ roles in exchanges. It also introduces a new analytical notion, ‘communicative entrepreneurship’ All of this, it argues, helps focus meaningfully on the issues of ideology, power, etc. that most centrally account for communication failures. To ignore these issues is, in theoretical terms, to lose descriptive and explanatory adequacy, in practical terms, to divert attention to symptoms and their correction, and, in moral terms, to legitimize behavior destructive of communication, thereby relieving narticinants of their all-important responsibility to change it.
In most communicative interactions, linguistic and nonlinguistic elements are intertwined and difficult to isolate analytically. Here, interaction between speakers of mutually unintelligible languages has been analyzed to identify what factors contribute to the successful negotiation of meaning in the absence of a common linguistic code. The primary data base is drawn from 30 hours of videotape which focused on two Chinese-speaking children in a nursery-school setting interacting with English-speaking children and adults. Evidence for the priority of top-down processing is presented, with successful interaction crucially determined in the first instance by appropriate apprehension of situation, strongly influenced by possession - of shared scripts for overall situational purpose, act sequences, and roles. Within comprehensible situations, genre-specific discourse structures are shown to provide scaffolding by further constraining possible interpretations of sequence, role, and intent. Finally, the successful joint construction of referential meaning is seen to involve the application of norms of interpretation within a comprehensible contextual framework of situation, structure, and intent. Prior experience is found to contribute to all levels of successful interpretation and negotiation of meaning in dilingual discourse, illustrating both the importance of nonlinguistic schemata to the inferencing processes involved, and the developmental and language-independent nature of these aspects of communicative competence.
Workplace narratives are one means of satisfying the complex demands of identity construction at work. Following reference to the relevant literature, this article discusses the range of narratives identified in our extensive New Zealand corpus of workplace interactions, distinguishing between more socially-oriented ‘workplace anecdotes’, and more transactionally-oriented ‘working stories’. While both orientations are often relevant, the distinction is useful in examining how different types of narratives function in the construction of diverse facets of an individual's identity. In the final section, one particular workplace narrative illustrates the complexities involved in accomplishing a narrative in a formal meeting, and the analysis explores how two members of a senior management team use the narrative to negotiate contrasting aspects of their professional and social workplace identities.
In this article I outline the case for methodological awareness as an essential component of the craft skill that qualitative researchers typically bring to their work. This is opposed to the view that good quality research can be produced by opting for the criteria promoted by one variety, ‘paradigm’, ‘moment’ or school, arguing instead that valuable lessons for research practice can be learned from each one. The ‘craft skill’ conception of research suggests that researchers should regard their activities as relatively autonomous from the need to resolve philosophical disputes. Methodological awareness, involving the capacity to anticipate the consequences of methodological decisions while carrying out a research project, can be acquired from exposure to almost any intelligent methodological discussion, as well as from critical reading of existing research studies. In making this case a summary of historical moments in qualitative research, and of key ideas presented by selected qualitative ‘criteriologists’ is provided.
This paper extends the notion of Language Awareness to include intercultural communicative awareness. The interconnectedness of language and cultural processes is illustrated through a discussion of metapragmatic awareness. The second half of the paper looks at the potential for misunderstandings in intercultural communication and charts some of the attempts to develop educational programmes and enhance intercultural awareness.
Fieldnotes and their processes tend to be implicit endeavours in the nursing and midwifery literature. The opportunity, therefore, to build an understanding of the social practice of this part of the research process is lost. This paper explores fieldnote generation in an ethnographic doctoral study examining the building of research capacity. Ethnographers claim that data is generated collaboratively. In this study, data was collected from two fields of 'peers'. First data set contained 50 h of observation with doctoral research fellows, and the second data set contained 2 years diary recording of a nurse working in a national research funding agency. The paper shows that the levels of collaboration in constructing the ethnographic data can depend on the field itself, the stance of the researcher and the willingness of peer participants.
This paper deals with the shifting, contested nature of identities in complex urban societies. More precisely, it looks at two work-related contexts - Further Education classrooms and employment Interviews - and examines the responsibilities of both teachers and Interviewers äs gate-keepers in the management and evaluation of social identities. On the theoretical side, we draw on sociological (Bourdieu's concept of symbolic power) and anthropological (Cultural Studies’ notion of multiple identities) perspectives on identity construction and make an attempt to ground these theoretical perspectives in interactional data. Using videoed interactions and ethnographic Interviews, we show how students and interviewees, in the classroom and in the interview room, have their identities constructed normatively along the majority, dominant class lines. In conclusion, we argue that multicultural Further Education classrooms and intercultural employment interviews are two crucial sites where particular identities are socially and jointly constructed through discursive practices. By looking at the classroom and the Job interview äs channelling identities into a particular bureaucratic mould, and the possibilities for contesting this process, we will link our argument to current work on race and identity.
This paper takes up the issue of applying linguistic insights into intercultural communication to training programs for professionals working in culturally diverse contexts. The paper posits that despite a vast increase in linguistic contributions to the study of cross-cultural communication in recent years, relatively few training programs in cross-cultural issues/communication have been informed by the linguistic results of such studies. I argue for a greater commitment of (applied) linguistic researchers to make the findings of their studies available to non-linguistic audiences so that they can inform the training initiatives in the area of cross-cultural communication. In this paper I report on an Australian case study which documents various issues and problems in making linguistic insights on cross-cultural communication available to non-linguists via an input in training programs. 6. Summary In this project we have examined some health professionals’ views and understanding of the role of language in cross-cultural communication. The purpose of this project was to establish which aspects of language and language use were more or less easily recognized by non-linguists as contributing to communication problems in cross-cultural settings with a view to providing adequate input on linguistic aspects in cross-cultural training programs.
Anglo-Texas women typically do not think of themselves as Southerners, but many can use speech forms that came to Texas from the American South. The relationship of Texas women to Southern speech is complex, and Texas women orient to and use Southern forms in various ways. Several of the possibilities are briefly illustrated. These examples serve to raise questions about language crossing and stylization in contexts in which the variety being adopted does not clearly 'belong' to an outgroup, and to suggest some new avenues for thought about what 'regional varieties' are and how regionally-marked speech forms can serve as rhetorical resources.
Jusqu'a la moitie des annees 80 la linguistique appliquee a surtout ete associee a la pedagogie, l'enseignement des langues et l'acquisition de la langue seconde. Elle s'est ensuite ouverte sur l'expertise linguistique en milieu judiciaire, le discours, les therapies du langage, ainsi que la langue des signes. L'A. passe en revue les methodes et les motivations qui sous-tendent la recherche en linguistique appliquee
Background/Context
This study builds upon research on teacher professional communities and high school restructuring reforms. It employs a conceptual framework that draws upon theories of “community of practice” and “community of learners.”
Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study
This study analyzes how teachers’ professional inquiry communities at the high school level constitute a resource for school reform and instructional improvement.
Setting
This research focused on a reforming, comprehensive urban public high school with site-based management.
Population/Participants/Subjects
This study investigates the practices of six school-based oral inquiry groups known as Critical Friends Groups (CFGs), which were selected as cases of mature professional communities. Twenty-five teachers and administrators participated as informants.
Research Design
This research involved a video-based, qualitative case study.
Data Collection and Analysis
Data included observations of CFG meetings, interviews with teachers and administrators, and document collection. Analysis entailed coding with qualitative software, development of analytic cross-CFG meta-matrices, discourse analytic techniques, and joint viewing of video records with informants.
Findings/Results
The author explores four particular design features of CFGs—their diverse menu of activities, their decentralized structure, their interdisciplinary membership, and their reliance on structured conversation tools called “protocols”—showing how these features carry within them endemic tensions that compel these professional communities to negotiate a complicated set of professional development choices.
Conclusions/Recommendations
The findings demonstrate how the enactment of design choices holds particular consequences for the nature and quality of teacher learning and school improvement. Although CFGs enhanced teachers’ collegial relationships, their awareness of research-based practices and reforms, their schoolwide knowledge, and their capacity to undertake instructional improvement, these professional communities offered an inevitably partial combination of supports for teacher professional development. In particular, CFGs exerted minimal influence on teachers’ pedagogical content knowledge. CFGs would benefit from regular and systematic metacognitive and process-oriented reflections to identify how their collaborative practices might optimally advance their “bottom line” goal of improving teacher practice to increase student achievement. Additionally, high schools might pursue multiple and complementary CFG-like professional development opportunities in subject matter departments and interdisciplinary grade-level academy teams. Mid-afternoon sunlight pours into Principal Alec Gordon's living room on this early release day. ¹ Lounging on chairs and the carpeted floor, 11 members of Revere High School's staff—among them teachers, the principal, an instructional aide, and a counselor—are in the midst of a structured conversation about a collection of student pinhole photographs brought by Lars, an art teacher. As the group talks, some members hold and peruse the black and white matted images. One member muses aloud, “Not that Lars can answer this now, but I wonder what was the purpose of this assignment? Will doing pinhole photographs make students better photographers or is this just a fun exercise?” As required by the protocol structure, Lars sits silently listening to his colleagues’ attempt to make sense of his students’ products, as well as the instructional context that generated them. Prompted by a timekeeper, the facilitator eventually shifts the conversation. “Oh, it's time? It's time. OK, next in this protocol, we reflect on the process as a group. Share what you learned about the student, about your colleagues, about yourself. Use questions from the previous page.” As the group concludes this conversation, their 3-hour monthly meeting comes to a close. They carry cups and plates to the kitchen and gather up the papers that have accumulated in their laps and on the coffee table. Several photocopies of student essays on violence prevention, as well as copies of a Michelle Fine article, get stowed away into briefcases and knapsacks. Lars collects his students’ work, putting pinhole cameras in a bag and rolling up a poster-sized enlargement of a playground shot. Some members assemble on the deck over the water chatting; their laughter floats into the living room. Others congregate by the fireplace to share lingering ideas with Shelby, the health teacher who brought the violence prevention essays. In the dining room, a veteran math teacher approaches a first-year chemistry teacher and asks how his year is going. Meanwhile, some members scurry off, thanking their host and bidding farewell to the group.
Ulster differs from the other three historical provinces of Ireland in the presence of Ulster Scots, an off-shoot of Lowland Scots brought principally from the Western and Central Lowlands of Scotland in the 17th century through a plantation established by King James I and through periodic migrations, especially in times of economic duress in Scotland. Since that time Ulster Scots has been spoken in rural parts of Counties Antrim, Donegal, Down, and Londonderry/Derry, where it was mapped by Robert Gregg in the 1960s mainly on the basis of phonological features. The present article, based on eight years of fieldwork with native speakers in Antrim, analyzes a range of pronominal, verbal, and syntactic features, seeking to identify general patterns as well as variation within Ulster Scots. When possible, comparisons are made to Lowland Scots and Irish English in order to situate structural features of Ulster Scots within the larger linguistic landscape of the British Isles.
This Special Section brings together researchers who adopt a constructional approach to Second Language Acquisition (SLA) as informed by Cognitive and Corpus Linguistics, approaches which fall under the general umbrella of Usage-based Linguistics. The articles present psycholinguistic and corpus linguistic evidence for L2 constructions and for the inseparability of lexis and grammar. They consider the psycholinguistics of language learning following general cognitive principles of category learning, with schematic constructions emerging from usage. They analyze how learning is driven by the frequency and frequency distribution of exemplars within construction, the salience of their form, the significance of their functional interpretation, the match of their meaning to the construction prototype, and the reliability of their mappings. They explore conceptual transfer and the acquisition of second language meaning. They consider the implications of these phenomena for L2 instruction.