Colloquia - British Association for Applied Linguistics

BAAL Conference 2004 37 th Annual BAAL Meeting 

Individual 

Papers 

'Definitely maybe…': modality clusters in spoken English 

Svenja Adolphs and Jane Evison 

School of English Studies, University of Nottingham 

Svenja.Adolphs@nottingham.ac.uk 

Jane.Evison@nottingham.ac.uk 

Over the past thirty years there has been a substantial interest in the cross-cultural and cross-linguistic 

comparison of politeness routines and markers. The linguistic realisation of 'hedges' or 'downtoners' 

has been particularly well explored. Yet, previous research has either focused on the comparison of 

individual lexical items which are often modal in nature, or taken a 'macro-perspective' in analysing 

speech acts and events. Recent studies especially in the field of corpus linguistics, however, indicate 

that the unit of meaning frequently extends beyond the individual lexical item and that certain clusters 

combine to perform describable functions in language, particularly in highly conventionalised domains 

such as politeness. Using as a basis the Cambridge and Nottingham Corpus of Discourse in English 

(CANCODE), a five million word corpus of spoken English, this presentation will attempt to bring 

together the two research traditions by exploring the conventionalisation of modality clusters, such as 

'might perhaps' or 'could possibly'. The results will be compared to data from a non-native speaker 

corpus of spoken English to ascertain the extent to which such clusters are used by language 

learners. 

Learners´ and teachers´ attitudes to English as a foreign language in Sweden comparative 

results from the national evaluations of 1992 and 2003 

Dr. Britt Marie Apelgren 

Language and Literature Unit, Department of Education, Göteborg University, Sweden 

brittmarie.apelgren@ped.gu.se 

Today English is often described as lingua franca used for communication worldwide. It is the 

dominant language of communication for small European countries such as Sweden where it is 

necessary to learn a foreign language for further studies, travel and for social and professional 

contacts throughout the world. In what way is this reflected in its curricular status in Sweden as 

regards its role in the compulsory school and its central goals and guidelines? What perceptions and 

attitudes do learners and teachers have towards English as school subject? In what ways have these 

changed in the last decade? These are some of the questions that will be addressed in this paper. 

The results from two comprehensive Swedish national evaluations initiated and coordinated by the 

Swedish National Agency for Education in 1992 and 2003 will be presented. These national 

evaluations comprise attitudinal data as well as achievement data -- in the area of EFL focusing on 

written production, reading and listening comprehension from 7,000 16-year-old pupils. In addition, 

their teachers´ experiences and attitudes to English as a foreign language are collected and compared 

to those of the pupils. 

The paper will focus on the attitudinal results from the two surveys and relate those to the 1992 and 

2003 national syllabuses for English. The implications for educational policy will be discussed. The 

paper will also relate the results to international research on English as a foreign language, a second 

language and a lingua franca. The status of English in education is an important issue, not only in 

Sweden but throughout Europe, as pupils are increasingly learning English outside school, so called 

incidental or unconscious learning. To some extent many of our learners today “live” in an English 

speaking world where they come into daily contact with English in addition to using their native 

language. This may affect their motivation for and attitudes to language learning generally. 

Focus on form in group writing tasks in an EAP classroom 

Helen Basturkmen 

Department of Applied Language Studies and Linguistics, University of Auckland, New Zealand 

h.basturkmen@auckland.ac.nz 

Instruction in writing classes often addresses features of written text organisation and discourse. It 

also often involves the use of group writing tasks in which small groups of students co-construct 

written texts. It is hoped that during such tasks language related episodes occur in which students 

negotiate meanings they wish to express and the language forms they need to express them. It is also 

hoped that at least some of the episodes are discourse related and concern aspects of writing, such 

as text organisation and genre conventions. 

King‟s College, London 9 – 11 th - 1 - 

September, 2004


This presentation reports a study that was conducted using an intact academic writing class in a 

university setting. The aim of the study was to investigate the extent to which students negotiated 

language forms (grammar, vocabulary, spelling, textual features and discourse) while engaged in 

small group writing tasks. The study was based in research into focus on the form in second language 

acquisition theory. Focus on form was originally proposed to account for negotiation of meaning (Long, 

1991). However, it has been recognized that classroom participants may negotiate form even if there 

is no attendant communication difficulty (Ellis, Basturkmen and Loewen, 2001). 

The data collected for the study comprised the written scripts produced by the groups of students and 

audio recordings of their spoken interaction during the group writing tasks. Language related episodes 

in the recordings were identified and analysed. 

References 

Ellis, R., Basturkmen, H. and Loewen, S. (2001). Learner uptake in communicative ESL lessons. 

Language Learning , 51 (2), 281-318. 

Long, M. (1991). Focus on form: a design feature in language teaching methodology. In K. de Bot, R. 

Ginseng and C. Kramsch (Eds.), Foreign language research in cross cultural perspective(pp.39-52). 

Amsterdam: John Benjamin. 

Evaluating Europe: Parameters of Evaluation in the British Press 

Monika Bednarek 

Department of Linguistics, University of Augsburg / University of Birmingham 

mb399@yahoo.co.uk 

In our ever faster changing environment and with the advances of new information technologies, the 

media have become increasingly powerful. Despite the growing relevance of European issues that 

transcend national boundaries, there is no pan-European media publication which has as much 

influence as the national newspapers of its member countries. These national publications in turn 

influence individual readers‟ views towards the European Union. Applied linguistics can use its 

methodology to uncover this process of “recontextualization” (Caldas-Coulthard 2003: 273). 

In this study I will analyse parameters of evaluation in British newspaper reportage covering European 

issues. Evaluation, or “the expression of the speaker or writer‟s attitude or stance towards, viewpoint 

on, or feelings about the entities or propositions that he or she is talking about” (Thompson & Hunston 

2000: 5) has only recently become the focus of linguistic analysis and this mainly within studies of 

ESP (English for Specific Purposes) or – under the name of appraisal – within SFL (Systemic 

Functional Linguistics). 

In contrast to this, the approach taken here is eclectic, drawing on a wide range of linguistic studies on 

evaluation to establish its own framework of evaluative parameters, which is then applied to a close 

manual analysis of a small corpus of British „tabloids‟ and „broadsheets‟. As is shown, evaluative 

parameters can be combined to greater or lesser degrees and are of crucial influence in determining a 

newspaper‟s authorial stance towards the events that are described. 

The study thus aims to close a number of gaps within linguistics, among them the systematic 

exploration of differences between „tabloids‟ and „broadsheets‟, the study of evaluative parameters, 

and, most importantly, the exploration of the evaluative potential of language in news reportage on 

Europe. 

References 

Caldas-Coulthard, Carmen (2003). “Cross-cultural representation of „Otherness‟ in media discourse”. 

In: Weiss, Gilbert and Ruth Wodak (eds). Critical Discourse Analysis. Theory and Interdisciplinarity. 

Palgrave MacMillan, 273-296. 

Thompson, Geoff and Susan Hunston (2000). “Evaluation: An Introduction”. In: Hunston, Susan and 

Geoff Thompson (eds). Evaluation in Text. Authorial Stance and the Construction of Discourse. OUP, 

1-27. 

The effects of processing instruction, traditional instruction and meaning-output instruction on 

the acquisition of English past tense 

Alessandro Benati 

Department of Languages and International Studies, University of Greenwich 

A.Benati@gre.ac.uk 

Processing instruction is a type of focus on form developed from the input processing theoretical 

model. This model is principally concerned with the way L2 learners derive intake from input (see 

VanPatten, 1996; 2002, 2004). The effects of processing instruction have been examined and 

compared to traditional instruction through a series of classroom studies (see for a full review 

VanPatten, 2002, Benati, VanPatten and Wong, 2004). The main findings from these studies support 


September, 2004


the view that processing instruction is a more effective type of focus on form than traditional instruction 

as it provides a more direct route for the learner to convert input to intake. 

The purpose of this paper is to present the results of two parallel classroom studies investigating the 

effects of processing instruction, traditional instruction and meaning output-based instruction on the 

acquisition of English simple past tense (“lexical preference principle). 

Processing instruction consisted of some form of explicit information about the target feature followed 

by structured input activities. Traditional instruction consisted of explicit grammar explanation which 

was followed by mechanical form oriented and communicative output practice. Meaning-based output 

instruction contained no mechanical drills and is based on the tenets of structured-output activities 

proposed in Lee and VanPatten (1995). 

The design, procedures and results of the two studies will be presented and some theoretical, 

empirical and pedagogical implications outlined. 

References 

Benati, A. VanPatten, B. & Wong, W. (2004). Il modello input processing e l’approccio processing 

instruction: tra teoria e sperimentazione nell’acquisizione dell’italiano come lingua straniera. Roma: 

Armando. 

Lee. J. & VanPatten, B. (1995). Making communicative language teaching happen. New York: 

McGraw Hill. 

VanPatten, B. (1996) Input processing and grammar instruction. Norwood , NJ: Ablex. 

VanPatten, B. (2002) Processing instruction: an update. Language Learning 52, 755-803. 

VanPatten, B. (2004) Input processing in SLA, In B. VanPAtten (ed.) Processing instruction. Mahwah, 

NJ: Erlbaum [pages forthcoming]. 

Spanish speaking Londoners: is there a Latino London? 

Dr. David Block 

School of Culture, Language and Communication, Institute of Education, University of London 

d.block@ioe.ac.uk 

There is by now a well-established and varied literature on Spanish speaking Latino communities in 

the US and Canada. However, such communities in European countries have not been the focus of 

specific and exclusive studies into who they are and what kind of language practices they engage in. 

Thus while Latinos have appeared in studies of immigrant language practices in Europe (see Berta in 

Bremer, Roberts, Vasseur, Simonot and Broeder, 1996), they have not been the centrepieces of any 

research published on the international stage. This is especially the case in Britain and specifically, 

London, where we find only passing mentions of Spanish speakers in surveys such as Baker and 

Eversley (2000). And as regards books and monographs, there has been nothing of note (although 

there is some PhD work in the pipeline). 

In this paper, my aim is to begin to remedy this situation, focusing specifically on London and indeed 

one workplace setting in London. I first discuss my research methodology, among other things how I 

have proceeded from one informant to several and how I have collected interview and field data. I then 

explore who these Spanish-speaking Latinos are (their sense of self identity and how they position 

themselves and are positioned by others as Others) and the different communities of practice in which 

and with which they engage. Among other things, I conclude that yes, we can speak of the existence 

of a Latino London. However, I also suggest that while the subject positions and language practices I 

document find resonances in research about Latinos in North America, there are also very important 

differences. 

References 

Baker, P. and J. Eversley (eds) Multiligual Capital. London: Battlebridge Publications. 

Bremer, K., C. Roberts, M. Simonet M-T. Vasseur and P. Broeder (1996) Achieving Understanding: 

Discourse in Intercultural Encounters. London: Longman. 

The concept of identity in Germany illustrated by changes in the German language 

Natalie Braber 

Department of Linguistics, University of Manchester 

natalie.braber@man.ac.uk 

The fall of the Wall which for many years divided Germany into two separate states occurred almost 

fifteen years ago. Before this time, the two German states were on opposing sides in the Cold War. 

During the years of separation there appeared to be the emergence of two German identities, one for 

West Germany (BRD) and one for East Germany (DDR). These identities were the subject of much 

discussion as it was argued whether or not the German language would follow the political split. After 

unification in 1990 it seemed initially as if these problems had ceased and all linguistic differences 


September, 2004


would quickly disappear. However, it seems that many of the divisions that were in place before 1989 

continued to persist in unified Germany. This became clear once the initial euphoria of unification had 

worn off. The further changes in the German language which occurred as a direct result of unification, 

particularly from the side of the former East German citizens, allowed the continuation of separate 

identities to live on. Particularly for the former East Germans new concepts for almost all aspects of 

life had to be learned, with the accompanying vocabulary. This paper will examine how language 

divisions exemplify social, political and economic differences that were taking place simultaneously, 

and how these divisions are slowly overcome. The paper concentrates on linguistic forms used by 

East and West Germans, as well as other aspects such as modal particles, as an example of applied 

linguistics making a contribution to language study. This research brings out changes in the German 

language which illustrate how the concept of German identity is constantly evolving in an evolving 

Europe. 

Cognitive-Linguistic Analysis of Conceptual Change: The New Monetary European Union for 

Spanish speakers 

Carmen M. Bretones-Callejas 

University of Almeria 

cbreton@ual.es 

cbretones@hotmail.com 

This paper will analyze how individuals in society face a new conceptual reality. and, more specifically, 

the conceptual frame that Spanish speakers establish given their new currency (the Euro). The aim is 

to show the cognitive mechanisms activated for facing such reality and making communication 

successful. As we will see, Conceptual Metaphor (Lakoff & Johnson 1999, Lakoff &Núñez 2000) and 

Conceptual Integration (Turner & Fauconnier 2002) are basic in this process (Bretones 2002). 

The main hypothesis of this research is the following: after the change of currency certain cognitive 

structures and mental operations arise. To test this we will study utterances produced by 50 subjects 

between the ages of 30 and 60. The analysis is still in progress, but on a first approach to the data the 

results vary and depend on age and other factors. The preliminary conclusion is that speakers solve 

the situation when it comes to deal with a somehow imposed new conceptual reality, going through 

“conflict” and “epistemic impasse” (Bretones & Martín-Morillas 2000). More specifically, in the use of 

words such as “peseta” 1 or “money”, or idiomatic expressions such as “nadie da duros por pesetas” 

(„no-one gives dimes for pennies‟ meaning “nobody gives money away”) or “no vale un duro” („it is not 

worth a penny‟). 

Finally, we will see how speakers must become aware of the blend (Faucconier & Turner 2002) and 

keep it active (the blend was entrenched before, but on-line now). If we are conscious of the blend we 

are able to access on-line structures that reflect it, for instance, the resulting mapping „money are 

euros‟(see Figure 1 below for a schematic representation of the blend). 

1 Notice that definitions such as “The peseta is the unit of money that is used in Spain” (Collins Cobuild Dictionary 1987) are no 

longer associated to the concept „peseta‟ by speakers (more specifically, since January 2002). 

References 

Bretones Callejas, C. M. 2002. “Conceptual Integration, Categorization, Metaphor and Idiomaticity in 

the New European Monetary Union: The Euro.” LAUD. Vol. 566:1-10. Essen: Universität GH Essen. 

Bretones Callejas, C. M. and Martín Morillas, J. M. 1999. “El Procesamiento léxico-discursivo en la 

comprensión textual poética”. In Luque Durán, JD. and Manjón Pozas, FJ. (eds). Investigación y 

didáctica del léxico. Granada: Método Ediciones. Pp. 265-276. 

Faucconier, G. and Turner, M. Forthcoming. The Way We Think. New York: A Member of the Perseus 

Books Group. 

Fillmore, C.J. 1982. “Frame Semantics”. In Linguistic Society of Korea (ed). Linguistics in the Morning 

Calm. Seoul: Hanshin, pp. 111-138. 

Gibbs, R. 1990. “Psycholinguistic studies on the conceptual basis of idiomaticity.” Cognitive Linguistics 

1-4, 417-451. 

Gibbs, R. 1994. “Idiomaticity”. Chapter 6 from The Poetics of Mind. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge 

University Press. Pp. 265-318. 

Lakoff, G. and Johnson, M.. 1999. Philosophy in the Flesh. The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to 

Western Thought. New York: Basic Books. 

Lakoff, G. and Núñez, R. 2000. Where Mathematics Comes From? A Member of Perseus Books 

Group. 

Tomasello, M. 2003. "On the different origins of symbol and grammar." In Christiansen, M. H. Name 

and Kirby, S. (eds). Language Evolution. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press. 


September, 2004


GENERIC 

INPUT A INPUT B 

PESETA 

� Things 

(what is use for 

the transactions) 

� Value (1) 

� Until 

February 2002 

� Spain 

EXCHANGE ACT 

(world interaction and 

sensory-motor 

experience) 

MONEY 

� Euro, $,... 

� Value 

(166.386 or 

others) 

� Cents 

� Nowadays 

� EU (Sp), 

USA,... 

BLEND 

MONEY 

� Goods 

(what has 

commercial value) 

� Values (?) 

� Time (?) 

� Anywhere 

FRAME: „Commercial Transaction‟ 

Figure 1: Blend for the concept „money‟ in Spain. In this figure we also see how the process of 

Conceptual Integration makes possible the birth of the concept „euro‟ as part of the blend. 

The research article abstract as a site of linguistic colonization: English in Spanish social 

sciences journals 

Sally Burgess and Pedro Martín Martín 

Departamento de Filología Inglesa y Alemana, Universidad de La Laguna, Tenerife, Spain 

sburgess@ull.es 

pamartin@ull.es 

Spanish researchers, like their colleagues elsewhere in the world, find themselves under increasing 

pressure to publish in English. Even Spanish publications in some disciplines accept and privilege 

papers presented in this language. The abstract plays a crucial role in what we regard as a process of 

linguistic colonization The inclusion of an abstract, a relatively recent import from publications 

produced by international discourse communities, marks the first stage in the process. While initially 

these abstracts may be in Spanish and/or other languages, at a later stage English becomes an 

alternative or even dominant language, first of the abstract and then of whole articles and journals. In 

this study we chart the incidence of abstracts accompanying Spanish research articles in two social 

science disciplines (psychology and linguistics) and examine! writers‟ representations (see Riley 1996) 

of research paper abstract writing in the two languages. We begin by presenting the results of our 

analysis of a corpus made up of 80 abstracts from major Spanish psychology and linguistics journals 

published in 1975, 1985, 1995 and 2003. We then present an account of Spanish-speaking social 

scientists‟ metalinguistic ideas about the function of the abstract in the two disciplines, its structure and 

its relationship to the paper as a whole, drawing on interview data. We conclude that a heightened 

awareness of the role of the research article abstract in attracting and informing an international 

readership has benefits for abstract writing, but suggest that there may also be good reasons for 

Spanish academics to offer resistance to this process of linguistic colonization. 

References 


September, 2004


Riley, Philip 1996. “„Look in thy heart and write‟: Students‟ representations of writing and learning to 

write in a foreign language” in Eija Ventola and Anna Mauranen (eds.) Academic Writing: Intercultural 

and Textual Issues (pp. 115-137) Amsterdam: John Benjamins 

Hybridity - A Way to European Linguistic Identity? 

Dr. Elisabeth Burr 

Frankoromanistik und Italoromanistik Sprachwissenschaft, Universität Bremen 

elisabeth.burr@uni-bremen.de 

Only a few years ago, the new technologies in general and the web in particular seemed to constitute 

a danger for most languages of the world. The parallel between the invention of the printing press, 

which led to the normalisation of languages for economic reasons and caused the disappearance of 

language varieties and dialects, on the one hand, and the accessibility of the new technologies and 

the dominant role of English seemed to indicate that a significantly more detrimental process of 

homogenisation was to be expected. 

In the meantime, however, it would seem that quite the opposite is the case and that not 

monolingualism but multilingualism is favoured by the new technologies. One good example is the 

Web, which only a few years after its monolingual birth started to become an inherently multilingual 

space, where not only national and regional languages but also minority languages and dialects are 

used and where even mixed languages and hybrid varieties appear. 

While socio- and applied linguists have mostly looked upon phenomena like the mixing of languages, 

the crossing of languages or code-switching as belonging to the domain of (conceptual) orality and 

have studied them above all in urban migration milieus, postcolonial cultures or diasporas, in my paper 

I would like to show first of all that the scope of mixing, at least today, is not confined between such 

borders and that the new technologies even favour the insertion of hybrid varieties into the written 

(virtual) world. Studies on the language of SMS and Chat as well as the mixed language Europanto 

among others will serve as examples. 

In order to tackle the question as to what the creation of mixed languages and their acceptance by 

speakers might mean for applied linguistics, and whether hybridity is a possible way to a European 

identity, I will draw on the links which have been established between hybridisation and the production 

of new identity patterns in studies on the domain of (conceptual) orality like those above. 

Grammatical and Pragmalinguistic Knowledge in a Foreign Language: The Case of English 

Focus Constructions 

Marcus Callies 

Institute fur Anglistik und Amerikanistik Englische Sprachwissen, Universitat Marburg 

callies@staff.uni-marburg.de 

This talk reports on the theoretical framework, experimental design and first results of a Ph.D.-project 

that investigates native-speaker and advanced German EFL-learner production and comprehension of 

focusing devices in English. The aim of the study is to explore the relationship between grammatical 

and pragmalinguistic abilities in an L2. Although pragmatic knowledge/ competence in an L2 includes 

more than the sociopragmatic and pragmalinguistic abilities for understanding and performing speech 

acts, the significance of L2 pragmatic knowledge beyond the domain of speech acts has been 

neglected in Interlanguage Pragmatics research to date. 

The study focuses on the syntactic devices (word order and focus constructions such as 

fronting/topicalization, inversion, and different types of clefting) that are available to convey emphasis 

and contrast, and adopts a functional approach to syntax and word order in that syntactic patterns are 

primarily dealt with in terms of their functions in discourse, serving the communicative needs of the 

speaker. However, lexico-syntactic devices such as emphatic do, lexical intensifiers and discourse 

markers (extremely, really, actually) are also taken into consideration. 

The central research questions are: 

Which (pragma)linguistic resources do native speakers of English and German EFL-learners use to 

express specific pragmatic effects such as emphasis and contrast? · Do native speakers of English 

and German EFL-learners differ in their preferences for the use of devices that are available to 

express these pragmatic effects? Do German EFL-learners have explicit knowledge of the syntactic 

devices available in English for realizing emphasis and contrast, and do they have knowledge of the 

appropriate contextual use of these devices? 

Native speaker and German EFL-learner data were collected using traditional techniques such as 

discourse completion, multiple choice - administered in the form of written questionnaires - and 

retrospective interviews, but the study also draws on a corpus of argumentative student writing as an 

additional database. 


September, 2004


Visual display of metaphor use in conciliation talk: methodological considerations 

Prof Lynne Cameron and Dr Juup Stelma 

School of Education, University of Leeds 

L.J.Cameron@education.leeds.ac.uk 

J.H.Stelma@education.leeds.ac.uk 

Time-ordered visual display offers an alternative mode of understanding the dynamics of talk, 

assisting interpretation through highlighting tendencies, shifts and co-occurrences in language use 

across shorter and longer timescales (i.e. the dynamics of the talk). This paper aims to show how 

visual display provides valuable insights into the dynamics of metaphor use in talk, and how it can 

complement more traditional types of discourse analysis. 

The paper uses data from a project which investigated the dynamics of metaphor across a series of 

conciliation meetings. We will present visual displays of the talk, between a politically-motivated 

bomber and the daughter of one of the victims of the bombing, in which each is trying to understand 

more about 'the Other'. A total of 160 minutes of one-to-one interaction were analysed to answer the 

research question: what are the dynamics of metaphor use across a single meeting, and across the 

two meetings? 

The data was analysed for the use of linguistic metaphor, for references to self and other, and for 

discourse topics. Visual displays of the metaphor dynamics will be used to show how metaphor uses 

clusters and changes across the two meetings. Parallel visual displays of discourse topics, and 

referencing allow additional insights into how participants use metaphor. We will show how the visual 

displays can guide the selection of transcribed talk for further transcript-based analyses of metaphor 

dynamics, offering a complement to more traditional methods of discourse analysis. 

The paper concludes with a summary of the potential of visual display and broader implications for 

research on spoken interaction. 

Introducing the Grammar of Talk 

Ronald Carter 


Ronald.Carter@nottingham.ac.uk 

Janet White 

English Team, QCA 

This paper reports on a recently completed project entitled Introducing the Grammar of Talk (QCA, 

2004) undertaken by QCA (Qualifications and Curriculum Authority). The project follows on from 

previous the work of the QCA English team reported in publications devoted to grammar such as The 

Grammar Papers (QCA, 1997); Not Whether But How (QCA, 1999) by focussing on the role of 

grammar in spoken English, Carter and McCarthy, The Cambridge Grammar of English, forthcoming, 

2005). Among the main aims of the project are: to provide teachers with the results of recent 

computational, corpus-based research into spoken and written language - and with particular 

reference to grammar; to explore how more explicit knowledge of the workings of spoken language 

can enhance uses of language across a range of informal and formal texts; and to exemplify related 

classroom teaching materials which can be used (mainly) with Key Stage 3 students and above in the 

National Curriculum for English in England and Wales. Over thirty teachers have been involved with 

the project and have produced classroom materials revealing the extent to which pupils' implicit 

knowledge about and understandings of language can be made more explicit. The project has raised 

key questions for our understanding of literacies in national curricula and for appropriate 

methodologies for teaching and learning about spoken grammar and language in general in a school 

context. 

Pitching for funding: a critical academic genre 

Dr Joanna Channell 

Channell and Associates, Language and Communication Research and Training 

joanna@channell.demon.co.uk 

An academic genre which is critically important for academic advancement is the grant application. 

With the average success rate for grant applications (UK national figures) at 30 percent, an 

understanding of how successful applications are written is of obvious practical value. For theory, this 

genre extends the study of persuasive language (cf Bhatia 1993) to a new domain, as well as the 

study of academic genres. The paper reports a genre-based study of successful applications from 

each of the main discipline areas of funded academic research. Findings include the ways in which 

applications are, and are not, similar to other academic genres. While applications do not report 


September, 2004


research, rather they promise that research will be carried out, they nevertheless share certain 

communicative purposes and textual characteristics with research articles (and, in particular with the 

introductions to research articles), notably the need to situate the work, and the need to claim 

originality. 

These two purposes require to be expressed at their briefest in the short summary of the research 

proposal which most British grant funders ask for in their application forms. With only 200 words 

available (there are some variations between different funding bodies), successful applicants must 

achieve maximum impact in every sentence, as, for example in the following summary of a successful 

proposal to EPSRC: 

„This proposal thus represents a substantial and adventurous theoretical and methodological 

contribution to the field of HCI and interaction design.‟ 

Both on-record and off-record persuasive writing appear to lead to success; while ethnographic data 

on the developing understandings of novice application writers shows that they underestimate the 

need to pitch or sell their idea, and to tailor it to the intended readership. 

� Bhatia, Vijay 1993 Analysing genre: Language use in professional settings. London: Longman. 

Investigating News Representations of the New Europe: Using Critical Discourse Analysis and 

a Specialized Corpus 

Caroline Coffin and Kieran O'Halloran 

Centre for Language and Communications, Faculty of Education and Language Studies, The Open 

University 

K.A.Ohalloran@open.ac.uk 

c.coffin@open.ac.uk 

On May 1st 2004, 10 new countries joined the European Union. This paper reports on a study 

investigating news representations leading up to this event and how these representations position 

readers into newer types of identity with regard to the expanded European Union. We draw upon 

Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) in our examination. 

Critiques of CDA research methodology (e.g. Widdowson, 2004) often argue that critical discourse 

analyses of reader positioning say more about the analysts than about the way in which a text 

positions its target readership. To address this criticism, we draw on a specialised news corpus as a 

means of checking whether we as analysts may be 'over'-interpreting values and identities with regard 

to the new Europe from the perspective of the actual readership. 

More generally, we highlight how large specialised corpora of news texts: 

i) enable a partial but nevertheless highly practical way into seeing how particular uses of language in 

a news text attempt to position the target readership into particular sets of identities. 

ii) check whether analysts may be 'over'-interpreting the value judgements being made in a news text 

from the perspective of the target readership. 

Reference 

Widdowson, H.G. (to be published in 2004) Text, Context, Pretext: Critical. Issues in Discourse 

Analysis, Oxford, UK: Blackwell. 

Oral competence of foreign language teachers: perspectives for improvement in pre-service 

language education? 

Dr Douglas Altamiro Consolo 

UNESP-Brazil & The University of Melbourne 

dconsolo@lem.ibilce.unesp.br, dconsolo@terra.com.br 

This paper deals with the development of linguistic competence in English in undergraduate courses 

that aim at EFL teacher education (Letters courses), based on data from university courses in Brazil. 

Research studies have indicated that the levels of oral proficiency among EFL teachers (OP-EFLT) in 

Brazilian schools are not always compatible with the competence desirable for such professionals 

(Consolo, 2002). In a vicious and problematic circle of factors that have influenced the conditions for 

the teaching of foreign languages in Brazil, specially of oral skills, it has been claimed that many 

graduating students of Letters courses, who are awarded certification to teach English, are not or do 

not believe they are - competent to speak the foreign languages they (are expected to) teach, as 

pointed out by Almeida Filho (1992), Baghin-Spinelli (2002), Barcelos (1999), Freitas (2003) and Silva 

(2000). I discuss the relationship of concepts such as oral competence and proficiency with data on 

students‟ experiences of learning EFL in Letter courses so as to articulate conceptual knowledge and 

existing views of OP-EFLT, expecting to contribute for the improvement of language education in 

university contexts. I depart from a theoretical review of concepts such as competence, fluency and 

proficiency, and report on findings from a larger research study that aims at discussing how the 


September, 2004


concepts of oral competence and proficiency, based on data collected in contexts of EFL teacher 

education, can be articulated for the establishment of a definition of a linguistic-communicative 

competence in spoken English that meets the professional needs of those teachers. This discussion 

reflects not only the reality and the demands faced by (future) EFL teachers in Brazil, where 

improvements can be made, but may as well provide contributions for EFL teacher education and 

research studies in other countries where ELT is carried out under similar characteristics. 

This paper deals with things we do: vagueness in conference 

Dr Joan Cutting 

Curriculum Research and Development, Moray House School of Education, University of Edinburgh 

joan.cutting@education.ed.ac.uk 

This paper deals with things we do when we write conference abstracts: it analyses the use of vague 

language in them. The fact that conference organisers put out calls for abstracts six to nine months 

before the conference date means that many presenters are forced to write their abstract at a moment 

when they have only a vague idea of what their presentation will consist of. Some international 

postgraduate students are reluctant to send in abstracts if they have not completed their analyses, 

because they cannot use generic English to cover the topic whatever the outcome of the analysis. 

This paper shows the proportion of abstracts written in just the initial stages of preparation of the 

research, and discusses the relationship between the stage of preparation and the English used in the 

abstract. The database is 400 abstracts from the conferences BAAL 2003 and Sociolinguistics 2004, 

and 400 questionnaires from the same presenters. The abstracts were analysed to find the density of 

vague and heavily context- dependent language features: general nouns e.g. "thing" (Channell 1994), 

general verbs e.g. "do", vague noun phrases e.g. "what you said I'd do", and vague fillers e.g. "and so 

on", (Cutting 2000), and non-anaphoric personal pronouns, demonstrative pronouns and adverbs e.g. 

"they", "that" and "there". The questionnaires established the state of the papers' preparation. It is 

hoped that the results of this study can help to train future academics to write open, flexible abstracts 

using generic English with inexplicit referring expressions, thus improving international postgraduate 

students' chances of getting abstracts accepted. 

Content-and-language-integrated programmes: classroom questions for language learning? 

Dr. Christiane Dalton-Puffer 

Institut fuer Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Universitaet Wien (University of Vienna) 

christiane.dalton-puffer@univie.ac.at 

The rationale of Content-and-Language-Integrated classrooms is grounded in their being naturalistic 

and authentic contexts for the learning and use of a foreign language. Generally, classrooms as 

speech events are characterized by the frequency and specific quality of questions. While early 

verdicts on the „unnaturalness‟ of typical classroom questions are still widely adhered to, many 

educationalists have re- evaluated questions as central instruments in the discursive construction of 

knowledge. This article seeks to reconsider the case for classrooms where a foreign language is the 

medium of instruction, pursuing the issue of the impact of questions on the quantity and quality of 

student output in the target language. 

The database consists of 42 secondary level CLIL lessons (English=language of instruction) taught in 

Austrian schools, covering a range of different school subjects. Ten transcripts were submitted to 

coding and detailed analysis. The analysis employs a set of question typologies developed for the 

study of educational discourse. Teacher questions as well as student questions and responses are 

considered. 

The results show that contrary to expectations it is not teacher display questions but referential or 

„real‟ questions which are the dominant question type overall and that there is a clear differentiation 

according to register (instructional vs. regulative). However, it must be noted that a question being 

referential is not a good predictor regarding the characteristics of the output it stimulates. Other 

features of classroom questions like their being open or closed and their actual objects (factual vs. 

metacognitive) are shown to be more relevant in this respect. Factual questions typically receive 

minimal responses while answers to other questions tend to require the encoding of full, sometimes 

complex propositions. In this light the overwhelming share of factual questions in the lessons studied 

points towards the limiting conditions which typical content-classroom discourse sets for the richness 

of classroom language. 


September, 2004


Reconfiguring Europe - Reconfiguring language units: A study of the use of semi-prefabricated 

units in translated texts 

Pernilla Danielsson 

Centre for Corpus Research, School of Humanities, University of Birmingham 

pernilla@ccl.bham.ac.uk 

In the new Europe, understanding across borders will require being able to communicate over 

linguistic boundaries. When ideas, opinions, and information need to be disseminated across 25 

different countries, translation will hold the key to success. 

This paper will study the quality of translated texts. Decades ago translation studies focused on critical 

examination of the errors and faults in a translated text. This attitude to the subject may have changed 

but still today we assign translated texts a lesser status than that of originals. Often, translated texts 

are said to have a different flavour than the original; studies have indicated that a translated text is 

usually more grammatical than the original, while at the same time it lacks the naturalness and flow of 

the source text. Up to now there has not been any obvious way of avoiding these problems, but 

solutions may in future be found using modern corpus techniques, as new methods open up for more 

objective comparisons between translated and original texts. 

In this study, we will look at the translation differences in semi-prefabricated units. The idea of semiprefabricated 

units was first introduced in Sinclair's distinction between the idiom-principle and the 

open-choice principle (Sinclair 1991). A recent study by Erman and Warren showed that as much as 

55% of the words in a text were there due to the idiom-principle, i.e. out of 100 words, 55 were part of 

larger units and were not present in the texts as individual choices in a grammatical system (Erman 

and Warren 2000). Whereas this study focused on monolingual use of language, we will here use the 

same line of argument to identify what is different in translated texts. The paper will also include a 

section where postgraduate students were asked to manually identify the units in authentic texts. Their 

results will be compared to those from a corpus. 

References 

Erman, B. and Warren, B. 2000. The idiom-principle and the open-choice principle. In: Text 20(1), pp 

29-62. 

Sinclair, J. 1991. Corpus, Concordance, Collocation. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 

Language marketing in Europe 

Barbara De Cock 

Katholieke Universiteit Leuven 

barbara.decock@student.kuleuven.ac.be 

barbaradecock@yahoo.com 

History has witnessed various initiatives for language planning and policy, such as standardisation and 

normalisation through institutions as the Académie Française or the Real Academia Española. 

Recently, language scientists and planners have acknowledged that in addition to mother tongue 

speakers foreign language speakers also increasingly determine the importance of a language. 

Acknowledging this new battlefield, EU languages try to gain more importance through language 

marketing efforts. I will first discuss the concept of language marketing (Domínguez 1998) and 

highlight the particular difficulties of promoting a language and culture abroad in an area where the 

language is not supported by a legislative power or only to a limited extent, as opposed to more 

traditional language planning and policy initiatives which are implemented within a state‟s own territory 

(Cooper 1989, Kaplan & Baldauf 1997). In order to concretise these differences, I will focus on the 

British Council, the Alliance Française and the Instituto Cervantes in a European context. My 

presentation will include a description of their structure - discussing the link with a nation-state, the 

type of activities organised and special attempts concerning the European Union (in its composition 

before and after the 2004 enlargement) programmes, officials and actors - as well as an assessment 

of the efficiency of the initiatives and language marketing in general. Finally, I will present CICEB, the 

umbrella organisation of various language and culture organisations in Brussels. I will discuss its 

reason for coming into being as well as the difficulties and opportunities it presents for a language and 

culture promotion conglomerate at supranational level. 

In my conclusion, I will highlight the particularities of the marketing of foreign languages and cultures 

in the European Union and I will link the difficulties of this concept to broader cultural and sociological 

concepts such as the concept of nation-state (Anderson) and consociationalist theory (Lijphart). 


September, 2004


Emergent literacy practices in pre-school age indigenous children in Tennant Creek, central 

Australia 

Samantha Disbray and Prof Gillian Wigglesworth 

Department of Linguistics and Applied Linguistics, School of Languages, University of Melbourne, 

Australia 

gillianw@unimelb.edu.au 

Tennant Creek, in central Australia, is one of the communities participating in the Aboriginal Child 

Language Acquisition project. This project is investigating the complex multilingual nature of the 

language input children in remote Aboriginal communities receive from their caregivers. The project is 

focussing in particular on the relationship between input and acquisition, and socialisation in changing 

multilingual environments. 

Indigenous children in Tennant Creek, whose traditional language is Warumungu, are acquiring nonstandard 

English as a first language. Warumungu has undergone severe language shift but influences 

the variety of Aboriginal English spoken. The eight children in this study, aged between 14 and 36 

months, are being recorded on a regular basis interacting with one or more caregivers and other 

children, over a three-year period. 

The problem for these children will be that at the age of five they will enter mainstream schooling 

where standard English is the language of instruction. In addition, literacy and learning programs 

assume that children have been socialised in literacy practice according to mainstream norms. 

In this paper, we focus specifically on the language used in activities normally associated with the 

development of pre literacy skills. Caregivers and older children were recorded reading and discussing 

picture books, and modelling oral story-telling styles in the children‟s homes. We argue that these 

kinds of activities should provide a foundation for links between home language practices and schoolbased 

learning. 

Peer-peer interaction in a paired speaking test: the case of the First Certificate in English 

Dr. Evelina D. Galaczi 

Research & Validation Group, ESOL Examinations, University of Cambridge 

Galaczi.E@ucles.org.uk 

This discourse-based study investigates paired test-taker discourse in the First Certificate of English 

(FCE) speaking test. The paired test format involves two test takers who work jointly on a task. The 

primary aim of the study is to focus on fundamental conversation management concepts of the paired 

test-taker interaction, such as overall structural organization, turn-taking, sequencing and topic 

organization. The study has been motivated by the complexity of the paired speaking test event and a 

need for a deeper understanding of the interactional dynamics in paired speaking tests in order to 

make better inferences about L2 speaking ability. 

The presentation will fall into three parts. First, I will briefly overview the available research on paired 

speaking tests. I will then present the main findings about the global patterns of interaction in the peer 

test-taker dyads which emerged as a result of the conversation analysis. The three patterns of 

interaction were termed "collaborative," "parallel," and "asymmetric," and were distinguished based on 

the dimensions of mutuality and equality (Damon & Phelps, 1989; Storch, 2001, 2002). In addition, the 

dimension of conversational dominance, operationalized as "participatory," "sequential," and 

"quantitative," (Itakura, 2001) was found to intersect with the dimensions of mutuality and equality, 

leading to sub-groups within each interactional pattern of high or low conversational dominance. I will 

end with a discussion of the theoretical and pedagogical significance of the study, namely (i) the 

deeper understanding it provides of paired oral test interaction in the FCE and the construct of 

conversation management; (ii) the SLA implications in terms of a lower- and higher-level 

conversational management ability, and (iii) the pedagogic insights it provides into patterns of 

interaction non-native speakers orient to when in pairs, and the benefits of teaching L2 learners the 

features of collaborative interaction. 

Regulative to Instructional Register: Towards Partnership Talk in Primary EAL 

Dr Sheena Gardner 

CELTE, University of Warwick 

S.F.Gardner@warwick.ac.uk 

"You'd better use the word 'partnership' there - that's what they want us to be doing now" said by a 

language support teacher as we reviewed my transcript of an earlier interview”. Despite the potential 

benefits of Partnership Teaching, as distinct from Collaborative Teaching and Support Teaching 

(Bourne and McPake 1991, Bourne 1997), international research suggests that language support staff 

may be marginalised in lesson planning (Arkoudis 2003) and in the classroom (Creese 2000, 2002), 


September, 2004


but that more equal partnerships can develop over time (Davison 2003), though related issues persist 

(Davison and Williams 2001) and the area is generally under-researched and under-theorised 

(Creese et al. 2003). 

Evidence from a three year study of classroom-based assessment of EAL in the Midlands and West of 

England suggests that full Partnership Teaching is rare, though Collaborative Teaching is increasing. 

For example, the language support teacher may lead the class for the language segment of the 

literacy hour, or alternate responsibility for the whole literacy hour. Occasionally both teachers are 

centre-stage, and Partnership Talk, where two teachers, together, teach the class, is possible. 

Drawing on Christie's development of Bernstein's regulative and instructional registers in curriculum 

genres (Christie 1997), this paper analyses part of a social studies lesson where the language support 

teacher moves from a silent, scribing role, through responding, then nomination and feedback moves 

in the regulative register, to finally initiating content and directing beautifully choreographed action 

centre-stage in the instructional register. This analysis forms the basis of a proposed continuum from 

Support Talk through Collaborative Talk to Partnership Talk. Though Partnership Teaching arguably 

need not be enacted in the classroom (Bourne, 1997:83), analysis of teacher-teacher classroom talk is 

an essential component of understanding language support relationships. [299 words] 

References 

Arkoudis, S. (2003). Teaching English as a Second Language in science classes: Incommensurate 

epistemologies? Language and Education17/3:161-173. 

Bourne, J. and J. McPake.(1991). Partnership Teaching: co-operative teaching strategies for 

language support in multi-lingual classrooms. London: HMSO. 

Bourne, J.(1997). The continuing revolution:‟Teaching as learning in the mainstream multilingual 

classroom‟. In C. Leung and C. Cable (eds) English as an Additional Language: Changing 

Perspectives. York: NALDIC. 

Christie, F.(1997). Curriculum macrogenres as initiation into a culture. In F. Christie and J.R. Martin 

(Eds) Genres and Institutions:Social Processes in the Workplace and School. London: Continuum. 

Creese, A.(2000). „The role of language specialists in disciplinary teaching: In search of a subject?‟ 

Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 21/6:451-470. 

Creese, A.(2002). EAL and ethnicity issues in teacher professional and institutional discourses. In 

Leung, C. (ed.) Language and Additional/Second Language Issues for School Education: a reader for 

teachers. York: NALDIC. 

Creese, A., S. Arkoudis, C. Davison, S. Gardner and N. Hornberger (2003). Teacher Teacher Talk: 

The Discourses of Collaborating Teachers. Colloquium at the Language, Education and Diversity 

Conference, University of Waikato, New Zealand. 

Davison, C. (2003). Collaboration between ESL and content teachers: A developmental continuum. 

Paper presented at the Language, Education and Diversity Conference, University of Waikato, New 

Zealand. 

Davison, C. and A. Williams.(2001). Integrating language and content: Unresolved issues. In B. 

Mohan, C. Leung and C. Davison (eds) English as a second language in the mainstream: Teaching, 

learning and identity. pp. 71-90. Harlow: Longman. 

Face and Gender: the Significance of Negative Face in Iranian Women‟s Social Identity 

Amer Gheitury 

Mostafa Hasrati 

Department of English, Razi University, Kermanshah, Iran 

gheitury@yahoo.com 

hasrati@yahoo.co.u 

A main feature of recent scholarly work on language is its focus on identity, or the self, as a social 

construct, or more particularly as a discursive product (Fairclough 1992; Ivanic 1998). One way of 

viewing the self as a social construct is through the notion „face‟, i.e. “the positive social value a 

person effectively claims for himself (sic) by the line others assume he (sic) has taken during a 

particular contact” (Goffman 1967, p. 5). 

Building upon Goffman‟s notion of „face‟ as a social construct and the Brown and Levinson‟s (1987) 

politeness theory and particularly their claim to universality of „face‟, the present study is an endeavour 

to investigate the ways in which Iranian women‟s identity, or face wants, affect their linguistic 

interaction with the members of the opposite sex. 

This study was conducted in a case study format and the data thus obtained was analysed using 

QSR.NUDIST software. The subjects were seven women working in Iranian governmental offices 

whose daily interactions with their male and female customers were carefully observed over a two 

week period. Some follow up interviews have been conducted with the participants, and more 


September, 2004


interviews are scheduled to be conducted. The preliminary results indicate that Iranian women show a 

systematic awareness of the significance of their face wants in constructing their identity as „Iranian 

women‟. Nevertheless, this negative face is not entirely socially motivated and is not likely to be 

explicable in accord with Brown and Levinson‟s politeness theory which is often postulated as 

universal. 

References 

Brown, P. and Levinson, S.C. (1987). Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage. Cambridge: 

Cambridge University Press. 

Fairclough, N. (1992). Critical Language Awareness. London and New York: Longman. 

Goffman, E. (1967). Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-to-Face Behaviour. New York: Anchor Books. 

Ivanic, R. (1998). Writing and Identity: The Discoursal Construction of Identity in Academic Writing. 

Philadelphia: John Benjamin Publishing Co. 

Revisiting the debate on interruptions: from measurement 

to classification in the annotation of data for cross-cultural research 

Marie-Noëlle Guillot 

School of Language, Linguistics and Translation Studies, University of East Anglia 

m.guillot@uea.ac.uk 

This paper will take up the debate about the measurement of interruptions in talk-in-interaction and 

revisits methodological issues associated with the annotation of corpora. In a study investigating two 

measurements of interruptions - West and Zimmerman‟s (1983) syntactic measurement and Murray‟s 

(1985) context-sensitive measurement - Okamato et al. (2002) show that both types by and large 

capture the same underlying constructs. While they identify subtle variations likely to affect some 

(meaning-based) studies, they conclude that, at least as far as the coding of very large data is 

concerned, researchers can be reassured by these results. Their enquiry, in other words, (largely) 

validates West and Zimmerman‟s frequently disputed but simpler and more objectively reliable 

measurement method for the coding of large corpora. The extent to which what West and Zimmerman 

propose is inclusive enough is not queried per se in Okamoto et al. There may be grounds for doing 

so. 

The intention of this paper, however, is not to challenge Okamoto et al.‟s findings, nor to dispute the 

attributes of West and Zimmerman‟s system (ease of application, cross-coding reliability), other than 

to (re)illustrate still largely unresolved issues about the identification of interruptions. Its main concern 

is to harness the debate to the related issue of categorisation, in its application to the annotation of 

medium-size multilingual data for cross-cultural analysis. The discussion will be informed by pilot work 

which has involved annotating a corpus of multi-party confrontational interactions in NS French and 

NS English, and has drawn on Goldberg‟s 1990 model for differentiating between interruption types 

(affiliative) relationally neutral interruptions and (non-affiliative) relationally loaded rapport and power 

interruptions. It will review issues from the conflicting points of view of Conversation Analysis and 

corpus annotation, and reveal concerns peculiar to this type of study with significant implications for 

research. 

Language Brokering among Young Children: Case Studies of Mandarin-speaking Families 

Zhiyan Guo 

Institute of Education, Manchester Metropolitan University 

J.Guo@mmu.ac.uk 

Many people seem to assume that parents play an important role in children‟s language development. 

However, it seems that fewer research offers the insights into how the children help to develop the 

parents‟ language, particularly second or foreign language. In reality, children in new arrival immigrant 

families, with access to the mainstream schooling, may grasp the knowledge of the English language 

more quickly than their parents. As a consequence, children, consciously or not, mediate the 

language to their parents and promote their parents‟ language learning. This mediation has been 

increasingly termed as brokering. 

The current study is part of a PhD project on the cultural brokering among young children in Mandarinspeaking 

community. In cultural brokering, language brokering could be one of the main categories. 

However, language brokering may happen not merely in significant events such as seeing doctors or 

being at the bank, but also in more routine activities in daily life such as telling stories, preparing 

children to a school activity. Adopting an ethnographic approach, the study bases the data production 

upon the daily activities in which language learning may occur between children and parents. By 

means of providing notebooks and cassette recorders to children and parents, some information 

flowing processes are captured. I also found that many linguistic items were actually brokered by the 


September, 2004


children. Analysis is done of how these language elements facilitate the parents‟ enculturation. 

Through children the parents may get to know more about the language itself. On the other hand, the 

study seems to suggest how language helps new immigrants acculturate themselves to the 

mainstream society even when their English is proficient enough to work professionally in the UK. 

More importantly, the study is intended to draw implications for the second or foreign language 

education. 

Re-thinking the grammar of spoken and written English 

Prof Susan Hunston 

Centre for English Language Studies, University of Birmingham 

s.e.hunston@bham.ac.uk 

In recent years there has been a considerable amount of interest in exploring the differences in 

grammar between written and spoken English, much of this using contrasting corpora of the two 

modes. Work has been done by, among others, Halliday (e.g. 1985), Carter and McCarthy (e.g. 1995), 

and Biber et al (1999). Whilst all the observations made by these researchers are pertinent, the 

implications for teachers are not always clear, and their relevance has been challenged (Cook 1998). 

This paper will propose that the results of research into spoken and written English can usefully be 

regarded as belonging to three categories: 

a) differences in quantity, proportion and probability. The preference in written language for nouns and 

in spoken language for pronouns belongs to this category. 

b) differences in acceptability in spoken and written English. The prevalence in spoken language of 

utterances consisting solely of a subordinate or relative clause, which in written English would be 

considered to be incomplete, belongs to this category. 

c) features of spoken English which do not constitute a different grammatical system but which are 

the result of processing constraints. False starts and grammatical blends belong to this category. 

The paper suggests that the term 'grammar' has a different meaning when applied to each of these 

categories. Furthermore, each category has different implications for the teacher of English. This 

needs to be taken into account when proposing that language teaching materials incorporate research 

findings of this kind. 

References 

Biber D., Johansson S., Leech G., Conrad S. and Finegan E. (1999). Grammar of Spoken and Written 

English. London: Longman. 

Carter R. and McCarthy M. (1995). 'Grammar and the spoken language' Applied Linguistics 16: 141- 

158. 

Cook G. (1998). 'The uses of reality: a reply to Ronald Carter' ELTJ 52: 57-64. 

Halliday M.A.K. (1985). Spoken and Written Language. Geelong, Vic.: Deakin University Press. Republished 

1989. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 

Graduates' gratitude: the structure of dissertation acknowledgements 

Dr Ken Hyland 


k.hyland@ioe.ac.uk 

The neglect of acknowledgements in the EAP literature is perhaps surprising given their importance in 

the scholarly communication process. While unrelated to the important academic goals of establishing 

claims and reputations, the significance of this optional genre is confirmed by its widespread use and 

the role it plays in the academic practice of reciprocal gift giving. Acknowledgements are almost 

universal in dissertation writing where they provide writers with a unique rhetorical opportunity not only 

to convey their genuine gratitude for the intellectual and personal assistance they have received in 

completing their research, but also to promote a competent scholarly identity by displaying their 

immersion in scholarly networks, their active disciplinary membership, and their observance of the 

valued academic ideals of modesty, gratitude and appropriate self-effacement. This paper discusses 

the importance of this genre and examines its generic structure and key features based on interviews 

with students and the analysis of the acknowledgments accompanying 240 PhD and MA dissertations 

written by Non-Native speakers of English in a variety of disciplines at five Hong Kong universities. 

The analysis reveals a three move pattern which is mediated by disciplinary preferences and strategic 

career choices, reflecting one way in which way postgraduate writing represents a situated activity. It 

helps reveal how acknowledgements are sophisticated and textual constructs which bridge the 

personal and the public and allow writers to present themselves as enmeshed in a network of 

academic and social relationships. 


September, 2004


Sojourners in cultures: interpreters in the political asylum process 

Moira Inghilleri 

Department of English and Comparative Literature, Goldsmiths College 

ens01mi@gold.ac.uk 

In the past decade, throughout Europe, the issue of immigration has remained amongst the highest of 

priorities for government policy and in popular opinion, extending from national concerns about border 

controls and quotas to more local reactions to changing communities. One of the most politically 

charged areas of immigration at the present time centers on the rights of refugee and asylum seekers 

fleeing persecution, many from within Europe itself. 

This paper will consider how asylum seekers in the U.K. communicate their right to be granted asylum 

in their accounts of persecution presented in interpreted appeal hearings. Based on on-going 

ethnographic research into interpreted asylum interviews, the paper will discuss the observable 

patterns evident with respect to the cultural arguments made for or against the credibility of an asylum 

claim and consider the potential impact of the interpreter within the exchange. It will consider the 

view, frequently appealed to in interpreting studies, that interpreters act as cultural intermediaries, 

occupying an effectively neutral space between different cultural/linguistic practices. This trope of inbetween 

suggests that the 'intercultural spaces' in which interpreters are located are ideological voids, 

with the interpreter as the channel that enables the two sides to discursively 'connect'. This paper will 

consider an alternative view. It will theorise the space between as an inherently heterogeneous and 

hybrid place where cultures and meanings overlap. It will argue that, in the asylum hearing, any 

cultural explanations presented on behalf of an asylum applicant's claim, as well as their acceptance 

or refutation by the judiciary, must be viewed within the context of the asylum system within which they 

serve a particular individual, social and/or political agenda. 

Polish Agritourism: Bilingualism and New Internationalities 

Adam Jaworski and Sarah Lawson 

Centre for Language and Communication Research, Cardiff University 

jaworski@cardiff.ac.uk 

lawsons@cardiff.ac.uk 

This paper examines discourses surrounding Polish agritourism within the framework of the expanding 

European Union and Eastern Europe's shift to market economy. Our data come from seven semistructured 

interviews with Polish agritourism 'farmers' conducted in 2001 and 2002 to unravel the 

tension between the global positioning of tourism in general, and the largely local consumption of 

Polish agritourism. Our interview protocol included questions on contacts with foreign visitors, hosts' 

ability to speak foreign languages, and hosts' views on the desirability of Poland joining the EU. At the 

time of the interviews the issue of Polish accession to the EU was hotly debated in public and private 

domains. Although the 2004 referendum delivered a 'yes' verdict, the majority of the Euro-sceptics 

tended to be rural, relatively less well-educated and older, in contrast to the urban, better-educated 

and younger Euro-enthusiasts. It was thus expected that the interviewees who run agritourism 

businesses and continue to make a living as farmers would be more apprehensive about Polish 

accession to the EU than those who have converted their farms solely for the purpose of running 

holiday businesses. The interviews confirm these general demographic patterns of Euro-sceptics and 

Euro-enthusiasts. Furthermore, the subjectivities of agritourism farm operators seem to be affected 

rather significantly by the types of interactions they enter with their paying guests. We demonstrate 

that Polish agritourism farmers' identities undergo change when their businesses expand from catering 

mostly for Polish tourists to hosting foreign tourists and becoming bilingual. We also suggest that the 

'new' international identities of the operators running Polish agritourism businesses embracing cross- 

European differences may be a contributing factor to their increasing bilingualism. This is in contrast to 

the more traditional, 'old' nationals, whose primary point of reference lies in their indexing their 

sameness with other Poles and remaining monolingual speakers of Polish. Interestingly, both Eurosceptics 

and Euro-enthusiasts, or 'new' internationals and 'old' nationals, invoke Polishness as a 

central point of reference in discussing 'Europe' (cf. Wodak et al., 1999 for a related discussion in the 

case of Austria). 

Reference 

Wodak, Ruth, Rudolf de Cillia, Martin Reisigl and Karin Liebhart. (1999). The Discursive Construction 

of National Identity. Translated by Angelika Hirsch and Richard Mitten. Edinburgh: Edinburgh 

University Press. 


September, 2004


The contribution of applied linguists and language testers in developing the Common 

European Framework of Reference for Languages 

Neil Jones and Dr Lynda Taylor 

Research and Validation Group, ESOL Examinations, University of Cambridge 

Jones.N@ucles.org.uk 

taylor.l@ucles.org.uk 

In 2001 the Council of Europe published the Common European Framework of Reference for 

Languages: Learning, teaching, assessment. The Framework document is 'a comprehensive model of 

language use and the language user, drawing attention ... to the relevance of the different components 

of the model to language learning, teaching and assessment'. It articulates a model of language and 

language use which draws heavily on work done within the field of applied linguistics over the past 30 

years. 

Since 2001 the Common European Framework (CEF) has become increasingly influential within 

Europe as national education authorities and other agencies adopt it for pedagogical and/or sociopolitical 

purposes, mainly in order to set and attain target language proficiency levels. The CEF now 

impacts directly on policy-making, syllabus design, curriculum development, pedagogy and 

assessment practice in countries throughout Europe. 

However, attempts to link performance in language exams to CEF levels have led several researchers 

to question both its theoretical status and its practical utility for this purpose. They have found its scale 

descriptors inadequate as construct definitions, being too underspecified to be useful for constructing 

tests or interpreting performance. 

This paper discusses the contribution that language testers can make to the CEF. Firstly, a constructled 

approach to language test construction can address the issue of scaling, i.e. the construction of 

dimensions of language proficiency clearly described in terms of task features. Secondly, work to 

interpret test performance -in 'can do' terms- provides a level of functional equivalence which enables 

equating across different languages. Assigning learners to CEF levels, on the basis of their test 

performance, is the final step. 

Discoursal Celebration of Ethnic and Gendered Cultural Capital: Japanese-Caucasian Hybrid 

Adolescent Girls in Japan 

Laurel Diane Kamada 

Aomori Akenohoshi College 

laurelkamada@hotmail.com 

Europe has been dynamically reconfigured over the last century by active movements of hybrid 

peoples. Movements of European peoples continue to expand into regions that have as yet not been 

well researched. This paper contributes to research on discoursal approaches to analyzing hybrid 

identities in Europe through examination of a non-European model: Japan. This presentation analyzes 

informal focus group talk of a network of six Japanese-Caucasian adolescent girlfriends residing in 

Japan since birth, all attending different Japanese (regular) schools, drawing on discursive psychology 

discourse analysis (Edwards & Potter, 1991; Potter & Wetherell, 1987, Wetherell, & Potter, 1992; 

2001; Wetherell, 1998; Potter & Edwards; 2001, Billig, 2001; Edwards & Potter, 1992). All of the girls 

have one Japanese parent and one foreign born/raised English-speaking Caucasian parent from 

Britain, America, or Australia. This paper examines how these girls, with their double-dominance 

(indigenous and white-western heritages), construct the notion of cultural capital as a self-enhancing 

discursive resource. They discursively celebrate their multi-ethnic and gendered cultural capital, 

backgrounded by their positioning in a society where a dominant hegemonic discourse denies the 

existence of heterogeneity and where they are socially positioned as the other and referred to as 

haafu (half).Examples of multi-ethnic cultural capital which these girls discursively construct for 

themselves include bilinguality, biliteracy, global savvy, femininity and means of access to a world 

beyond the national borders where one was born (including access to high-status English proficiency, 

connections, information). These girls are not only able to successfully take control of constituted 

subject positionings by use of rhetorical devices to explore, reject, confront, contest and alter subject 

positions, but more specifically, I will demonstrate how they discursively confront power positions of 

various actors in their worlds by (re)constituting themselves via rhetorical constructions which boost 

their self-confidence and pride in their possession of many kinds of multi-ethnic and feminine cultural 

capital. 


September, 2004


Cultural Imperialism or a Bridge to the Outside World? The Native Speaker in EFL in Japan 

Today. 

Patrick Kiernan 

Department of English, Tokyo Denki University 

patrick@cck.dendai.ac.jp 

The native speaker has been widely discussed as a theoretical concept in Applied Linguistics (Davies, 

2003), and it has been suggested that monolingual native speakers may not be the best target for 

learners of English as an international language (Honna, 2002). Indeed it has been argued that EFL 

has been redesigned as a profession for the convenience of Western publishers, educational 

institutions and native speaker teachers of English, often at the expense of local language policy 

(Phillipson, 1992). But how far is such an analysis appropriate to Japan which has a history of 

importing language and culture (including native speakers) to suit its needs? And what is the 

theoretical and practical role of the native English speaker in Japanese education and society today? 

This presentation brings together a variety of evidence to answer these questions. 

The first part of the presentation sketches a general picture of the native speaker of English in 

Japanese society from a historical perspective and as represented in the media. It then focuses on the 

narratives of the native speaker in government authorised English textbooks contrasting them with the 

cultural discourse presented by popular Western publishers. Finally the presenter reports on a survey 

of native and non-native English teachers and their students in a variety of educational contexts in 

Japan. Through questionnaires and interviews the presenter explores the attitudes to Phillipson‟s 

tenets of EFL teaching and the experiences of those effectively employed as native English speakers. 

The presenter argues that while the idealisation of English as a bridge to the outside world may 

contain elements of both Western and Japanese cultural imperialism, new discourses are emerging 

through the experience of foreign teachers resident in Japan. 

References 

Davies, Alan. (2003) The Native Speaker: Myth and Reality. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. 

Honna, Noboyuki. (2002) The Encyclopedia of the English Lanaguge Situation in the Asia: For Smooth 

Communication in the Global Age. Tokyo Taishukan Shoten. 

Phillipson, Robert. (1992) Linguistic Imperialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 

Educating Wei Liu: Chinese international students in Australian schools. 

Dr. Kristina Love 

Department of Language, Literacy and Arts Education, Faculty of Education, The University of 

Melbourne, Australia 

k.love@unimelb.edu.au 

In Australia, as in other English speaking countries, there has been a dramatic increase in the number 

of full-fee paying students from China accepted into senior high schools. These students aim to 

complete the final two years of secondary education well enough to gain entry to tertiary courses. 

There has however, been very little empirical research into the academic, language and learning 

experiences of these International students in Australian schools. 

Our recent research in one secondary school (Love & Arkoudis, In Press: Arkoudis & Love, In Press) 

challenges stereotypes of Chinese learners as "Brainy Asians" (Marton et al, 1997) and indicates that 

Chinese international students may not be receiving the support they need, despite representing a 

lucrative market for Australian education. This initial research suggests that while many Chinese 

international students experience general success in the Commerce and Science areas, they 

experience considerable difficulty in specialized subjects within those areas (such as Physics) or 

specialized sections within subjects, such as the media tasks in Business Studies, which rely on 

culturally specific knowledge and language. 

In this presentation, the nature of these difficulties will be explored as they are reported in our 

interviews with Chinese students and their teachers in a number of subject areas emerging as most 

problematic. Transcripts of these interviews will be analysed using the APPRAISAL framework 

developed by Martin (2000) and White (2002) in order to identify: the positions of subject area 

teachers as they struggle to understand the needs of their international students; and the positions of 

the students themselves as they struggle to understand the cultural and linguistic requirements in key 

subject areas. 

The analysis suggests that subject area teachers are working with outdated stereotypes of Chinese 

learners, while the academic characteristics of these new populations of such learners are much more 

heterogeneous. Given that existing stereotypes of Chinese learners may be leading to the 

institutionalizing of a form of disadvantage for these students in the current educational market, there 

is an urgent need for further research in this area to be more contextualised. 


September, 2004


Arkoudis, S. & Love, K. (In press for 2004). They're all over the shop: Chinese International students in 

the VCE, TESOL in Context, 14, (1). 

Love, K. & Arkoudis, S. (In press for 2004). Sinking or Swimming? Chinese international students and 

high stakes school exams (to appear in The Australian Review of Applied Linguistics, 27 (2). 

Martin, J.R. (2000) Beyond Exchange: APPRAISAL systems in English In Evaluation in Text: Authorial 

stance and the construction of discourse. S. Hunston & G. Thompson (eds) 142-175 Oxford, Oxford 

University Press. 

White, P. (2002) Appraisal: the language of attitudinal evaluation and intersubjective stance. Appraisal 

website URL: www.grammatics.com/appraisal. 

Formulaic sequences in lingua franca English 

Prof Anna Mauranen 

School of Modern Languages and Translation Studies, University of Tampere, Finland 

Anna.Mauranen@uta.fi 

It has been observed (Pawley and Syder 1983, Nattinger and DeCarrico 1992, Wray 2002), that the 

kind of idiomaticity contained in multi-word sequences which characterises native speakers' preferred 

use is particularly hard for even advanced L2 speakers to get right. Corpus research also suggests 

that learners' 'prefabs' deviate from L1 use in frequency, form and function (DeCock et al. 1998). This 

has been explained by L2 speakers' different language acquisition history and consequently different 

processing mechanisms (Wray 2002). However, the learner perspective on L2 use has its limitations. 

Increasingly, L2 speakers use English in international communication as a lingua franca with other L2 

speakers. In this situation, orientation towards an L1 standard becomes less salient than overall 

communicative clarity in negotiating meanings. From this perspective, English as a lingua franca (ELF) 

is to be studied in its own right, rather than as an imperfect version of Standard English. This paper 

investigates formulaicity in English spoken as a lingua franca in fairly sophisticated communication: 

academic discourse in university settings. The data consists of transcribed speech (the ELFA corpus). 

Results suggest that ELF speakers approximate native speakers' semi-formulaic sequences; for given 

pragmatic functions, they tend to employ expressions similar to those in L1 (there's this... for a 

presenting move; sort of, something like that, for certain kinds of vagueness). The choices (to answer 

to your question...) do not always match the preferred L1 expression, as observed in earlier research. 

However, the role of preferred expressions should not be exaggerated in modelling L1 use; native 

speakers do not confine themselves solely to the preferred forms (Mauranen 2003), but vary them 

creatively according to instantial needs. Both speaker groups thus deviate from the "canonical" form, 

although their deviations differ. L2 processing may therefore be closer to L1 in principle than is usually 

thought, but the actual linguistic outcome brings new variation into the language. 

University and Business: Towards a Systems Theory of Discursive Alignment 

Prof. Gerlinde Mautner 

Department of English Business Communication, 

Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration 

Austria 

ghm@wu-wien.ac.at 

The rhetoric of the free market is now firmly established in the discursive repertoire employed by 

university management. This is well documented in discourse analytic work (Fairclough 1993, Mautner 

2002), and has also been noted by higher education research (Barnett 2003: 103, Bok 2003: 20). 

The 'marketisation' of higher education discourse is generally attributed to universities' growing 

orientation towards the corporate sector, which, in turn, is due to cuts in government funding, 

increased reliance on private sector monies, deregulation and growing competition. Universities are 

responding to these pressures by remoulding their structures, operations and identities according to 

commercial, and specifically 'entrepreneurial', models (Slaughter and Leslie 1997, Marginson and 

Considine 2000). 

The reasons for marketisation have thus been clearly identified, as have been the discursive traces it 

leaves in the discourse of and about higher education institutions (HEI). What remains undertheorised, 

however, is the 'black box' in between marketisation as a political, economic and social phenomenon, 

and the language choices that individual members of HEIs make on a daily basis – choices which, 

cumulatively, constitute the new, marketised HE discourse. 

We can see that there is discursive alignment between universities and business; we also know why it 

is happening, but we know very little about how. Along what conduits of social contact does the 

discourse of the market flow into academia? What are the key points of contact at which this 


September, 2004


discursive osmosis takes place? Who are the prime agents, both outside and inside universities, of the 

changes in institutional discourse? 

The aim of this paper is to address these questions by setting out a theory of discursive alignment that 

is informed by sociolinguistic models of language change (Giles and Coupland 1991) on the one hand, 

and by systems theory on the other (Bailey 1994, Luhmann 1995). 

References: 

Bailey, Kenneth, 1994: Sociology and the New Systems Theory. Toward a Theoretical Synthesis. 

Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press. 

Barnett, Ronald, 2003: Beyond All Reason. Living with Ideology in the University. Buckingham: The 

Society for Research into Higher Education & Open University Press. 

Bok, Derek, 2003: Universities in the Marketplace. The Commercialization of Higher Education. 

Princeton & Oxford: Princeton University Press. 

Fairclough, Norman, 1993: Critical Discourse Analysis and the Marketization of Public Discourse: the 

Universities. In: Discourse & Society 4,2 (April 1993): 133-168. 

Giles, Howard, and Nikolas Coupland, 1991: Language: Contexts and Consequences. Pacific Grove, 

CA: Brooks/Cole. 

Luhmann, Niklas, 1995: Social Systems. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 

Marginson, Simon, and Mark Considine, 2000: The Enterprise University. Power, Governance and 

Reinvention in Australia. Cambridge, etc.: Cambridge University Press. 

Mautner, Gerlinde, 2002: Universitäten online – Die Kommerzialisierung des Diskurses in der tertiären 

Bildung am Beispiel von Business Schools. In: Thimm, Caja (ed.): Unternehmenskommunikation On- 

und Offline. Wien/New York: Peter Lang, 209-229. 

Slaughter, Sheila, and Larry L. Leslie, 1997. Academic Capitalism: Politics, Policies, and the 

Entrepreneurial University. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 

'My beloved and occupied homeland': Palestinian children's views of emerging nationhood 

Sky McLaughlin 

Department of. English Language and Literature, University of Liverpool 

s.a.mclaughlin@liverpool.ac.uk 

This paper is situated within the Appraisal framework outlined in Martin (2000), Hunston & Thompson 

(2000) and White (2002) and explores the linguistic resources employed by a group of Palestinian 

children to evaluate their country and nationality. Such a study comes at a critical point in the 

Palestinian's struggle for an independent state; the loss, violence and destruction suffered during the 

second Intifada, or uprising, has prompted the Palestinian community to reflect on existing, and 

negotiate new, shared values of nationhood. 

Results of the study reveal that Palestine is evaluated in two main ways. Firstly, the children express 

their own emotions and attitudes directly, and secondly, they attribute emotions and attitudes to the 

country which results in its personification. Evaluations of the nation are both positive and negative; 

positive evaluations originate in the innate characteristics and aesthetic beauty of the country, while 

negative evaluations stem from an external agent, namely the political 'situation' and its attendant 

obstructions. 

I argue that the contrast in these evaluations, combined with the particular nature of the negative 

evaluations, contributes to a deepened sense of what it means to be Palestinian. The children's 

resulting view of nationalism is reflected in their portrayal of themselves as citizens who embrace the 

responsibility of both 'freeing' and 'building' the nation. The conclusions reached by this study have 

wider implications for similar studies of nationhood in other contexts. 

Mapping Provision for Community Languages in the UK and in Europe 

Joanna McPake 

Institute of Education, University of Stirling 

j.m.mcpake@stir.ac.uk 

Teresa Tinsley 

CILT- The National Centre for Languages 

Teresa.Tinsley@cilt.org.uk 

The UK, like every other European country, is a multilingual nation. In addition to national languages, 

people in almost every European country also speak a wide range of community languages: 

languages of long-established and recently-established communities, sign languages, the languages 

of travellers, etc. 

However, until recently, neither UK nor European language policy made reference to provision for 

community language learning. A shift has now begun to occur. In England, recent policy documents 


September, 2004


have indicated that community languages could be taught alongside or in place of 'foreign' languages 

in schools. In Scotland, support for Gaelic and other community languages is identified as a national 

education priority. At European level, the European Communities' Action Plan 2004-6, Promoting 

Language Learning and Linguistic Diversity, specifically includes what are termed 'regional, minority 

and migrant languages'. 

But what impact are such commitments likely to have, and how can this be measured? Limited 

attention to this issue in the past means that even very basic information about the nature of current 

provision is lacking: for example, neither for the UK nor for Europe more generally is it possible to 

establish the number of languages for which provision is made, nor the number of people who take up 

such provision. Base-line information of this kind will be necessary in order to establish the impact of 

current and future initiatives, but collecting these data presents considerable challenges. These issues 

are discussed in this paper, which is based on work currently underway at CILT - the National Centre 

for Languages and Scottish CILT, in preparation for a UK-wide survey in 2004-5 and a European 

survey in 2005-7. Both surveys aim to map the kinds of formal and informal provision available for 

school-aged learners and to describe, in broad terms, the outcomes of such provision. 

Miss, who needs the languages of immigrants? Values and attitudes attached to bilingualism 

Dina Mehmedbegovic 

Ethnic Minority Achievement Adviser, City of Westminster LABSS 

dmehmedbegovic@westminster.gov.uk 

These were the words of a sixteen year old Kurdish girl when asked if in her opinion her languages, 

Arabic and Kurdish, could be of help in the career she wanted to pursue - as a travel agent. Currently 

a student in an inner London secondary school, she has been here for eleven months. Does that 

mean that only within eleven months of living in Britain, despite the fact that she was new to English 

when she arrived, this students has already received the 'low message value' in regards to minority 

languages? 

Britain as a country, in comparison to some other European countries, e.g. Scandinavian countries, 

Belgium, Switzerland, does not have a culture that supports or values bilingualism in individual or 

communities. For example, one of Britain's native bilingual communities situated in Wales has gone 

through a whole history of a complete language rights denial. It was only in 1993 that Welsh Language 

Act was passed, which for the first time guaranteed a 'basis of equality' between English and Welsh. 

An earlier act of this kind was passed in 1967, but it was much more limited. 

When it comes to the current situation in terms of immigrant communities maintaining their languages 

there are no issues regarding the exercise of this right, but the issue is that mother tongue schools are 

largely ignored by the mainstream system and the work done by children in these schools receives 

very little recognition outside of their communities. 

This paper seeks to explore how small samples of different groups within the British context relate to 

bilingualism. It is based on three studies: 

� study with bilingual parents; 

� study with mainstream headteachers; 

� study with bilingual children. 

The data collected in these studies are analysed using Ruiz's classification of attitudes towards 

bilingualism. According to Ruiz there are three main categories of attitudes towards bilingualism: 

bilingualism as Problem, as Right and as Resource. I have modified this framework by adding the 

category of bilingualism as Identity. 

Data-driven learning in German for Academic Purposes: A corpus-based approach for 

specialist learners 

Dr Martina Möllering 

Head of German Studies, Macquarie University, Sydney 

martina.mollering@mq.edu.au 

Following the rationale that corpora have an important part to play in fostering language awareness, 

this paper investigates the use of corpora in the teaching of German as a foreign language. Over the 

past decade, corpus-based research has had an increasing influence on language teaching 

pedagogy, with regard to linguistic content as well as to teaching methodology (c.f. Tribble & Jones 

1989, Johns & King 1991, Wichmann et al 1997, Kennedy 1998, McEnery & Wilson 2001). While the 

majority of studies reporting on corpus-based teaching approaches refer to English, only a small 

number of studies have discussed such an approach for German (e.g. Dodd 1997, Jones 1997, 

Möllering 2001). This paper describes an approach to teaching German designed for students who 

wish to acquire a reading knowledge of the German language, specifically for research purposes in 


September, 2004


the field of Ancient History where a large number of standard texts are published in German. The 

paper discusses the design and compilation of a corpus of German academic texts, which serves as a 

basis for linguistic analysis of semantic, morphological and syntactic patterns through procedures 

commonly employed in corpus analysis, such as compilation of word lists, frequency counts and 

concordances. While existing corpora of written German focus mainly on press and literary texts, a 

specialised corpus as examined here can serve as a database for research into the linguistic 

structures particular to academic texts in German, notably in the domain of Ancient History. In this 

contribution, the exploitation of language corpora is proposed in order to arrive at authentic teaching 

materials in the field of German for Academic Purposes. 

Dodd, B. (1997): Exploiting a corpus of written German for advanced language learning. In: 

Wichmann, A., Fligelstone, S., McEnery, T. & G. Knowles (eds): Teaching and Language Corpora. 

London/New York: Longman, pp. 131-145 

Johns, T. & P. King (eds) (1991): Classroom Concordancing 4. English Language Research Journal. 

Birmingham: Birmingham University 

Jones, R. (1997): Creating and using a corpus of spoken German. In: Wichmann , A., Fligelstone, S., 

McEnery, T. & G.Knowles: Teaching and Language Corpora. London/New York: Longman, pp. 146 - 

156 

Kennedy, G. (1998): An Introduction to Corpus Linguistics. New York: Longman 

McEnery, T. & A. Wilson (2001): Corpus Linguistics. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press 

Möllering, M. (2001): Teaching German Modal Particles: A Corpus-Based Approach. Language 

Learning & Technology. Vol. 5, No. 3, pp.130 -151 

Tribble, C., & Jones, G. (1989). Concordances in the classroom. Harlow, 

UK: Longman 

Wichmann, A., Fligelstone, S., McEnery, T. & G. Knowles (eds) (1997):Teaching and Language 

Corpora. London/New York: Longman. 

Cars, bands, films: Towards a local grammar of popular culture nomenclature 

Tim Moore 

Language and Learning Unit, School of Languages, Cultures and Linguistics, Monash University 

tim.moore@celts.monash.edu.au 

An interesting recent focus of discourse analysis has been on 'language in restricted 

domains'(Lehrberger, 1986). Such languages have been referred to as 'sub-languages', with the aim 

of the analysis being to develop what Gross (1993) calls 'local grammars'. One such sub-language, 

which has already received some coverage in the literature, is the language of newspaper headlines, 

whose grammar has been found to have its own distinctive syntax and lexis. 

This paper provides some preliminary findings and conclusions about another sub-language, one of 

interest to applied linguistics working in the area of popular culture - the language of product 

nomenclature (see also Lehrer, 1992). Examples are taken from three fields - the naming of car 

models, rock bands, and films. A number of patterns - lexical, syntactic and phonological - will be 

discussed for each field. For example, a key structural element in the syntax of rock band names is 

the definite article. In the titling of films, gerundive structures have played a significant role in recent 

times. In the naming of car models, a key linguistic unit is a phonological one - what might be called 

"the latinate tri-syllable of no particular meaning". 

A variety of explanatory models are considered for the patterns observed, including genre, 

intertextuality and linguistic novelty. Also considered will be the way that naming practices in English 

transfer to product nomenclature in non-English speaking markets. The research is thought to make 

some contribution to the theoretical field of local grammars. It also has practical application to the 

professional field of marketing and product promotion - as well as to the critiquing of these fields. 

European classrooms speak English: interactional and pragmatic implications? A look at 

classroom discourse in Finnish CLIL settings 

Tarja Nikula 

Department of Languages/ English, University of Jyväskylä 

tnikula@campus.jyu.fi 

The process of European unification has also its linguistic consequences. Language policies of the 

European Commission have, for example, resulted in its strong support for Content and Language 

Integrated Learning (CLIL), i.e. teaching non-language subjects through the medium of a foreign 

language. The popularity of CLIL has increased since the 1990s and, despite the instructional use of 

also other languages, the foothold of English as a medium of instruction in various European countries 

remains particularly strong. 


September, 2004


Research on CLIL is still in its infancy. While there is some research suggesting that its results are 

quite encouraging in terms of language development and subject mastery, we still know little about the 

discoursal effects of the use of English as the medium of instruction. Questions that have not been 

investigated in detail include: What are the forms and functions of English used in CLIL settings? In 

what ways is English used for the complex and diverse tasks that instructional events involve? How is 

language use shaped by the institutional and cultural contexts and linguistic backgrounds of the 

participants? 

Such questions will be tackled in this paper that reports on research on CLIL classrooms in the Finnish 

context from a discourse-pragmatic perspective, with particular reference to how the way in which 

English is used in CLIL settings relates to discourse in traditional EFL classrooms. The data consist of 

secondary level CLIL and EFL classrooms. The findings show differences between the two contexts 

that point toward their discursive practices being differently placed on the pragmatic dimension of 

detachment vs. involvement, CLIL discourse tending towards the latter. The findings also show how 

the role of English as an object and tool of study is discoursally constructed in these settings with, for 

example, students and teachers activating different identities towards English in each. 

On-Line Planning and its Focus-on-Form Effects in L2 Oral Performance: A case of a single 

learner of English 

Ryo Nitta 

Centre for English Language Teacher Education, University of Warwick 

R.Nitta@warwick.ac.uk 

Research on planning effects on L2 performance suggests that planning leads to better fluency and 

complexity but not always better accuracy. Yuan and Ellis (2003) indicate the inconsistent results of 

accuracy are due to confounding pre-task planning (PTP) with on-line (while-task) planning (OLP), and 

propose OLP as an effective implementation to enhance accuracy and complexity. Drawing on 

psycholinguistic rationale (e.g. Levelt, 1989; VanPatten, 1996; Skehan, 1998), the purpose of my 

research is to develop the framework and to investigate whether OLP induces L2 speakers to have 

focus-on-form opportunities through accurate performance and raising conscious awareness of form. 

The study addressed two main questions: One is, following Yuan and Ellis (2003), to investigate 

whether OLP significantly leads to better accuracy and complexity than the other conditions (i.e. PTP 

and non-planning [NP]); to develop this understanding, the second part explores whether the L2 

speakers notice their conscious effort to make accurate form through OLP using retrospective 

interview and transcription analysis. 

The pilot study was conducted by investigating a single learner with story-telling tasks in order to 

understand the nature of OLP and the feasibility of the research design. The results are that, 

consistent with Yuan and Ellis (2003), OLP led to disfluent but more complex and accurate 

performance; beyond their received findings, the speaker was more consciously engaged in 

formulation in OLP. The second stage particularly reveals that the speaker performed more correct 

past tense use in OLP, suggesting that past tense formation may devour much attention in the speech 

processing which is less available when the cognitive capacity is pressured (i.e. NP). Results using the 

two-part research design suggest that OLP is a useful device to investigate L2 speakers' formulation 

process, as well as a powerful pedagogic implementation to provide focus-on-form episodes. 

References 

Levelt, W.J.M. 1989. Speaking: From Intention to Articulation. Cambridge,Mass: MIT Press. 

Skehan, P. 1998. A Cognitive Approach to Language Learning. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 

Yuan, F. and R. Ellis. 2003. The effects of pre-task planning and on-line planning on fluency, 

complexity and accuracy in L2 monologic oral production. Applied Linguistics 24: 1-27. 

VanPatten, B. 1996. Input Processing and Grammar Instruction. New York: Ablex. 

Teaching and learning through interaction: A case study of a Japanese primary EFL classroom 

Yumi Ohashi 


ohashi_yumi@hotmail.com 

This paper will examine the spoken discourse of a primary EFL classroom in Japan from a sociocultural 

perspective. It applies Rogoff‟s (1990) the notion of “guided participation” as a mean of 

interpreting learning in daily life to language learning. Language learning is seen as a process of 

educational “participation” enabling pupils to use English to become active social members of the 

classroom community. Thus the study examines the process of EFL learning through classroom 

discourse, based on the assumption that classroom activity is the process by which the learner 

becomes a participant in the community of the EFL classroom. 


September, 2004


A total of 8 lessons (6 hours) of spoken data from a Year 3 Japanese primary classroom was collected 

over 5 months. Transcribed data was coded for “discourse actions” which were then condensed into 

“discourse patterns”. As a result of the analysis, seven discourse patterns emerged, capturing the 

major characters of participation such as control and support. 

Of the patterns identified, one in particular, which has been labelled as “scaffolding” appears to lead to 

active participation. This is an open and uncontrolled pattern that invites pupils‟ participation together 

with teacher‟s support. Such a discourse pattern provides the class with rich affordances, encouraging 

and inviting pupils to participate in language learning activity. The result is a process in which learning 

is co-constructed by the teacher and pupils, the teacher playing an important role in the guiding of 

social interaction leading to active participation. 

The pedagogic implications for primary pupils at the beginner level are that teachers need to (1) be 

responsive to pupils‟ needs (2) provide a rich “semiotic budget”(Van Lier, 2000) such as the use of 

pictures and gestures and (3) establish a mutually supporting relationship with the pupils, involving the 

handing over of control to nurture autonomy in participation. 

References 

Rogoff, B. (1990) Apprenticeship in thinking: cognitive development in social context. New York: 

Oxford University Press. 

Van Lier, L. (2000) From input to affordance: Social-interactive learning from an ecological 

perspective. In J. P. Lantolf.(ed.) Socio-cultural Theory and Second Language Learning. Oxford: 

Oxford University Press. 

Appropriating academic discourses: the intersection of the academic curriculum with student 

voices in a South African context 

Moragh Paxton 

Commerce Academic Development Programme, Centre for Higher Education Development, University 

of Cape Town, South Africa 

mpaxton@ched.uct.ac.za 

The research for this paper is set in a changed and changing political and cultural context as the 

South African Higher Education system transforms itself to address the needs of a new social order. In 

South Africa as in Europe, language shapes and is shaped by these changes and there may be 

interesting comparisons to be drawn between countries and continents. 

The paper describes some of the findings from an interpretive qualitative study which used linguistic 

and intertextual analysis of student writing to consider the relationship between the academic 

curriculum and student voices in the first year of studying economics at a South African university. It 

illustrates the way students from diverse social backgrounds draw on past discourses as well as a 

variety of new ones they encounter as they negotiate the new literacy of the academy and attempt to 

make sense of new concepts in economics. In the process of acquiring the new discourses students 

reaccentuate and rework past texts so that they blend more acceptably into the new discourse. 

The challenge is to understand the impact of these experiences and these past discourses in order to 

successfully mediate the transition to university. The paper emphasises that cultural and linguistic 

difference may be used as a resource so that students learn to understand and appreciate the 

diversity of discourses in the university environment. It is felt therefore that the findings of this study 

may have the potential to impact on the way that economics and economic literacy is taught in South 

Africa and the way teaching materials are designed. 

Negotiating participant roles and status in intercultural communication 

Hermine Penz 

Department of English Studies, University of Graz 

hermine.penz@kfunigraz.ac.at 

In intercultural communication, instances of miscommunication and consequently repair activities are 

frequently only viewed as resulting from people's cultural differences. However, miscommunication 

can be attributed to a number of factors which are not restricted to differences in the participants' 

cultural background. Differences in interpretation may be caused by situational factors, different social 

or professional roles, status or perceived status differences, gender differences, age, etc. In the data 

analysed it is peoples' different professional roles and different levels of expertise which tend to cause 

communication problems. People's perceptions of roles are frequently also closely related to their 

inactment and interpretation of status. This is why the second aspect addressed in this presentation is 

participants' negotiation of status. The discussion shows that role and status negotiations form an 

inherent part of international project work and should therefore be paid sufficient attention to in 

international cooperation. I argue that research in intercultural communication should shift towards 


September, 2004


integrating a wider range of parameters than concentrating on (national) culture. The examples are 

taken from a corpus of data collected during project work in the area of European educational 

cooperation. The project participants come from different European countries and use English as a 

lingua franca for communication. In addition they also represent different professional backgrounds. 

The data were collected through participant observation, were tape-recorded and transcribed. The 

analysis uses the methods of discourse analysis, ethnography of communication and pragmatics with 

a specific focus on the analysis of framing in discourse. This paper analyses how participants frame 

their roles in intercultural interaction and how their differing interpretations of what roles are being 

inacted lead to miscommunication and negotiation processes. The focus, however, is not on why 

miscommunication occurs but on how people deal with problems in communication interactionally and 

how they manage to reach common ground. 

Talking Posh, Acting Posh? Masculine Identities on an Undergraduate Academic Writing 

Programme 

Siân Preece 

Educational Initiative Centre, University of Westminster 

s.preece@wmin.ac.uk 

As British universities engage with widening participation, the student body is becoming increasingly 

diverse. This is particularly the case in post-1992 urbanised universities which recruit large numbers of 

„non-traditional‟ students from local areas. A growing proportion of these students are „multilingual‟ 

(Martin-Jones and Jones, 2000) in the sense that they use English and one or more „community‟ 

languages. However, on arrival in university, some have low levels of expertise in the ‘literate English’ 

(Wallace, 2002) and literacy practices of their disciplines and may be referred to academic writing 

programmes. 

In this paper, I explore ways in which a group of multilingual male participants on an undergraduate 

academic writing programme negotiate their „newcomer‟ (Lave and Wenger, 1991) identity in 

university. Most are British-born and aged 18-21. Through discourse analysis, I reflect on ways in 

which the participants perform gender (Butler, 1990), in particular doing „being one of the lads‟. This 

involves a strong identification with the language and practices of their peers and a much more 

problematic identification with the „discoursing subjects‟ (Foucault, 1991) of higher education, and the 

language and literacy practices of university communities of practice. This becomes expressed in 

dichotomies such as „talking slang/ talking posh‟, „acting cool/ acting mature‟. I argue that attention to 

„face‟ (Goffman, 1972) in the peer group makes it difficult for the participants to engage fully in tasks 

designed to improve their expertise in „literate English‟ and university literacy practices. Many appear 

to be walking a tightrope between conflicting demands. While some learn to negotiate these conflicting 

identities, others drop out, are excluded or underachieve. This has implications for ways in which 

universities approach widening participation and for (language) educators working with similar cohorts 

of undergraduates. 

Collaborating on topic: the work of questions in speaking and literacy lessons 

Julie Radford 

School of Psychology & Human Development, Institute of Education, University of London 

j.radford@ioe.ac.uk 

Asymmetry in classroom discourse, typified by the teacher's frequent use of inauthentic questions, 

potentially constrains the oral contributions of children. The aim of this paper is to compare the 

interactions between teachers and pupils during three oral language tasks, where questions perform 

different work. 

Specialist language teachers were video-taped interacting with children experiencing specific 

language difficulties during consecutive episodes of story-writing, speaking-book and circle-time 

lessons. By adopting a conversation analytic (CA) approach to the analysis, a detailed account of the 

structure and lexical choices within the teachers' initiations is gained. The analysis explores how 

these features have different implications for topical development in terms of the extent to which they 

foster collaboration. 

High use of modalisation is found in the speaking book and story-writing activities, indicating the 

teachers' willingness to negotiate alternative points of view. During speaking-book the teacher initiates 

topic with elicitations, which invite news, ideas or opinions from the child. In story-writing the teacher 

uses invitations, that call for children to generate ideas or suggestions. Analysis of follow-up turns 

demonstrates ways in which the teachers recast and reformulate the prior turn and elicit further topical 

material related to the pupils' agendas. By contrast, there is limited use of modalisation or topic 

negotiation in the circle-time activity. 


September, 2004


The study demonstrates how questions in speaking and literacy activities can be suited to the coconstruction 

of topic by teacher and pupils, whereas circle-time affords no such opportunities because 

of the way in which turns are allocated. The findings have professional significance for both teachers 

and speech and language therapists. 

Second language learners' identities: a literature review 

Cristina Ros i Solé 

Department of Languages, Open University 

c.ros@open.ac.uk 

Traditional views of language learning have tended to judge linguistic competence from a monolingual 

point of view. As a result, L2 speakers are too often regarded as failed native speakers who very 

rarely achieve native speaker or bilingual status. More socially oriented views of language learning, 

however, acknowledge that language learners are legitimate owners and users of the second 

language (Cook, 1999). Language learners perform their own representations of the language and 

have identities in their own right, without which they could not become successful language users in a 

multilingual world. The review of the literature of this emerging area of applied linguistics will be based 

on post-structuralist and socio-cultural oriented views on language learning, which expand the 

definition of linguistic competence to include notions of inequality of power in social interaction and the 

notion that language users‟ identity is dynamic and multiple. Within this approach, the individual 

learners‟ desires and imagined communities of practice are as important as the processes by which 

the language is acquired and practiced. Striving to belong to a particular community of practice, 

accessing linguistic resources, and the opportunities to practice and invest in the target language are 

some of the key elements to succeed in acquiring „the right to speak‟. Three different strands of the 

literature that form the basis for this approach will be discussed: the immigrant language learner 

experience (e.g. Norton 2000); language learners and teachers‟ identities (e.g. Pavlenko 2003); and 

the testimonial accounts of professional writers in L2, (e.g. Cowley 2003). 

References 

Cook, V. (1999). Going beyond the native speaker in language teaching. TESOL Quarterly, 33, 185- 

209. 

Cowley, P. (2003). Lost and found- the language of exile. Mots Pluriels 23. March 2003. 

http://arts.uwa.ed.au/MotsPluriels/MP2303pc.html 

Norton, B. (2000). Identity in Language Learning: Gender, Ethnicity, and Educational Change. London: 

Longman. 

Pvlenko, A. (2003). „I Never Knew I Was a Bilingual‟: Reimagining Teacher Identities in TESOL. 

Journal of Language, Identity and Education, 2 (4), 251-268. 

The Representation of Social Actors in the EFL High School Textbooks in Iran 

Samad Sajjadi 

Shiraz University of Medical Sciences 

ssajjadi2001@yahoo.com 

Although the structural approach to the study of texts, written or oral, is shown to have numerous 

advantages, the study of both the structure and the 'social context of media texts' can be very effective 

in providing a solution which arms the media critic with the ability to 'denaturalize' or uncover the 

'taken-for-granted of ideological messages' (Dellinger, 2000). In this approach textbooks, as a kind of 

media, are looked upon not merely as something intended to reflect the existing reality of the 

community, but as an entity capable of building stereotypes as well as presenting sorts of ideological 

views of the reality (Cameron, 1992; Van Dijk, 2001). 

Textbooks, as such, tend to show the reality from a particular standpoint, i.e. a sort of ideology 

embedded in a curriculum which, to Armstrong (1998), can aid in the dissemination as well as 

imposition of power relation in a community. Armstrong, in this concern, goes on to assert that "[T]he 

school and its curriculum is a powerful agent for imposing and preserving social norms, cultural values 

and what counts as knowledge" (pp. 147-8). Such assertions indicate the significance of a curriculum 

in imposing certain opinions or beliefs on the learner in particular and the community in general, using 

textbooks as one of the most effective means of disseminating the intended message. 

In this connection, the present study was planned to investigate how language as a social practice has 

been employed in EFL textbooks (at high school level) to expose the underlying ideology, representing 

certain social groups in Iran. More specifically, it aimed to find out how the representations, used in the 

texts, construct certain social and normative realities, such as subjectivity and identity. As such, the 

study intended to know whether the curriculum developers or the authors of the textbooks under study 


September, 2004


have, consciously or unconsciously, given a special priority to a particular social group, such as a 

special gender, social class, or race in developing the content of the texts. 

The results turned out to be quite interesting; for example, the analysis of the text materials showed 

that females have been significantly under-represented, with a ratio of 6:1. In terms of social class, the 

middle class has been mainly introduced and referred to, at the expense of all other classes. 

Ethnically also norm and values dominant in the capital city, Tehran, form the main feature of texts, 

excluding numerous varieties common in other parts of the country. 

References 

Armstrong, F. 1998. The curriculum as alchemy: school and the struggle for cultural space. 

Curriculum Studies, 6(2), pp. 145-160. 

Cameron, D. 1992. Feminism and Linguistic Theory. London: Mcmillan Press Ltd. 

Delinger 2000. Critical discourse analysis. Obtained from: www.utufi/~bredelli/cda.html (retrieved on 

Thursday 30 March 2000). 

Van Dijk, T.A. 2001. Critical discourse analysis. In D. Schiffin, D. Tannen and H. Hamilton (eds.), The 

Handbook of Discourse Analysis (pp. 1-43). Malden, Mass: Blackwell. 

Prospects for linguistic diversity in Europe: views from a small island 

Julia Sallabank 

University of Reading 

julia@torteval.demon.co.uk 

The European Union places overt value on linguistic diversity, as is shown by its commitment to 

multilingualism in the European Parliament, the European Charter for Regional and Minority 

Languages (ECRML) and the European Bureau for Lesser-used Languages. 

The ECRML has had an impact on the policies of EU countries, although it is implemented with 

varying degrees of enthusiasm and very few minority languages are no longer considered 

endangered. Policies to protect linguistic diversity do not apply to non-indigenous languages. 

This paper considers the benefits of bilingualism (social and cognitive). Current research indicates that 

benefits are seen in general educational achievement only if both languages are afforded equal (or at 

least respected) status. 

The paper examines the consequences of loss of societal bilingualism in a small speech community in 

Guernsey, Channel Islands. This can be seen as a forerunner and microcosm of the loss of linguistic 

diversity in larger communities. Language shift is further advanced than in many EU countries; 

Guernsey is not a full member of the EU and has not ratified the ECRML. Until the mid-20 th century a 

high proportion of the population was trilingual in Guernsey-French, Standard French, and English. 

Loss of the local variety has led to even greater loss of Standard French, despite it being taught as a 

school subject from age 9 and the proximity of the French mainland. The paper maintains that there is 

a need to protect/strengthen linguistic rights in order to maintain linguistic diversity, and that a trilingual 

education model, valuing the minority vernacular as well as standard languages, is the only way to 

regain a valuable resource. Parallels are drawn with the situation of community/heritage languages in 

the UK. 

The research involves a combination of questionnaires, ethnographic interviews and participant 

observation, as well as interviews with policy-makers and language campaigners. 

Recognising the different classroom genres: a classroom study in the context of the Academic 

Language Development Project 

Pascaline Scalone 

Annabel Tremlett 

Brian Street 

Carys Jones 

King's College London 

linescalone@yahoo.co.uk 

This study is based on data from an Academic Language Development classroom occurring once a 

week for AS students from different South East London Schools. These students come from a range 

of different disciplines, are from different linguistic and cultural backgrounds, and speak English as a 

second language. 

The classroom under study is part of a range of various activities, within the Aspire Partnership, 

aiming at providing young people with more opportunities to access higher education. Within the 

Academic Language Development programme, students work on different literacies (reading, writing, 

doing presentations etc.) across different types of activities (attending lectures, group discussions, 

textual analysis, debates etc.) to be more familiar with the multiple types of academic literacies skills 


September, 2004


required from students at university . Students consequently need to recognise different genres 

operating in the classroom and produce different texts accordingly. 

This paper reports some of the initial findings of this classroom-based study which investigates, 

among other issues, how students recognise the different activity frames and their associated genres 

within and throughout the sessions. The analysis focuses on the effect of such knowledge on both 

students' participation in different classroom activities and their productions of related texts. 

The data used for this presentation are drawn from a data-set of classroom video- recordings. In 

addition to the naturally occurring video and audio classroom data, the discussion will draw on video- 

and audio- taped interviews with teachers and students, and work samples produced by students. 

Interlanguage pragmatic development from two angles: production and comprehension 

Gila A. Schauer 


aexgas2@nottingham.ac.uk 

This paper presents the results of a longitudinal study into the pragmatic development of nine learners 

of English over a period of nine months. The development of pragmatic proficiency was approached 

from two angels: pragmatic comprehension and the production of pragmatically appropriate language. 

Data for the study were collected with Bardovi-Harlig and Dörnyei's (1998) innovative video-andquestionnaire 

based instrument, retrospective interviews and a new Multimedia Elicitation Task (MET) 

developed by myself. 

Data on the pragmatic comprehension of the learners were collected with Bardovi-Harlig and Dörnyei's 

(1998) instrument, whose "exemplary study has opened a venue for much future research" according 

to Kasper and Rose(1999, p. 86). The original study was based on a video containing 20 short 

scenarios, eight of which contained a pragmatic error, eight a grammatical error and four scenarios 

were correct. Participants were asked to assess on a questionnaire whether the individual scenarios 

were correct or incorrect and in the latter case rated the error on a six-point scale. 

For the present study, the retrospective interview was added to the original research design to obtain 

data about the reasons why a particular level of salience was assigned to a mistake. Also, the 

interview provided the opportunity to obtain further information on the participants' attitudes towards 

their host country, their contact with native speakers and their personality. 

Data on the production of pragmatically appropriate language were gathered with the MET which 

contextualises traditional DCT techniques with audio and visual situational information and collects 

oral data. The 16 MET scenarios have been developed according to the permutation of two organizing 

factors, status and imposition, and depict situations students are likely to encounter during their time at 

a British University. 

The talk will focus on individual learner differences evidenced by the qualitative and quantitative 

results obtained from the various data elicitation methods. 

The Role of Scaffolding and Awareness in L2 Learning 

Sabina Sica 

Centre for Language in Education, School of Education, University of Southampton 

S.Sica@soton.ac.uk 

Sociocultural theory (Lantolf 2000) is changing our perspective on L2 learning as a culture specific, 

socially-built, learner-active process and is increasingly adding new insights into the processes 

involved in L2 learning (Ohta 2001). 

This case study is an ongoing Sociocultural exploration of the role of the construct of scaffolding, the 

strategic collaborative assistance involving the co-construction of knowledge, in L2 vocabulary 

learning. Its aim is to track L2 vocabulary progress in relation to scaffolding and to explore a series of 

issues grounded in the qualitative analysis of the data. In particular, the issue of strategic awareness 

of collaborative assistance and the ways in which it can impact on the learning outcome are among 

the objectives of the study. 

We observed two adult learners of English L2 during a year's language course with a frequency of 

weekly, one-hour recordings. A stimulated-recall method looked into the mechanisms of learning as 

perceived by the learners and tested newly learned vocabulary in the short term (weekly intervals). 

Vocabulary size tests (Meara 1990, Nation 1990) were also employed to measure general lexical 

progress. 

In the paper we will discuss the relationship between the scaffolding episodes found in the course of 

the year's observation and the vocabulary progress as seized in the tests. We will look at the features 

of the scaffolding episodes that led to vocabulary development in the two learners and the 

mechanisms around the successful learning incidents. We will finally discuss the relationship between 


September, 2004


1) learners' perception of what conditions determined the success of the recorded learning incidents; 

2) the actual ways in which learners tackled the task of learning vocabulary and their use of 

scaffolding; 3) the learning outcome. 

We hope that this study will help teachers to exploit the potential of scaffolding in the language 

classroom and will inform future research in SLA. 

References 

Lantolf J. P. (2000), Sociocultural Theory and Second Language 

Learning, Oxford University Press: New York. 

Ohta A. S. (2001), Second Language Acquisition Processes in the Classroom: Learning Japanese, 

Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. 

Meara P. (1990), Eurocentres Vocabulary Size Test, version E1.1/K10, MSDOS, Eurocentres 

Learning Service: Zurich. 

Nation P. (1990), Teaching and Learning Vocabulary, Newbury House. 

Double-crossing as an educational strategy 

Christopher Stroud and Lionel Wee 

National University of Singapore 

ellscj@nus.edu.sg 

Viewing literacy as social practice obliges us to pay attention to how attempts to acquire particular 

practices may or may not fit with an individual's larger sociolinguistic profile, including her identification 

of herself as having a certain kind of persona. 

In this paper, we draw upon ethnographic data of literacy practices among Singaporean teenagers, 

and illustrate the simultaneous existence of competing participation frameworks for literacy activities in 

the classroom. Our claim is that the personal stance on literacy activities that students take can be 

discussed in relation to these competing frameworks, and we discuss this in terms of Bell's audience 

design categories for persona presentation. For example, the fear of being labelled an 'attention 

seeker' by their friends makes students unwilling to approach the teacher for help. The worry that they 

might be considered 'snobs' makes them unwilling to use English. In these cases, the main concern is 

not with the teacher's evaluation; rather it is with the opinions of their peers. 

This raises the question of how the conflict between pedagogic activities and peer orientation might be 

resolved. Our proposal takes its inspiration from Rampton's (1995) notion of crossing, which highlights 

the ways in which a language user can comfortably partake of codes that are associated with 

identities to which user obviously does not belong and does not claim any linguistic competence in. 

We introduce the idea of double-crossing as an educational strategy, where teachers might first cross 

over into students' peer oriented ways of speaking with the specific intention of inducing the student to 

cross back (hence the double-crossing) into ways of speaking that are more typically associated with 

adult role models. The goal is to encourage students to engage in language use without threatening 

their prevailing investments (Pierce 1991) in a peer-oriented identity. 

„Parenting‟ Magazines: the Real Addressee 

Jane Sunderland 

Dept. of Linguistics and Modern English Language, Lancaster University 

j.sunderland@lancs.ac.uk 

Recently the commercial childcare magazine industry has added to its conventional title range (such 

as Mother and Baby) with new titles like Parents, Parenting, Parentwise, Baby Years and Child. The 

question these new titles raise is whether the targeted audience of these magazines is any less 

„mother‟ than previously. In this study I look at advice features in three different „parenting‟ magazines 

from 2002, and ask (a) whether they address fathers and mothers equally, and (b) whether and to 

what extent they constitute a „shared parenting‟ environment, or at least a father-friendly one. Drawing 

on theoretical notions of discourses, interpellation, representation (a form of address), polyphony and 

reader response, I examine address features, slippage, salient lexical and visual absences, lexical 

traces of the „Part time father‟ discourse (Sunderland, 2000), and gender stereotyping. I show that the 

representation of fatherhood is mixed. There are indeed some references to and about fathers. 

However, there is considerable textual evidence of slippage from „generic‟ you to you as mother, the 

very polyphonic advice articles create a highly female environment, and traditional gender 

stereotyping is much in evidence. Bizarrely, given the titles of these magazines, „shared parenting‟ 

itself is rarely if ever discussed. The heterosexual father in a partnership seems to have difficulty being 

constructed as a father. Finally, I therefore consider different possible readings of these magazines by 

a would-be „shared parenting‟ father. 


September, 2004


Reference 

Sunderland, J. (2000) „Baby entertainer, bumbling assistant and line manager: discourses of 

fatherhood in parentcraft texts.‟ Discourse and Society 11/2: 249 – 274. 

CLIL in monolingual countries 

Liss Kerstin Sylvén 

English Department, Goteborg University 

liss.kerstin.sylven@eng.gu.se 

Content and language integrated learning (CLIL) has proven effective in enhancing the learning of an 

L2, not least in the form of immersion teaching in Canada (cf. Swain & Lapkin 1989, Genesee 1987). 

Also in the European context CLIL has been implemented as a way of conveying foreign languages to 

students (cf., e.g., Baetens Beardsmore 1993). In Sweden, CLIL has expanded rapidly since the 

beginning of the 1980‟s and is now used in every fifth school at upper secondary level (Nixon 2000). 

Reports show that teacher and student attitudes towards language teaching using CLIL are almost 

exclusively positive, and also that students rate their own development as much better than do their 

traditional peers, who are taught in Swedish and have English as a separate subject (Hägerfelth 1992, 

Nixon 2001). However, few reports exist on the actual development of proficiency in English among 

CLIL students in Sweden as well as in Europe. Those that have been published show no hard and fast 

evidence that CLIL students are more proficient than their traditional peers (Washburn 1997, Wode 

1999). Moreover, studies of CLIL classrooms indicate that the linguistic environment is not as rich as 

expected (Dalton-Puffer 2003, Nikula 2002, Falk 2000), suggesting that the intake of English in school 

is negligible. This paper will account for a recent longitudinal study focusing on the incidental 

acquisition of vocabulary among CLIL students as compared to traditional ones (Sylvén forthcoming). 

Suggestions will be made as to possible reasons for the relatively poor outcome of the CLIL students 

in the study. Furthermore, ideas for future research areas for the enhancement of CLIL in monolingual 

countries such as, e.g., Sweden will be proposed. 

References 

Baetens Beardsmore, Hugo (ed). 1993. European models of bilingual education. Clevedon: 

Multilingual Matters. 

Falk, Maria. 2000. Språk- och innehållsintegrerad inlärning och undervisning i praktiken: meningsfull 

målspråksträning? Unpublished degree paper. Department of Nordic languages. Stockholm 

University. Stockholm. 

Genesee, Fred. 1987. Learning through two languages. Cambridge: Newbury House. 

Hägerfelth, Gun. 1992. Undervisning på främmande språk. Department of Nordic languages. Lund 

University. Lund. 

Nikula, Tarja. 2002. Teacher talk reflecting pragmatic awareness: a look at EFL and content-based 

classroom settings. Pragmatics. 12, 4. 447-467. 

Nixon, John. 2000. Content and language integrated learning and teaching in Sweden. Stockholm: 

Swedish National Agency for Education. 

Nixon, John. 2001. Integrating the teaching of language with the teaching of content. Språkboken. 

225-234. 

Swain, Merrill and Sharon Lapkin. 1981. Bilingual education in Ontario: A decade of research. 

Toronto: Ontario Institute of Studies in Education. 

Sylvén, Liss Kerstin. Forthcoming. Teaching in English or English teaching? Göteborg: Göteborg 

University. 

Washburn, Linda. 1997. English immersion in Sweden: A case study of Röllingby high school 1987- 

1989. PhD thesis. English Department. Stockholm University. Stockholm. 

Wode, Henning. 1999. Incidental vocabulary acquisition in the foreign language classroom. Studies in 

Second Language Acquisition. 21, 243-258. 

The progression of linguistic knowledge through language games: a reflection about games as 

learning tools in the EFL classroom 

Paula Tatianne Carréra Szundy 

Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo, Brasil 

Linguistics and Modern English Language, Lancaster University 

p.szundy@lancaster.ac.uk 

This paper aims at presenting some results of the research I have been developing as a PHD student 

in Brazil and as a visiting researcher at Lancaster University, UK. Having as its main purpose to 

accomplish an in depth discussion about the use of games as teaching-learning tools in the EFL 

(English as a Foreign Language) classroom, my research is oriented by two main goals: 1.Investigate 


September, 2004


the progression of language games as well as their role in the process of knowledge construction in 

three different learning stages of the foreign language. 2. Promote the teacher's reflection about 

his/her own practice in the EFL classroom in what concerns the use of language games through the 

observation of his/her teaching, the construction of a theoretical framework and the dialogue with the 

researcher in reflective sessions taken place after the video recording of the teacher's class. The set 

of data for this research was collected in a Language School in Brazil and consists of seven 

videotaped games, written questionnaires answered by students after the videotaping of each game 

and four dialogical reflective sessions from which the teachers and the researcher participated. The 

theoretical framework that gives support to the discussion concerning the use of games in the EFL 

classroom is mainly based on the studies of Vygostky (1930), Leontiev (1934) , Elkonin (1978) 

Huizinga (1944), Caillois (1955), Cook (2000), Bruner (1975), Lier (1985) and Rojo (1999, 

forthcoming). In what concerns the reflective process and the role played by the researcher in the 

construction of this process, I have been seeking theoretical support basically in the conceptions of 

Bakhtin (1929, 1953, 1975), Coulter (1999), Fullan (1996) and Freire (1992). Besides providing 

essential information concerning the research questions, the context and the theoretical framework, 

this paper intends to focus on some analysis results in progress concerning both the construction of 

knowledge in the games and the participants' reflective process. 

Taking the Bible for a Talk: The discursive life of a Bible-study group 

Andrew Todd 

School of Religious and Theological Studies, Cardiff University 

andrew.todd@stedmundsbury.anglican.org 

In an age where the contribution of religion to the cultural life of Europe is under question, it is 

increasingly important to understand the language of religion and its relation to other discourses. This 

paper provides a small contribution to this area. The author of the paper is an adult educator 

employed by the Church of England and a practical theologian. He is currently researching empirically 

the way in which people in local churches talk about and interpret the Bible. This involves in-depth 

study of the talk and dynamics of a small number of existing Bible-study groups. This paper presents 

some early findings from the project. 

The paper will discuss the ways in which one particular such group talked about the Bible and its 

interpretation, focusing on: 

� the role of the researcher, and associated questions of reflexivity; 

� the different interpretative strategies adopted by members of the group, and the ways they 

orientated to the Biblical text; 

� the way members talked about God, and the location of God in relation to the discourse. 

Language learning motivation in a reconfigured Europe: access, autonomy, identity 

Dr Ema Ushioda 

Centre for English Language Teacher Education, University of Warwick 

E.Ushioda@warwick.ac.uk 

Historically, social-psychological models of language learning, though originating in a North American 

context, date back to a foundational period in communicative syllabus design prompted by European 

integration in the early 1970s. Their central motivational concepts of instrumental and integrative 

orientation closely paralleled the professional and social communicative purposes according to which 

functional-notional syllabus specifications were defined. Moreover, social-psychological theory offered 

a valuable framework for studying communicative needs and language development among migrant 

populations (e.g., Meisel 1977). 

In the last decade, however, in a move towards what Dörnyei (2001) has called more educationfriendly 

approaches, we have witnessed significant diversification of L2 motivation concepts under 

scrutiny, adapted largely from cognitive and social cognitive theories of motivation. This move is 

welcomed since it has resulted in a stronger focus on classroom practices and brought the field in line 

with mainstream educational psychology. Yet one might also argue that it has somewhat shifted 

attention away from the broader social context of language learning and language use during a period 

of significant socio-political change. 

This paper proposes that we need to develop an appropriate set of conceptual tools for examining 

motivational issues pertaining to linguistic diversity, mobility and social integration in a rapidly 

changing and expanding Europe. The paper draws on research that has begun to reappraise the 

concept of integrativeness in relation to the lingua franca status of English. It considers the value of 

participation rather than acquisition metaphors of language learning in illuminating perspectives on 

motivation, and explores recently developed notions of investment and cultural capital. It examines the 


September, 2004


contribution of the Council of Europe‟s European Language Portfolio in promoting a view of motivation 

as self-development, and concludes by highlighting the concepts of access, autonomy and identity as 

key tools for analyzing the multiplicity of personal, professional and social goals underpinning the 

motivation to develop full and partial competences in additional languages. 

References 

Dörnyei, Z. 2001. Teaching and Researching Motivation. Harlow: Longman. 

Meisel, J. 1977. Linguistic simplification: a study of immigrant workersspeech and foreigner talk. In S. 

P. Corder & E. Roulet (eds), The Notions of Simplification, Interlanguages and Pidgins in their Relation 

to Second Language Pedagogy, pp.88113. Geneva: Librairie Droz. 

The best way to teach inferring meaning from context: A comparative study 

JoDee Walters 


aexjdw@nottingham.ac.uk 

The use of context to infer the meanings of unknown words has been proposed as the source of the 

majority of the words in the mental lexicon, with the task of learning vast amounts of vocabulary seen 

as too great to be accomplished by direct instruction alone (Nagy, 1997, Sternberg, 1987). In addition 

to seeking better ways to teach vocabulary directly, researchers and teachers have sought ways to 

improve the use of context, in an attempt to have an impact on vocabulary acquisition. While much of 

the empirical research in this area has been from the L1 perspective (e.g. Fukkink, 2002; Jenkins, 

Matlock & Slocum, 1989), the topic has been widely addressed, largely in descriptive terms, by 

second language researchers and teachers (e.g. Clark & Nation, 1980; Fraser, 1999; Huckin & Jin, 

1987). Instruction in the use of context seems to be generally considered worthwhile, in order to 

enhance, at the very least, reading comprehension, as well as, it is hoped, vocabulary development. 

What has not been demonstrated in the literature, however, is the most effective means of instruction 

in the use of context; nor has any long-term effect on vocabulary development been demonstrated. 

In this paper, the presenter will describe, and report on the preliminary results of, an ongoing research 

study, the purpose of which is to compare the effects of various methods of instruction in the use of 

context in ESL learners. This study will look at three instructional conditions: the use of a general 

strategy for using context, presentation and practice of specific context clues, and the use of cloze 

exercise to enhance awareness of and use of context. The effects of these instructional conditions on 

reading comprehension, ability to infer meaning from context, and vocabulary growth will be 

examined, and implications for teaching and further research will be discussed. 

References 

CLARKE, D. F. & NATION, I. S. P. (1980). Guessing the meanings of words from context: strategy 

and techniques. System, 8, 211-220. 

FRASER, C. A. (1999). Lexical processing strategy use and vocabulary learning through reading. 

Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 21, 225-241. 

FUKKINK, R. G. (2002). Effects of instruction in deriving word meaning from context and incidental 

word learning. L1 – Educational Studies in Language and Literature, 2, 37-57. 

HUCKIN, T. N. & JIN, Z. (1987). Inferring word meaning from context: a study in second language 

acquisition. In ESCOL 86: Proceedings of the third eastern states conference of linguistics. 

Colombus, Ohio: Department of Linguistics. 

JENKINS, J., MATLOCK, B. & SLOCUM, T. (1989). Two approaches to vocabulary instruction: the 

teaching of individual word meanings and practice in deriving word meaning from context. Reading 

Research Quarterly, 24, 215-35. 

NAGY, W. (1997). On the role of context in first- and second-language vocabulary learning. In N. 

Schmitt & M. McCarthy (eds.), Vocabulary: Description, Acquisition and Pedagogy, 64-83. 

STERNBERG, R. J. (1987). Most vocabulary is learned from context. In M. McKeown & M. Curtis 

(eds.), The nature of vocabulary acquisition. 89-105. 

Frequency, flexibility and word order in formulaic sequences: a corpus-based approach 

Shih-ping Wang 

University of Nottingham 

aexspw@nottingham.ac.uk 

Fixed idiomatic strings or formulaic sequences (FSs) can play a successful role in language studies 

(McCarthy, 1990 and onwards; Sinclair, 1991; Wray, 2000 among many others). Frequency is often 

suggested as one of the factors to influence the flexibility of word order in FSs (Fenk-Oczlon, 2001). 

However, how flexible (cf. Carter's 'cline', 1998) can the word order of fixed sequences be reversed, 

possibly yielding different grammatical/ungrammatical usages with various metaphorical meanings? 


September, 2004


For instance, the regular example, 'black and blue', expresses genuine colour or 'bruised', which is 

different from its counterpart, 'blue and black' with the meaning of real colour only. The problem 

immediately raised is that it is more difficult for non-native speakers (NNS) than native speakers (NS) 

to perceive what the differences between regular and reverse word orders are. In addition, individual 

variations and language change across the UK and the US occur to some extent in this regard. 

This three-year project investigates the word order of FSs, and the judgments for NS and NNS in 

terms of Academic Word List (Coxhead, 2000) for a vocabulary proficiency test, the British National 

Corpus (BNC) and a wordlist (116 items) as the questionnaire. There are 689 participants (313 NSs: 

UK & US and 376 NNSs) who confirm this research through two experiments. Following are some of 

the findings: 

1) There are at least 33% of items can be grammatically reversed. 

2) Kendall's tau_b correlation test shows that frequency is lowly correlated with NSs' judgment about 

the flexibility of word order (p < .01). 

3) The higher a regular example is ranked by NSs, the lower its word order is flexibly reversed (p< 

.01). 

4) MANOVA tests were further conducted to indicate that the frequency is not a factor to influence 

NSs' judgment, but a factor to have an effect on NNSs' preference. 

5) The higher the frequency of a item in the BNC, the higher the significant difference for different 

vocabulary proficiency levels of NNSs, who show 35% of items with significant difference. 

6) There are only 15% of items showing the individual differences among NSs, but 39% with 

significant difference between the UK and US participants (p


language learnt. In addition the different attributions given by those who considered themselves 

successful and those who saw themselves as unsuccessful were examined. 

The results were compared to those obtained in previous attribution studies and specific inferences 

drawn with regard to language learning in the UK. Consideration is given to the implications of these 

findings for the language classroom. 

To Be or Not To Be: Exploring CMC in a Virtual Second Language Learning Environment 

Dong Ye 

School of Education, University of Southampton 

dy@soton.ac.uk 

The idea of using the web as a "virtual classroom" has provided a new language-learning environment 

with a wealth of pedagogic possibilities. While computers have done an excellent job of providing drills 

and storing and retrieving large amounts of information for users/learners, few programs are able to 

provide the genuinely communicative environment that is seen as necessary for acquisition. (Meskill, 

1999) Computer Mediated Communication can overcome this obstacle, since individuals can actually 

communicate with others within the electronic context. 

The purpose of the research is to study the nature of learner- teacher, and learner-learner interaction 

in CMC environments in a virtual English language class. It aims at increasing understanding of the 

role and significance of the technological tools and the various ways in which they can become part of 

the academic community and the individual students' study processes. The research has used a case 

study approach, complemented with techniques from discourse analysis and ethnography. These 

research questions try to illuminate the specific ways that CMC functions as a tool in a class of 

intermediate level learners of English as a second language. The whole data set includes interviews, 

questionnaires, observations and documents from the learners and the teachers, as well as transcripts 

of CMC sessions. 

Interactional patterns in the CMC environment will be analyzed in detail, as well as learner and 

teacher perceptions of the use of CMC as a communication and language-learning tool, and finally, 

any changes in learner output will be documented. It is hoped that the combination of these research 

objectives will provide a deeper insight into the nature of CMC as a language-learning tool. The study 

therefore can contribute to the body of literature of second language teaching and learning, as well as 

the growing body of literature on CMC. 

The multiple readings of metaphor in classroom 

Mara Sophia Zanotto 

Pontificia Universidade Catolica de Sao Paulo 

marasophia@terra.com.br 

This research originated from a concern with the genuine problem pertaining to the means by which a 

lecturer and his/her students deal with the interpretation of metaphors, leading to multiple readings 

since metaphor is a highly indeterminate phenomenon. 

Our aim in this work is to investigate this problem, making use of interpretive methodology (Erickson, 

1986; Denzin & Lincoln, 1998), with students generating data (Mason, 1996) in naturalistic settings, 

i.e., in classrooms. The main instrument used for collecting data was group verbal protocol, which is a 

socio-cognitive reinterpretation of verbal protocol (Ericsson & Simon, 1984), based on the metaresearch 

on verbal protocol carried out by Cavalcanti & Zanotto (1994). 

Our aim is to contribute to answering the following questions: 

a) how do students construct multiple readings of a metaphor during a collaborative thinking-in-groups 

practice in a classroom? 

b) what pedagogical implications are there for the use of group protocol in classroom for metaphor 

interpretation? 

Analysis focused on segments relating to the understanding of a metaphor and was defined by an 

inductive search for categories and relevant theories for interpreting data, such as: conceptual 

metaphor theory (Lakoff & Turner, 1989; Lakoff, 1993) and conceptual integration theory (Fauconnier 

& Turner, 1999). 

Using qualitative methodology to focus on multiple readings for „the metaphor‟ resulted in the 

generation of relevant data which, besides shedding light on some mechanisms of comprehension 

process, made it possible to discuss the nature and the process of metaphor identification, considering 

that what was evident in the interpretation of „the metaphoric vehicle‟ was a network of readings 

interweaved by metaphoric and metonymic threads. Therefore that which one might classify simply as 

„a metaphor‟, proved to be a more complex matter, a polysemous amalgam of metaphors and 

metonymies, that challenges theories to explain it. 


September, 2004


Colloquia 

Joint efforts, shared benefits – advances in methodology, good practice and theory building 

for and through language documentation 

Peter Austin and Friederike Lüpke 

Endangered Languages Academic Programme, SOAS 

pa2@soas.ac.uk, fl2@soas.ac.uk 

Language documentation is a relatively new field of linguistics, whose standards are still emerging. 

Language documentation differs crucially from language description in that it exploits new 

technological possibilities for presenting not only linguistic analyses but huge and accessible amounts 

of primary data. These data open up radically new opportunities beyond the grammatical analysis of 

lesser described languages to include research on culture, history, and cognition. The availability of 

these data also calls for a greater contribution from lesser described languages to subfields of 

linguistics that generally draw on data from a few well described languages, such as corpus linguistics 

and psycholinguistics. The collection and publishing of audio and video data is also of relevance to the 

interests of neighbouring disciplines that generally are not much in contact with descriptive linguistics, 

such as anthropology, history, and sociology. At the same time, language documentation is an area 

where the traditional image of isolated field workers compiling information all by themselves on „their‟ 

languages is totally challenged, because it is impossible to assemble and exploit the relevant data 

without close interdisciplinary collaboration. As such, language documentation can only live up to its 

potential if it creates interfaces for the interaction between researchers from different disciplines 

working together for their mutual benefit. The proposed workshop aims at engaging colleagues from 

three fields of applied linguistics in an exchange with documentary linguists on the issues of 

methodology, good practice, and theory building in relation to language documentation. As far as 

methodology and good practice are concerned, we are interested in contributions as close to practical 

reality in the field as possible. With respect to theory building, we encourage contributions that aim at 

demonstrating how specific kinds of data from undocumented languages can advance linguistic 

theory, and recommendations on what these data are and how they should be collected and analysed. 

We aim at covering fields of interest of the three BAAL special interest groups on linguistic 

ethnography, corpus linguistics, and psycholinguistics/language learning. We propose a format 

consisting of four sessions of two papers each. Since some papers cross-cut the boundaries of the 

different subdisciplines, where possible, a representative of the three subdisciplines will be paired with 

a documentary linguist in one session, allowing as much direct contrast of perspective as possible. 

Each session will be 85 minutes long and consist of two 20 minute papers (each followed by 10 

minutes of discussion) by invited speakers, followed by a chaired discussion. A final round table 

discussion will close the colloquium. 

In relation to the different subfields of applied linguistics covered by the workshop, topics of interest 

comprise, but are not limited to, the following issues: 

We would like to exchange with scholars in anthropology and ethnography ideas about what kinds of 

data they would like to see included in a documentation in order to allow an appraisal of cultural and 

social practices based on collected audio and video data, even if the description of these practices is 

outside of the scope of the documentation project, how these data should be collected and what they 

can contribute to current theories. Simultaneously, we would like to point out ways to make linguistic 

data usable for anthropological interests and make recommendations on the minimum of linguistic 

data to be contained in a documentation based on an ethnographic or anthropological research goal 

for the later benefit of linguistics. 

We would like to discuss with corpus linguists what tools we can use in order to manage and analyse 

corpora, and what research questions small field-based corpora can answer. Further, we would like to 

find out how these tools could be refined and adjusted in order to accommodate the relatively small 

corpora resulting from language documentation. In return, we would like to engage with corpus 

linguists in a discussion of methodological issues such as corpus planning and design, the usability of 

statistical tests, the comparability of genres across languages, the contributions that could be made 

through investigations of corpora of lesser described languages, etc. 

Finally, we would like to engage with psycholinguists and language learning researchers on what kind 

of research questions we could answer through the use of stimuli and experiments, and how and to 

what degree we could document minority learner languages. We would further be interested in 

discussing how stimuli and experiments should be designed and analysed in order to be applicable to 

field conditions. From field linguistics there would be input on technical limitations to consider, crosscultural 

compatibility of stimuli, interesting areas of cross-linguistic variation to investigate in order to 

answer questions central to psycholinguistics and language learning research, etc. 


September, 2004


An anthropologist‟s suggestions for co-operative efforts between ethnographers and linguists 

working in small-scale societies 

Mark Jamieson 

Centro de Investigaciones y Documentación de la Costa Atlántica (CIDCA), Nicaragua 

krasku@macunlimited.net, wakumbai@yahoo.com 

In this presentation I consider topics which, from my own experience as an anthropologist working on 

language among the Miskitu, might benefit from sustained co-operative endeavours between 

ethnographers and linguists working in small-scale societies both in the field and in documenting their 

work. First, I believe that anthropologists and linguists need to share their knowledge about contacts 

between speech communities, both at particular moments and over time. Does such contact in any 

particular instance produce cultural and linguistic creolization? Or does it result in the formation of 

discrete classes, castes or other groupings kept fastidiously apart both culturally and linguistically? In 

addressing these questions I consider examples from Tukanoan people in the Northwest Amazon 

where languages operate as emblems of membership of discrete marriage classes and from the Pearl 

Lagoon basin in Nicaragua where in Miskitu-speaking communities English is used as a children‟s 

language. Anthropologists and linguists have already famously pooled their findings about linguistic 

and cultural classifications and possible relationships between these and worldviews from synchronic 

perspectives. However, the fascinating, and perhaps more revealing, changes that such classifications 

undergo over time remain comparatively little studied. I illustrate this with discussion of changing 

kinship terminology among the Pearl Lagoon Miskitu. I also consider the use for anthropologists of 

more information from linguists on noun classes and the criteria by which memberships of noun 

classes are fixed or suggested. I consider this in relation to Miskitu noun classes and the use of 

“alienable” noun class markers in Miskitu verbal art. Finally I discuss the need for co-operation 

between anthropologists and linguists in the study of genres, registers and speech styles, using as 

examples daughter-in-law and mother-in-law forms of speech among Mongolian- and Miskituspeakers. 

I suggest that anthropologists are good at identifying the contexts for these genres and 

analysing their social significance, but need help in finding and presenting linguistic evidence for 

these. 

Advances in linguistic theory issues through language documentation and psycholinguistic 

methodology: contributions from South-American languages 

Raquel Guirardello-Damian 

Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics Nijmegen/Museu Emílio Goeldi 

University of Bristol 

psrgd@bris.ac.uk 

My presentation explores how the methodology of psycholinguistics in conjunction with language 

documentation can contribute to addressing questions of linguistic theory. The notion of 'subject' has 

been the object of discussion in many linguistic works. Some scholars define it using formal criteria, 

others take discursive issues into consideration. Recently, there have been proposals for using 

concepts from the field of psychology to define 'subject'. Tomlin (1995) defends the hypothesis that the 

grammatical choice of subject in English is a linguistic manifestation of attentional focus. He devised 

an experiment - known as the fish film - which shows that, for English speakers, there is a 

correspondence between the entity of focal attention and the grammatical subject. The question is if 

this also holds true for other languages of the world. Ergative languages, especially deep ergative 

ones, pose particular problems for the definition of 'subject'. If we use the traditional criteria employed 

by linguists to identify subject in these languages, we often end up with confusing scenarios. So far, 

there have not been very satisfactory approaches to what the 'subject' of an ergative language is. 

Currently a project is under development in Brazil, investigating ergative languages from various 

South-American countries. The participants of this project are intending to use the methodology 

devised by Tomlin for obtaining linguistic data, given that it may be a useful tool for understanding the 

nature of 'subject' in such languages. As a participant of this project, I would like to report my 

experience in this area. I will give an overview of the discussions in linguistics regarding the notion of 

'subject' and the problem posed by ergative languages based on South-American ergative languages 

and our present project. I will show the film designed by Tomlin and discuss its features, having in 

mind the conditions faced by linguists during field work. Finally, I will mention related topics that can 

be explored with visual experiments. 

Reference: 


September, 2004


Tomlin, R. S. (1995). Focal Attention, Voice, and Word Order: An Experimental Cross-Linguistic Study. 

In Downing, Pamela and Noonan, Michael (eds.), Word Order in Discourse, pp. 517-554. Amsterdam 

and Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Co. 

The use of corpora in the study of collocation and semantic prosody, exemplified through 

corpus data from English and Mandarin Chinese 

Tony McEnery and Richard Xiao, 

Department of Linguistics and Modern English Language, Lancaster University 

A.McEnery@lancs.ac.uk 

This presentation illustrates the use of corpora for the investigation of central issues of semantics and 

lexicography. The paper studies the collocational behaviour of near synonymy and explores the links 

between collocation and semantic prosody. The importance of these concepts to language learning is 

well recognised. Yet while collocation and semantic prosody have recently attracted much interest 

from researchers studying the English language, there has been little work done on collocation and 

semantic prosody on languages other than English. Still less work has been undertaken contrasting 

the collocational behaviour of near synonymy and the association of collocation and semantic prosody 

in different languages. It was to explore issues such as these that the Lancaster Corpus of Mandarin 

Chinese was developed. Although relatively large in comparison to corpora of undescribed languages, 

the principles underlying the design of the corpus can serve as guidelines for field linguists aiming at 

conducting similar analyses. Using the Mandarin corpus, we were able to undertake a cross-linguistic 

analysis of pattern and meaning, drawing upon data from English and Chinese. Our main analytical 

findings are as follows: (1) corpus data is useful in that it shows the central tendency and typical 

attested use of a word; (2) semantic prosody is closely associated with collocation and text type; and 

(3) even typologically distinct languages may demonstrate striking similarities in collocational pattern 

and semantic prosody. We conclude the talk by addressing the more general question of how to 

create corpora for our as well as for similar research questions for languages for which only limited 

amounts of data are available. 

An overview of the design and encoding principles underlying the British National Corpus 

project and how thy can be adapted to field-based corpora 

Lou Burnard 

Oxford University Computing Services, University of Oxford 

lou.burnard@computing-services.oxford.ac.uk 

The British National Corpus is designed to represent as wide a range of modern British English as 

possible. The same goal should ideally underlie the creation of smaller, field-based corpora as well. 

Therefore, this paper introduces the design and encoding decisions underlying the British National 

Corpus with the aim of extrapolating as many design principles for the creation of smaller and fieldbased 

corpora as possible. The paper starts with an overview of the genres, both written and oral, 

represented in the corpus and gives recommendations on gathering a representative sample, 

balanced with respect to genres, age, region and social class of the speakers, for a much smaller 

corpus. The paper further introduces the encoding principles of the British National Corpus. The 

corpus is encoded according to the guidelines of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI). Each text in the 

corpus is segmented into orthographic sentence units, within which each word is automatically 

assigned a word class (part of speech) code. Segmentation and word-classification was carried out 

automatically by the CLAWS stochastic part-of-speech tagger developed at the University of 

Lancaster. The classification scheme used for the corpus distinguishes some 65 parts of speech, 

which are described in an accompanying documentation. Suggestions are made to what extent the 

encoding principles can be adapted to corpora that will mainly be tagged by hand and to what degree 

it is possible to create similar automatic taggers for less-described languages. Finally, it is illustrated 

how such a general corpus following internationally agreed standards can be used to answer a variety 

of research questions, ranging from lexicography to literary studies. 

The possible contributions of field-based corpora to syntactic theory, corpus linguistics, 

sociolinguistics, and anthropological and applied linguistics 

Friederike Luepke 

Endangered Languages Academic Programme, SOAS 

fl2@soas.ac.uk 

Corpus studies are in the overwhelming majority of cases limited to the investigation of languages for 

which large corpora are available. Field-based investigations, especially when presenting first 

descriptions of so far undocumented languages, generally rely on qualitative analyses only. 


September, 2004


Nevertheless, even small field-based corpora can contribute essentially to different subdisciplines of 

linguistics. 

This presentation introduces a field-based corpus study based on a small tagged corpus of natural 

speech from Jalonke, a West African Mande language of the Niger-Congo phylum spoken in Guinea. 

The corpus study serves to illustrate the importance of quantitative data for the following domains: 

� Theories of argument structure and argument realisation. There is a considerable debate whether 

the number of arguments with which a given verb appears is determined at the lexical or the 

constructional level. The Jalonke data show that this question cannot be answered universally and 

based on qualitative inspections, as is generally the case, but that language-particular features 

and quantitative data need to be taken into account. 

� The corroboration of language-particular genres established on the basis of culture-specifically 

recognised speech events, and the comparability of the linguistic features of these genres, such 

as the frequency of passives, imperatives, etc., across languages. 

� The identification and differentiation of sociolects according to age, sex, social background, etc., 

and a differentiated quantification of code switching. 

� The recognition of genres and registers featuring formulaic and ritualistic speech. 

� The identification of those genres and registers most suitable as an input for language planning, 

standardisation, the development of teaching materials, etc. 

The paper ends with an appeal to corpus linguists and psycholinguists to collaborate in the adaptation 

of quantitative methods to field-based corpora. Corpora are gaining more and more importance in the 

new field of language documentation. However, field linguists alone cannot develop adequate 

standards and techniques adding to their „traditional‟ workload – they urgently need to co-operate with 

specialists interested in the specific problems posed by smaller field-based corpora. 

The use of elicitation games in corpus studies 

Sonja Eisenbeiss 

Department of Language and Linguistics, University of Essex 

seisen@essex.ac.uk 

Ayumi Matsuo 

Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen 

ayumi.matsuo@mpi.nl 

Many field workers aim for natural communicative settings and thus simply observe and record 

communicative events or involve their participants in staged communicative events (e.g. discussions 

about a given topic). However, many constructions or grammatical markers are so infrequent that a 

detailed distributional analysis is impossible. This problem is even more pronounced for languages 

with argument ellipsis, where many verbs are hardly ever used with the full set of possible arguments 

(e.g. Japanese). Moreover, in spontaneous speech samples, it is often hard to determine intended 

meanings or referents. Therefore, many researchers make use of "classical" linguistic elicitation or 

experimentation. However, this data exhibits experimental effects and can often not be analysed for 

phenomena not targeted in the respective study. 

We argue for the use of so-called elicitation games, which involve comparatively natural 

communicative events that favour - but are not limited to - the use of particular constructions or 

markers. The effects of argument ellipsis for instance are reduced by providing discourse contexts in 

which speakers have to explicitly refer to all participants of the event they are talking about. We have 

developed a puzzle game, in which children describe pictures on a puzzle board in order to get the 

puzzle pieces with the matching pictures. The overt realisation of verb arguments is encouraged by 

using the same action but different participants for all pictures on the board (e.g. a man giving honey 

to a bear vs. a man giving honey to a cat vs. a woman giving a mouse to a bear). 

We present child language data from a comparative study on argument structure and case marking in 

German and Japanese. Based on this data set, we show that the use of elicitation games provides a 

quantitatively rich data base that can be exploited for a variety of purposes and provides a sufficient, 

ecologically valid foundation for quantitative and distributional analyses. In addition, we discuss the 

use of elicitation games for different types of constructions and grammatical markers in crosslinguistic/cultural 

studies. 

Three reasons to record speech-accompanying gestures when documenting an endangered 

language 

Sotaro Kita 

Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Bristol 

Sotaro.kita@bristol.ac.uk 


September, 2004


When people speak, they often spontaneously gesture. Speech-accompanying gestures are 

ubiquitous in everyday life, and an integral part of communication involving spoken language. But, why 

should we record this "non-verbal" phenomenon when documenting a language? I argue that there are 

three reasons to do so. First, gestures along with eye gaze could provide critical information for the 

description of demonstratives, which is an essential entry in any descriptive grammar. Recent works 

on demonstratives based on video recording have revealed that where the speaker and the 

addressees are attending may be a crucial semantic and/or pragmatic factor that determines choice of 

demonstratives in a given situation. Second, gestures may reveal crosslinguistic differences in 

cognition. Recent studies have revealed crosscultural variations in cognition that correlate with, and 

are possibly caused by, languages. If language plays a crucial role in maintaining such crosscultural 

variations in cognition, a loss of language entails a loss of a way of thinking about the world. Gestures 

are important in documenting crosscultural variation in cognition because they can serve as a 

"window" into the speaker's mind. One advantage of gestures in the investigation of cognition is that it 

is a spontaneous behaviour, not an imposed artificial task, which is often used in psychological 

experiments. Third, gestures themselves are worth documenting! If we are interested in documenting 

how people communicate with language, speech-accompanying gestures cannot be ignored. For 

example, important roles gestures play in conversation have been recognized in studies of 

conversation and face-to-face communication. Furthermore, documentation of gestural practice in 

different cultures may provide an answer to important dispute in cognitive science such as the 

biological vs. cultural origins of pointing gestures in child development. 

Exploring language-content duality in bilingual education 

Richard Barwell (Co-ordinator) 

Graduate School of Education, University of Bristol 

richard.barwell@bris.ac.uk 

Marilyn Martin-Jones (Discussant) 

School of Education and Lifelong Learning, University of Wales Aberystwyth 

mqm@aber.ac.uk 

The discourse of practice, policy and research in bilingual education relies on a number of key 

distinctions. One of the most significant is that between language and content. Whilst a number of 

authors have argued that language and content cannot be separated, the duality has proved difficult to 

dislodge. Its persistence may reflect its theoretical or heuristic usefulness or its intuitive appeal. Given 

the prevalence of this duality, however, it is important to consider how it shapes thinking in research, 

policy and practice. This colloquium offers an opportunity to consider how far the distinction between 

language and content has enabled us to understand the complex issues involved in teaching language 

and content in the same classroom at the same time. The contributors, who all draw on recent 

research in the area of the teaching and learning of English as an additional language (EAL), also 

suggest some different approaches or interpretations that may enrich work in this area. 

Participants: 

Constant Leung, King‟s College London 

Angela Creese, University of Birmingham 

Richard Barwell, University of Bristol 

Issues of language and content in bilingual education 

Constant Leung 

Dep. of Education and Professional Studies, King‟s College London 

constant.leung@kcl.ac.uk 

The concept of integrating language and curriculum content has long been recognised as a central 

issue in second/additional language education and has prompted much research. The framing of the 

discussion for this paper will particularly draw on the work of, inter alia, Beardsmore (1993), Cummins 

(2000), Christian and Genesee (2001), Leung (2003), and Ricento (2001), writers who have, for 

example, sought to locate the language/content issue in broader social and political contexts. 

In this paper, it will be argued that the pedagogic and curriculum issues of language-content 

integration intersect with at least two of the main themes in different approaches to bilingual education: 

the aims and goals of a programme, and the ideological-pedagogic values of the languages of 

instruction. 


September, 2004


In the first part of the paper, there will be a descriptive and analytical account of the different 

approaches to language-content integration found in many of the English-speaking education systems 

in the past thirty years. In the second part, the educational and pedagogic significance of these 

different language-content approaches for the conceptualisation of bilingual education itself will be 

discussed. 

Is this content-based language teaching? 

Angela Creese 

School of Education, University of Birmingham 

a.creese@bham.ac.uk 

Much of the content-based language teaching literature describes the benefits to be gained by 

integrating content with language-teaching aims and rejects the formal separation between „content‟ 

and „language‟ as a pedagogic necessity for language learning. This paper explores classroom 

interactions which trouble this claim. Through a focus on two-teacher secondary school classrooms, 

the paper analyses teachers and students interactions. It concentrates on the discursive management 

of shifts between language and subject knowledge foci. 

The paper draws on data from a year-long ethnography in three London secondary schools and draws 

on two particular data sets. The first set includes classroom interactions in which subject teachers and 

EAL teachers attempt to switch from a focus on curriculum knowledge to an aspect of language use 

(pronunciation, grammar, semantic, pragmatic). The second set incorporates an analysis of a 

geography booklet which has been adapted by an EAL teacher to make it more „user friendly‟ for EAL 

students. Both data sets are used to explore how teachers and students manage the content and 

language focus interface in a subject focused classroom. 

The ensuing discussion will consider issues such as the conflation and separation of language and 

curriculum learning aims within teacher/student interactions and classroom texts. It will explore the 

pedagogic consequences of shifting between the dual aims of subject and language learning and 

investigate how texts become transformed as teachers and students attempt to meet both sets of 

aims. 

Integrating language and content: a challenge from the mathematics classroom 

Richard Barwell 


richard.barwell@bris.ac.uk 

Research in bilingual education includes an important strand concerning the integration or 

„mainstreaming‟ of the teaching and learning of language and curriculum content for bilingual learners, 

particularly those from minority language backgrounds. Much of this work rejects a formal separation 

between „content‟ and „language‟, arguing instead that language and content are inseparable (see 

Mohan, Leung and Davison, 2001). Such research, however, tends to treat content as a fixed body of 

knowledge to be (re)constructed by learners. There is little research which seeks to understand how 

language and the curriculum are constructed and related in interaction by learners. 

In this paper, I report analysis of data from a recent study into the participation of students learning 

English as an additional language (EAL) in mainstream mathematics classrooms in the UK. This 3year 

study involved 18 students aged 9-10 years in two mathematics classes in a primary (elementary) 

school in the UK. As part of the study, pairs of students were asked to write and solve mathematical 

word problems together, an activity taken from their mathematics lessons. The students‟ discussions 

were recorded and transcribed. Analysis drew on ideas from discursive psychology and conversation 

analysis, in which talk is seen primarily as social action, through which notions such as curriculum or 

learning are constituted in interaction, rather than existing as pre-given states or structures. 

Analysis reveals how students‟ learning encompasses both mathematics and language learning, in the 

context, however, of significant identity and relationship work. Further analysis explores how these 

discursive practices relate to the kind of mathematics and language the students learn. These findings 

raise questions concerning current models of the relationship between content and language learning. 

In particular, I argue, there is a need for a more explicitly reflexive model of the relationship between 

content, language and learning. 

Angles on interviews 




September, 2004



1) General abstract 

Over the past two decades, there has been a noteworthy increase in the number of applied linguistics 

researchers publishing work which we might define as ethnographically oriented. In this 

ethnographically oriented work, the chief aim of researchers is often to gain understandings of 

language practices via sustained contact with participants in these practices. Such contact generally 

involves three types of data collection: documentary, observational (including the audio and video 

recording of speech events) and interview. While there is no way to establish which of these data 

sources has become the most popular among researchers, there certainly can be little doubt that the 

amount of research based either in part or entirely on interviews has increased notably in recent 

years. Historically, there have been at least two general discourses of interviewing. On the one had 

there is the textbook discourse of interviewing, often in the form of 'how to' or 'do's and don'ts'. This is 

the discourse of general texts on research methods, although in recent years most texts have begun 

to get away from this prescriptive, mechanistic and instrumentalist view of research interviews (see 

relevant chapters in Cohen, Manion and Morrison, 2000; Robson, 2002). A second discourse of 

interviewing is one which historically has questioned the textbook view of interviews as being about 

information transfer and what Kvale (1996) calls the 'mining' metaphor. From Cicourel (1964) to 

Briggs (1986) and Mischler (1986) to Kvale (1996), we see attempts to problematise interviews and to 

take Burgess's (1984) view of 'interviews as conversations' seriously. This colloquium is about the 

second discourse of interviewing. It is about how four researchers working in different applied 

linguistics contexts have come to view interviews as social events, and as such, as complex 

problematic processes. 

References: 

Briggs, C. (1986) Learning How to Ask. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 

Burgess, R. (1984) In the Field: An Introduction to Field Research. London: Routledge. 

Cicourel, A. (1964) Method and Measurement in Sociology. New York; Free Press. 

Cohen, L, L. Manion and K. Morrison (2000) Research Methods in Education, 5th edition. London: 

Routledge. 

Kvale, S. (1996) InterViews: An Introduction to Qualitative Research Interviewing. London: Sage. 

Mishler, E. (1986) Research Interviewing. Cambridge: MA: Harvard Univeristy Press. 

Robson, C. (2002) Research in the Real World, 2nd edition. Oxford: Blackwell. 

2) Individual contributions 

The problem with teaching interviewing 




Over the past eight years, I have taught sessions on research interviews to research students at the 

Institute of Education. In addition, I have given a fair number of talks on the topic at conferences and 

as an invited speaker at universities. In my contacts with research students attending these session 

and talks, I find that again and again I come back to the same theme, namely that interviewing cannot 

be taught as a skill, per se, and that it is for the most part an emergent craft, dependent on a 

combination of experience and common sense and sensitivity. Unfortunately, saying this to research 

students does not always go down very well. In this talk, I look at some of the sources of the conflict 

between my view of research interviews and the views manifested by some of my students. These 

include general research texts (e.g. Cohen, Manion and Morrison, 2002; Robson, 2002), which tend to 

frame interviewing as a technical skill, and a naïve positivist philosophy of science, which many 

students bring to the task of interviewing. My aim in this talk is to discuss these and other sources of 

conflict, how they are manifested and how I deal with them. 

References: 

Cohen, L, L. Manion and K. Morrison (2000) Research Methods in Education, 5th edition. London: 

Routledge. 

Robson, C. (2002) Research in the Real World, 2nd edition. Oxford: Blackwell. 

On-line interviewing: a researcher's journey 

Paul Borg 

Gifu Keizai Unversity, Japan 

borg@ogaki-tv.ne.jp 

Clearly, the advent of "online communication" has opened new and exciting data-gathering 

opportunities for the researcher. Internet "search engines" provide gateways to a veritable Pandora's 


September, 2004


box of information sources? whether book references, full-length articles, or official government 

documents in PDF format. E-mail is now widely recognised as the quickest and most cost-effective 

method of disseminating large numbers of survey questionnaires. What is sometimes not fully 

appreciated, however, is the extent to which correspondence by e-mail can offer the researcher a 

satisfying alternative to the face-to-face interview as a means of collecting in-depth, high-quality 

subjective data. 

Against this background, I shall discuss my own personal experiences conducting interviews (and, in 

certain cases, engaging in what may even be described as "dialogues") through the medium of e-mail. 

I shall try to present an honest account of the entire research process, from the recruitment of 

participants to the presentation of hard data. In so doing, I shall outline not only some of the practical 

advantages of e-mail as I perceive them, but also highlight some of the challenges, ethical concerns, 

psychological dilemmas and occasional failures I was forced to come to terms with. To provide some 

indication of how my research project was embraced by those who agreed to act as participants-namely, 

foreign teachers based in Japanese schools under the auspices of the Japan Exchange and 

Teaching (JET) Programme--I shall present some actual examples of participant feedback. 

Moments of tension? Insights from meta-language in interviews 

Frances Rock 

English and Modern Languages, Digby Stuart College 

University of Surrey Roehampton 

f.rock@roehampton.ac.uk 

This paper is motivated by the concern, shared by others on the panel, that researchers cannot 

sensibly take data collected through interviews as simply, or even necessarily, recording interviewees' 

perspectives. Briggs has called for this concern to be addressed through scrutiny of interview 

transcripts (1986:4) and, particularly, through attention to different orientations of interviewer and 

interviewee (1986:47). 

The paper begins by briefly taking stock of responses to Briggs' call. It then reacts to that call, in turn, 

by examining data collected during two rather different sets of research interviews. I was a constant 

across each set, as I participated in each interview. In the first set of interviews I was joined by police 

officers for discussion of linguistic practices which they used routinely at work. In the second set, in 

contrast, I was joined by people detained in police custody who discussed linguistic artefacts and 

situations which were less routine and in some cases completely new to them. This mixture of 

interactions with institutional 'insiders' and 'outsiders' and with interviewees with very different routes to 

the interview room, provides fertile ground for an examination of the diversity of orientations to what 

might, at first, appear a fairly homogeneous interview setting. 

The paper explores this diversity, by seeking moments of tension, manifest through meta-language 

and meta-linguistic exchanges on the surface of the interview transcript, which illuminate the emergent 

and unstable dynamic beneath. The paper therefore offers a data-based perspective which attempts 

to see interviews for what they are, communicative events in their own right, as well as recognising 

what they can offer, particular kinds of insight grounded in the interview context. 

Reference: 

Briggs, C. (1986) Learning How to Ask. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 

Facilitation Style in Focus Group Interviews 

Professor Greg Myers 

Linguistics and Modern English Language, Lancaster University 

g.meyers@lancs.ac.uk 

Handbooks on conducting focus groups give various suggestions for the moderator or facilitator who 

gets the discussion going and keeps it on the topics of interest to the researchers. But these 

suggestions tend to be general and prescriptive; there is little consideration of the range of possible 

kinds of discussion within the focus group format, or of the implications of this range for analysis of the 

discussion or use of the findings. This paper draws on conversation analytical studies of interviews 

and focus groups to consider the possible effects of differences in focus group facilitation, from what 

might be called more interventionist to what might be called more responsive styles. The analysis 

deals with transcripts of ten groups by two facilitators, and considers questions, prompts, receipts, 

formulations, and information turns from the facilitator, and responses, challenges, and questions from 

the participants. The finding is not a simple correlation of the facilitator's technique and the results, 

and certainly not a prescription of one most effective style. Instead the analysis shows how the 

ongoing discussion, including contributions of both the facilitator and the participants, opens up and 

closes off possible kinds of talk. 


September, 2004


Post-Graduate Colloquia 2004 

Getting a paper published in an academic journal 

Catherine Xiang 

Post-Graduate officer for the BAAL 

The Open University 

H.Xiang@open.ac.uk 

difficulties that PG members could have regarding publication during their PhD life. Getting paper 

published in an academic journal may be one of measurements for one‟s achievements through out 

the PhD. The main aim of the colloquium is to share the experience among the PG members in terms 

of publication and explore the factors and issues that are relevant to getting paper published. More 

importantly, we would be appreciated if we could have many reviewers, editors or more established 

researchers to participant in this colloquium and provide more insights and practical advice for those 

post-graduate students who would like to do in the future or who are already in the process of doing it. 

Therefore, the colloquium will be emphasising on interaction among the participants and mutual 

contribution towards the topic. After the session, a brief report on the main ideas or issues emerged 

from the discussion will be produced and circulated to all the attendees. 


September, 2004


Invited 

Colloquia 

Migration and Diasporas 

Convenors: 

Prof. Mike Baynham 


M.Baynham@education.leeds.ac.uk 

Prof. Dariusz Galasinski 

School of Humanities Languages and Social Sciences, University of Wolverhampton 

d.galasinski@wlv.ac.uk 

Discussant: 

Marilyn Martin-Jones 

School of Education and Lifelong Learning, University of Wales Aberystwyth 

mqm@aber.ac.uk 

Colloquium Abstract 

In an era in which public discourses, particularly in the media, increasingly present migration and 

diasporas through the lenses of nationalist and racist rhetorics (Wodak, & Riesegl,1999), creating 

atmospheres of social panic in which migrants, refugees and asylum seekers are seen as threatening 

the stable borders of national identities, there is, an urgent need for committed applied linguistic 

research “from the inside,” emphasizing through micro discourse analysis the subjective construction 

of these movements of human beings and the discursive processes in which they become engaged, 

rather than the objectivist “othering” of these in nationalist or racist mainstream discourses. Of course, 

as Wertsch has shown, narrative processes are also at work in these public discourses, in the 

constitutive stories which nations tell themselves. Our interest in this colloquium is in the stories that 

are ignored/silenced/othered by the public discourse on displacement, migration and settlement, but 

these „silenced‟ stories will necessarily be revealing about the nature of the public discourses within 

which migrants and migration are positioned. We are interested in the communicative practices that 

characterize processes of migration (which we see as starting while still at home, packing, planning, or 

perhaps hoping) and Diaspora We are also interested in the institutional processes such as asylum 

seeking procedures and the related power struggles over what constitute acceptable texts in those 

circumstances. Contributions to the colloquium may address a range of issues: 

� Issues of representation: how are migrants, refugees and processes of displacement, migration 

and settlement represented? 

� Issues of lived experience: how migrants cope with their experience of the process of migration 

and their sending and host communities? 

� Issues of identity construction: how are the identities of „migrant‟ „refugee‟, „displaced person‟ 

constructed in discourse? 

� Issues of orientation in social worlds: how do shifts in time and space produce the shifts in social 

identities and processes characteristic of displacement, migration and settlement? 

� Issues of institutional practices: what are the institutional practices related to displacement? 

Paper one: Polycentricity and interactional regimes in ‘global neighborhoods’ 

Jan Blommaert 

Universiteit Gent 

jan.blommaert@ugent.be 

James Collins 

University at Albany, SUNY 

james.Collins@kvab.be, collins@albany.edu 

Stef Slembrouck 


stef.slembrouck@ugent.be 

Focusing on multilingualism in Late-Modern urban environments, this paper argues for the 

neighborhood as a unit of practice mapped by field-specific relations. We show how language use and 

multilingualism are given social form by conditions of polycentricity and regimes of interactional 

practice. We present a preliminary typology of different places in an immigrant neighborhood in Ghent 

(Belgium) that organize different patterns of language use and language assessment. Streets, shops, 

public health centers, schools, bars all function as „centers‟ in the neighborhood, but each one of them 


September, 2004


allows or invites different interactional regimes, including perceptions of what counts as an acceptable 

set of (enacted) language resources from its users. Such densely layered patterns of multilingualism 

allow us to analyze the production of locality in the globalized era in which old and new forms of 

transnational movement and intra-national response intermingle. 

Key words: Multilingualism, neighborhood ethnography, polycentricity, globalization, migration 

Paper two: Lost in communism. Narratives of post-1989 Polish migrant experience 

Dariusz Galasinski and Aleksandra Galasinska 

School of Humanities Languages and Social Sciences, University of Wolverhampton 

d.galasinski@wlv.ac.uk 

In this paper we are interested in constructions of migrant experience in the narratives of Polish post- 

1989 immigrants to the UK who perceive their migration as unsuccessful, despite their wish to 

contribute to and be integrated into the British society. More particularly, we shall focus upon the 

positioning of the migrant and her or his immediate family in the social and economic reality of the host 

country. The central argument of our paper is that the migrants‟ narrated experience is anchored in the 

communist discourses of labour, social security and the state. 

We shall demonstrate that the migrants construct themselves and their immediate families as the 

those failed by the state and its social support agencies. While ready to train, work, and, more 

generally, contribute to the society, the informants see this readiness as one which should to be 

complemented by the state‟s help in obtaining employment. Not only are such constructions 

reminiscent of discourses of communism in which the state is the distributor and guarantor of 

employment, but also such narratives are predisposing the migrants to failure. 

We shall finally argue that the immigrants‟ engagement with the dominant discourses of the host 

country, their new „learning to labour‟, must start right at the level of the positioning of work and the 

worker in the discourses of the state. 

Paper three: Roots and routes through literacies: changing participation in a changing 

environment 

Clara Keating, University of Coimbra 

The present paper draws on ethnographic research into the routes through language and literacy 

practices experienced by a group of Portuguese women who have migrated to London. It focused on 

the role of language and literacy in people‟s processes of creating identities in migrant situations. This 

was a dynamic process where people played their own active role, located in the changing 

environment of the Portuguese community in London that sees its profile shift rapidly from that of 

„migrant‟ (with all the restrictions that „being a migrant‟ implies) to that of „European citizenship‟ since 

1986 (with all the apparent social and economic possibilities that „European citizenship‟ implies). 

Social transition opened space for conflicting, ambiguous and hybrid ways of doing that overlapped 

the old and the new. New ways of understanding business, work, education, community associations 

and public institutions were emerging for the Portuguese in the city of London, but they did not replace 

the restrictions (in terms of language, work or social welfare) that people still experienced in their daily 

lives, and that confined a vast majority of them to the traditional places of social activity (usually, 

domestic help and the service sector). The study focused on the mechanisms of agency, resistance 

and transformation revealed by personal experiences with language and literacy as these experiences 

emerged from the changing structural and historical factors that configured them in many-faceted 

ways (Keating, Maria Clara, 2001). 

By drawing on insights taken from social theories of learning, the study of language and literacy as 

social practice and critical discourse analysis to focus on the person in the doing (Wenger, 1998, 

Engeström 1999, Barton and Hamilton 1998, Chouliaraki and Fairclough 1999), this paper focuses on 

Zelia‟s lived experiences with literacy upon her relocation to the city of London as these experiences 

were narrated by her and observed by me in events. In particular, I will focus on the ways in which 

Zelia “became an interpreter” fully recognised both by her community and the institutional context of 

legal interpreting as it happened in the city of London at the moment of research. In this process, 

Zelia followed a path through literacies that resonated the lived experiences of other people in the 

research. Upon her relocation to London, Zélia held on to what she knew, named the practices around 

her, legitimised them and eventually created new literacies of her own. Underlying this path were a 

number of actions, or mechanisms, that she used as she participated in social practices of literacy. I 

have called this a recycling process where the women in the research repeated, recognised, reflected, 

recombined and reinvented the literacies at their disposal. In my view, these mechanisms can be seen 

as as acts of learning, i.e., as changing participation, changing practice and changing identity. In other 

words, as acts of both personal and social change. 


September, 2004


Structure of Colloquium 

Introduction and Scope of the Colloquium: Mike Baynham (15 mins) 

Paper One: 30 mins 

Paper Two: 30 mins 

Paper Three: 30 mins 

Discussant: Marilyn Martin Jones (15 mins) 

Open discussion: 30 mins 

Closing Remarks: Dariusz Galasinski (10 mins) 

Sign Languages in a Reconfiguring Europe 

Convenor: Graham H. Turner 

Department of Education and Social Science, 

University of Central Lancashire 

ghturner@uclan.ac.uk 

Among the European languages that have seen considerable change in circumstances since 1993 are 

the signed languages of these countries. A recent highlight is the Council of Europe's document from 

Spring 2003 entitled 'Protection of sign languages in the member states of the Council of Europe', 

engendered by the Commitee on Legal Affairs and Human Rights (Rapporteur: Malcolm Bruce, UK). 

With this document, the CoE not only recognizes the need for and recommends the creation of some 

legal tool to protect the Sign Languages of Europe: it requires either a new instrument specifically 

aimed at protecting sign languages or the addition of a protocol to the existing Charter on Regional or 

Minority Languages giving sign languages equal status to their spoken counterparts. It calls for 

national recognition of Sign Languages in all member states (Krausnecker 2003). 

Whilst such positive changes can be identified, the reality for Deaf people remains that language 

attrition (Turner 1999) and specific forms of linguistic genocide (Skutnabb-Kangas 2003) present 

identified threats as population sizes stand to reduce rapidly in the face of the ongoing pathologising of 

deafness (Ladd 2003) and the dramatic impact upon the demographics of signing communities of bioethically 

controversial medical procedures such as genetic intervention, cochlear implantation and 

hair-cell regeneration (Johnston 2004). 

This colloquium is therefore designed to bring together researchers from across Europe to review the 

changes that have reconfigured 'Deaf Europe' in the last decade, to reflect upon how these changes 

have occurred and the contribution that Applied Sign Linguistics has made, and to identify major 

elements of the collective 'agenda for change' in the decades to come. 

Paper one: Position of sign language in Croatia 

Vesna Ivasovic 

The beginning of the Croatian written language can be located in the 9th century, but the Croatian 

language was officially recognized in the middle of 19th century, after a national movement to give the 

Croatian language its position. Due to the unique Croat linguistic situation, formal shaping of Croatian 

standard language was a process that took almost four centuries to complete. 

However, these historical facts didn't make governmental structures, legislators, and the public more 

aware of the language rights of Deaf people in Croatia. On the contrary, the position of Croatian Sign 

Language is extremely low in almost all aspects of Deaf people's lives. Croatian Sign Language is 

neither recognized nor respected. This has far-reaching negative consequences on Deaf people's 

identity, self-esteem, and quality of life. 

In this paper, the situation in Croatia regarding such issues as early intervention and cochlear implant 

policy, education, employment, sign language interpreters and sign language tutor training, TV 

programs, and>interpreting in various settings will be presented. Croatian Sign Language is not 

standardized, but this process should begin soon in cooperation with American linguists. There are 

various dialects in different parts of the country. Although the "golden age" of the Croatian Deaf 

community was in the 1980's, progress slowed after the loss of some famous Deaf leaders. The war 

made the situation even worse. This paper will seek to draw comparisons between the status of sign 

languages in Croatia and in neighboring countries and discuss possible ways to improve the status of 

Croatian sign language. 


September, 2004


Paper two: Sign Language in a Reconfigured Germany 

Jens Hessmann 

University of Applied Sciences Magdeburg-Stendal 

This paper traces some of the changes that have affected the status of sign language and the Deaf 

community in a - albeit somewhat precariously-united Germany over the last decade. In some 

respects, this has been a story of success, and a substantial number of significant advances in such 

diverse areas as self-esteem and cultural productivity of the Deaf community, social legislation, 

training opportunities, service provision as well as the general level of awareness within the majority 

society have been made ever since the battle smoke of ideological clashes, provoked by an upsurge 

of linguistic awareness in the Deaf community in the early nineties, had settled. However, as a closer 

look will show, this is only one side of a story that can also be characterized by pointing out 

unrelenting opposing forces, vexing political obstacles, exasperating internal weaknesses, and 

daunting counter developments. The resulting picture is one of ambivalence, seriously qualified 

optimism, and, curiously, a noticeable lack of awareness concerning the wider European perspective. 

Certainly, sign language and the Deaf community in Germany might be well advised to place their 

cause within the context of a wider European 'agenda for change'. 

Paper three: Development and Status of Flemish Sign Language 

Mieke Van Herreweghe & Myriam Vermeerbergen 

University of Ghent 

Since the first "Signs Conference" in Ghent in 1979 (where the use of Signed Dutch was promoted for 

the first time), quite a lot has changed vis-à-vis the status of the sign language which is used in 

Flanders-Belgium (now called "Flemish Sign Language" or "Vlaamse Gebarentaal" or "VGT", but 

formerly called Flemish Belgian Sign Language or even Belgian Sign Language). In this paper, we 

would like to give a survey of the recent developments with respect to on the one hand its status and 

status planning activities and on the other hand corpus planning activities and the impact of sign 

language research on the language and its community. 

In order to achieve this we will focus on the development of sign language research in the last decade 

and the development of the status of VGT in the Deaf Community and in deaf education. Sign 

language research in Flanders is still in its infancy and as such quantitatively rather limited. It's only 

since the beginning of the 1990s that there has been sign language research. What's more, this has 

only been carried out by a handful of researchers. Nevertheless, there has always been close contact 

with the Deaf Community so that, a couple of years after the beginning of sign language research in 

Flanders, in 1996 the Flemish Deaf Community officially declared that they would start teaching VGT 

rather than Signed Dutch and as such recognized the fact that VGT is a fully-fledged language 

(whereas previously Signed Dutch was promoted). In deaf education the developments towards 

bilingual-bicultural education have progressed more slowly. In 1998 one school officially became a 'bibi" 

school with VGT as the first language and spoken/written Dutch as the second language. The 6 

other schools allow for Signed Dutch and have some VGT projects, but would not call themselves bibi-schools. 

In a second part of the paper we would like to demonstrate the impact of corpus planning activities on 

the language itself with respect to its lexicon and even its grammar. In Flanders it is estimated that the 

Deaf Community consists of approximately 6,000 VGT-users. In such a small linguistic community 

both corpus and status planning activities seem to have a lot of impact. 

Paper four: Austria's Sign Language Policy Reviewed: History, status report, analysis and 

suggested reforms 

Verena Krausneker 

University of Vienna 

For the past 10 years the Austrian Deaf community has been communicating its wish for full 

recognition of Austrian Sign Language (ÖGS). This request has been formally denied on several 

occasions by the Austrian Parliament. 

The paper contains an in-depth analysis of Austrian Sign Language policy; language policy is 

understood as multi-layered and multidimensional and therefore all fields are considered that influence 

the status of ÖGS and its Deaf users. This includes, to name just a few, media-, educational-, and 

research-policies. 

For the analysis of the state policy towards ÖGS, historical facts as >well as the contemporary 

situation are taken into account and contrasted with the requests and wishes of the Deaf language 

minority. Then the present status of ÖGS is described and its effects on users of ÖGS are analyzed. 


September, 2004


The many areas of (Deaf) life are discussed in which >language, access to language and information 

are relevant. 

The paper closes with practical suggestions concerning possible fields and levels of support for ÖGS 

and proposes measures to ensure a more successful Austrian Sign Language policy. 

Paper five: Sign Language Issues in the Netherlands 

Beppie v.d. Bogaerde and Trude Schermer 

University of Amsterdam/Hogeschool van Utrecht/Dutch Sign Center 

From the beginning of the 1980s, parents of deaf children began exerting pressure to effect a change 

in family counseling - they demanded more insight into the use of signs with their children. The 

KOMVA project was started (investigation of Nederlandse Gebarentaal: NGT) which was supported 

from the start by Prof. Ben Tervoort from the University of Amsterdam. Many students of general 

linguistics are interested in sign research. From 1985 / 1986 on the interest in signs also began to be 

manifest in special education. The introduction of signing children into the schools led to changes in 

the educational methods, at first in two school but spreading to all school towards the end of the 

1990s. 

At the same time there was close cooperation between the UvA, the Dutch Deaf Council, and the 

NSDSK, who started communication courses and courses to educate deaf people to become 

teachers. In 1985 the Second European Symposium on Sign Language Research introduced deaf 

people in this country to general linguistics and to insights from sign language research. 

In 1995 the NEDO (Nederlandse Dovenraad, Dutch Deaf council) was officially founded to represent 

the deaf community in the Netherlands (from 1999 on: Dovenschap). One of the major goals was to 

obtain recognition for the sign language, Nederlandse Gebarentaal. The KOMVA project led to 

language planning and at the same time the development of dictionaries. In 1996 the Ministers of 

Education and Welfare instituted a national committee, which was to investigate how NGT could best 

be recognized within the language recommendations of the EU. The report of this committee 

appeared in 1997 (Meer dan een gebaar) and issued about 65 recommendations on the recognition of 

NGT. The main recommendations dealt with the implementation of bilingual education for severely 

hearing impaired and deaf children, the institution of a higher educational programme for teachers and 

interpreters NGT, and a general effort to make society as a whole more accessible to the deaf 

community. 

Between 1999-2002 a Covenant was made, in which three projects were to be realized: 

Standardization of a basic lexicon, a curriculum for Sign Language Teaching and Deaf Culture, and a 

CD-ROM for NGT grammar. This was a joint effort of the schools for the deaf, the FODOK (parents), 

UvA, NSDSK, Dutch Sign Center (NGc) and Dovenschap. Their task was to plan the standardization 

and its implementation. 

Despite the standardization of the basic lexicon as yet no official recognition of NGT has occurred, 

although some money has become available to assemble/research the lexicon further, and to give 

information to the public about NGT (via subsidies to the NGc) and further NGT curriculum 

development (via projects of the schools for the deaf and NGc). Most recently, a committee has been 

instituted (Sprong Vooruit) to advise the Dutch government on how to recognize the NGT as a 

language. 

A major new development is the impressive increase of the use of Cochlear Implants (CI) in young 

deaf children from the age of approx. 6 months and the increasing influence of medical staff on parent 

guidance. Medicalisation of parents of a deaf child is gaining ground, and together with the 

introduction of a new system of financial support for parents with handicapped children and third, the 

tendency to integrate deaf children (with or without a CI) into the regular (hearing) school system is 

undermining the implementation of bilingual programmes in the schools. 

Paper six: Norwegian Sign Language: "Interesting" Developments 

Irene Greftegreff 

Sør-Trøndealg University College, Trondheim 

There may have been a temptation in recent times in Norway to think that all was tranquil as regards 

reconfigurements in relation to Norwegian Sign Language, but the landscape has proven to be 

susceptible to sudden change. Two "interesting" developments have just occurred and will be 

examined further in this paper. 

First: The Ministry of Culture and Religion, no less, has commissioned a report on the legal status of 

Norwegian Sign Language, which is just being completed. The recommendation is to design a special 

law to ensure the rights of NSL users, and not to rely on existing legislation, which is insufficient. In 


September, 2004


order to arrive at this point of action, a parallel is drawn to the special/official status of the Saami 

language(s). 

Second: The very same Ministry has moved in the direction of closing down all Government run 

schools for the deaf. Major realignments have been in the air during the Winter/Spring of 2003/4. On 

the one hand, a proposition has been put to the Norwegian Parliament to transfer all Deaf children to 

schools run by municipalities: strong protests have been made because the units will be too small to 

function as proper learning/socialization environments, and the proposal may very well be 

unsuccessful. On the other hand, we have seen a major reduction in funds to all Government run 

"centers of competence in Special Education". This has been used as an opportunity to cut resources 

available to all four centers that run schools for Deaf children by as much as 15 per cent. These four 

centers are widely understood to have been directly targeted. 

This paper will thus bring a report from the frontline as regards these developments; a brief analysis of 

how these events can be located in the context of the history of Norwegian Sign Language policy and 

its research underpinnings, and of where the present reconfiguration appears to be leading, coupled 

with a 'close-up' view - informed by the presenter's long-standing engagement with sign linguistics, her 

current association with one of the affected resource centers, and her position as vice chair of the 

Norwegian Deaf Association - of the impact of these sudden shifts at the crossroads of language, 

education, politics and community development. 

“Communicating Europe”: Language Policies, Participation and Democratization 

Convenor: 

Prof. Ruth Wodak 

Department of Linguistics, University of Vienna 

Linguistics Department, University of Lancaster, UK 

Ruth.wodak@univie.ac.at 

http://www.univie.ac.at/discourse-politics-identity 

1. General Themes of the Panel 

For a fairly long period of time now, Europe has been in the search for its identity, it has been looking 

for its definition and its „soul‟ (Moisi 1999, 45). The EU has even established a website entitled “The 

future of Europe – Debate” which provides contributions to this debate from all member states as well 

as candidate countries (http://europa.eu.int/futurum/debate_en.htm). Ideational motives, themes and 

horizons have regained importance in European political discourses vis-à-vis purely economic 

questions (“convergence criteria”) (cf., inter alia, Assmann 1999;Bellier and Wilson 2000; Brague 

1993; Busch and Krzyzanowski (forthcoming); De Cillia, Krumm and Wodak 2000 and 2003; 

Hermann, Brewer and Risse 2004; Ifversen 2002; Malmborg and Stråth 2002; Mokre, Weiss and 

Bauböck 2003; Oberhuber (forthcoming); Wodak and Puntscher-Riekmann 2003; Wodak and Weiss 

2004). In this search, Europe has been defined as imagined construct which requires paramount, 

cultural or political, common and shared identity (Anderson 1991). 

Who is Europe? What is Europe? At the beginning of the 21 st century, these questions concern not 

only those, like the USA, who have to adjust to the “new” Europe (while calling part of Europe “old 

Europe”); they have as well become the formative questions of the European political process itself. In 

the face of the coming enlargement of the European Union (EU) and the accompanying necessity of 

re-arranging the institutional frame of EU decision-making, an extensive reflection about the 

foundation and finalité of the common Europe has absorbed the political arena. East and West are 

seen to grow together, finally. The end of the Cold War is celebrated, the mission of “peace” and 

“freedom” are propagated. However, this is true only in some arenas. On the other hand, we observe 

many non-transparent economic interests and restrictions of free movement and migration. 

Contradictions “pop” into the eyes. 

Numerous attempts of the EU at creating an „European identity‟, which have been taking place for 

almost exactly thirty years now, prove that the EU has been searching for such an “ “identity” (or 

“identities”), in order to build its image as a representative and legitimate polity and as an important 

actor on the international scene. Ever since the 1973 Declaration of European Identity, the EU has 

been attempting at delineating its (political) self-definition linked with the defence of (mostly economic) 

„western‟ values and strictly linked to defining its borders and the non-European „other‟. 


September, 2004


A redefinition of “Europe” stands in front of the new upcoming (self-) challenge, once its enlargement 

becomes effective with the „first wave‟, of the new members (Cyprus, Czech Republic, Estonia, 

Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Slovakia, Slovenia, Poland) joining in May 2004, and the „distant‟ 

enlargement states (Bulgaria, Romania, Croatia and Turkey) still waiting outside EU‟s doors, perhaps 

until 2007 or later. 

Moreover, the search for “European identities” has led to the European Convention and the drafting of 

a European Constitution in the years 2002/3 (Oberhuber forthcoming; Krzyzanowski forthcoming). The 

discussion of what Europe is supposed to be or should be or will be, has thus not stopped (this debate 

begun very intensively also in “visionary speeches” of prominent EU politicians, such as the Humboldt 

Speech by J. Fischer in May 2000, at the Humboldt University, Berlin; see Weiss 2002; Wodak and 

Weiss 2004). The “failure” to agree on the draft constitution in December 2003, in Rome, marks 

another corner stone of the on-going tensions and processes of EU-enlargement and definitions of 

European identity. New proposals have been presented, such as “Europe of two speeds” (Europa der 

zwei Geschwindigkeiten; G. Schröder), a Europe of core states and peripheral states, and so forth. 

Moreover, recently debates, mostly in the media, have started about the threat of in-coming migrants 

after the enlargement in May 2004 and the possible danger to the majority population in the now EU 

member states of losing their jobs. Many EU-member states have thus decided to restrict mobility, 

although the enlargement countries should participate in the same Human Rights and EU-legislation 

as all other countries (Bauböck 1995; Haltern 2002). The danger of constructing two classes of EUcitizens 

becomes visible: “first-class citizens” of the 15 member states and “second-class citizens” of 

the enlargement countries. Tensions are to be predicted as well as difficulties in the transition 

processes (Jessop 1990). 

Issues of Human Rights, minority policies and language policies will most likely all be a priority on the 

agenda, as many minorities live in the enlargement countries which have had big socio-political 

problems over the recent years (Roma and Sinti in Slovakia and the Czech Republic, Rumanians in 

Hungary, Jews in Hungary and so forth; Kovács 1995). Proposals for best practices in supporting 

multilingualism and European language policies as well as for fighting discrimination and xenophobia 

will have to be implemented (see http://eumc.eu.int ). 

2. Organisation of Panel 

This panel (3,5 hours) will take up three large themes of the above mentioned complexity of the ongoing 

processes of EU enlargement: 

Language policies 

1) Communication, representation, participation 

2) Constructing European Identities 

These themes are very well connected to each other, and to Applied Linguistics, in multiple ways: 

The Research on Language Policies and Multilingualism is a central issue of Applied Linguistics in 

many Linguistic departments; moreover, the study of multilingualism and media has shown that 

language policies also affect global processes as well as migration and integration of migrants into 

European societies. Thus, identity policies are also influenced. 

The transparency and comprehensibility of EU policies (documents, speeches, and so forth) as well as 

the construction of new public (virtual) spaces via the Internet has to be seen as one of the first 

attempts of EU policy makers to establish interaction with the European citizens. (This attempt is one 

of the four suggested pillars of the White Paper on European Governance 2001). The study of aspects 

of EU policies (be it on the Internet or in the organizations) does not only allow for descriptions of texts 

and discourses; results might be taken up by Applied Linguistics which could offer some solutions to 

problems rooting in inter- and cross cultural misunderstandings. 

The papers in the panel will discuss important aspects of all these themes, specifically from the point 

of view of possible contributions to Applied Linguistics. Each of the six papers will be allowed 40 

minutes (25 minutes lecture, 15 minutes discussion). At the end of the panel, a general debate should 

take place. A coffee break should be provided after the first three papers. 

3. Abstracts: 

Paper one: 'Identity Spaces in-Between: National and European Identities, Discourse and 

Socio-Political Change' 

Michal Krzyzanowski M.A. 

University of Vienna, Department of Applied Linguistics and Research Centre 'Discourse, Politics, 

Identity' 

michal.krzyzanowski@univie.ac.at 

http://www.univie.ac.at/discourse-politics-identity 


September, 2004


This paper seeks to explore how discourse-analytic and applied-linguistic approaches may contribute 

to a better understanding and in-depth analysis of socio-political change and to an explanation of 

transition processes, which influence collective identification patterns and collective identities in 

Europe. 

By drawing on a broad theoretical background associated with general issues of modernization 

(Sztompka), globalization (Bauman, Beck), Europeanization (Bach, Risse) and post communist 

transformation, the paper seeks to explore how social and political change takes place subsequently 

to the transformation of national, discursive representations and constructions of the national, 

„collective self‟ (national identities) as well as of the supranational European space (European 

identities). By taking a CDA perspective (and thus treating discourse as reproducing society, politics 

and culture, as well as being reproduced by them (Fairclough, Wodak)), it is suggested that the 

dynamics of discursive, social and political change all merge into „Identity Spaces In-Between‟ which 

display important changes of collective (national and European) identification patterns of national 

groups. 

Analytically, the paper draws on elements of the Discourse-Historical Approach of CDA (Wodak, 

Reisigl), on the analysis of thematic structures (Van Dijk), and on the concept of “historical semantics” 

(Koselleck). The analysis focuses on discourses of national „political elites‟ (i.e. Polish politicians 

expressing „strong pro-European orientation‟) within the national public sphere (media at the national 

level) as well as on the supranational level of EU politics. 

Paper two: Transformation of ideologies of multilingualism in a changing Europe 

Normand Labrie, Professeur 

Centre de recherches en éducation franco-ontarienne, OISE/UT, Université de Toronto 

http://www.oise.utoronto.ca/CREFO 

Besides being part of the daily sociolinguistic realities of many constituencies, institutions and citizens, 

multilingualism in Europe is an ideological construct which has been undergoing thorough 

transformations in the past decades in pace with social, economic and political change. Long 

considered a unique and fundamental characteristic of the European identity, multilingualism has now 

become a major defining marker of the globalized economy around the world. In this paper, based on 

an-ongoing study of bilingualism and the new economy, we will examine how people working for a 

former public French-speaking Belgian corporation, recently acquired by a predominantly Englishspeaking 

Canadian private company, commercially present all over the world, deal with the ideology of 

multilingualism, the construction of a global corporate identity, the negotiation of power relationship 

between languages, and multilingual communication. Based on this case study, we will outline some 

possible theoretical and methodological contributions that applied linguistics can make to the study of 

current changes in multilingual practices and the ideologies of multilingualism in a global economy 

which also affects the “new” Europe. 

Paper three: EU Language Policies 

Dr. Brigitta Busch 


Brigitta.busch@univie.ac.at 

Cultural policies and therefore also language policies within the European Union are still regulated 

according to the principle of subsidarity, i. e. the individual member states are still considered to be the 

main actors in this domain. Nevertheless, political declarations, policy guidelines as well as 

instruments of indirect intervention (e. g. subsidies, different joint programs in the fields of education, 

culture and media) on the Union level express a certain commitment to endow linguistic diversity as a 

common principle in language policies within the EU. For the moment, it remains unclear whether this 

notion of linguistic diversity will correspond to the lowest common denominator between diverging and 

sometimes conflicting nation state interests or whether it will be based on the linguistic resources and 

needs of Europe' s citizens. 

Empirical studies in applied linguistics are increasingly focusing on language in multilingual urban 

environments, in border regions and more generally on language under the condition of globalization. 

Such recent works point out that in language policies (nation) states are loosing their central role as 

other players (e. g. cultural industries, regional and urban administrations, grass-root initiatives) gain 

importance. At the same time basic assumptions which have unquestioned dominated language 

policies in the nation state framework are being challenged. Notions of linguistic homogeneity, 

linguistic purity and monolingualism as the 'norm' are deconstructed as categories linked to the nation 

state paradigm. 


September, 2004


The aim of the paper is to situate actual language policy orientations in Europe in the context of the 

works in applied linguistics which emphasize the role of the supra-state and sub-state levels and 

challenge the biases inherent to the nation state paradigm. 

Paper four: European Identity and the minority issue (Irene Bellier, Paris) 

Prof. Irene Bellier 

CNRS, LAIOS Paris 

ibellier@club-internet.france 

With the next (and future) enlargement to Central and Eastern European countries, the European 

Union is to face new challenges regarding its institutional capacity to speak “with one voice”. New 

actors bring new practices, topics, languages and ways of doing, and that constitutes one of many 

problems to be solved with the adoption of a European constitution defining common principles and 

values. New comers also bring new actors in the political field such as representatives of different 

minorities who fight for improving their political, cultural, linguistic and social conditions of existence. I 

propose to explore the introduction of the minority issue on the EU agenda, the question of including 

collective rights in European governance, and the changes that the organization of a Roma 

information office in Brussels have achieved. 

Paper five: What is a language? The difficulties inherent in language rights 

Prof. Sue Wright 

Department of Linguistics, Aston University 

suewright30@yahoo.co.uk 

When language rights first became a matter of interest in international law, the rights envisaged were 

only negative rights. The scope of the early declarations and agreements was to protect those who 

wanted to use a minority language in the private sphere from persecution or simply disadvantage. In 

more recent legislation the compass of the concept has broadened. Language rights are now more 

likely to mean the right of speakers to use their language in the public domain. 

Those concerned to defend and promote a „minority‟ language are usually in accord on the rights that 

they are asking for when they demand language rights. They want the language to be used in 

governance, in education and in bureaucracy. However, there may be less agreement on the object of 

those rights. For a language to be the medium in the political, educational and administrative spheres, 

it needs to have standard form. Agreeing on this standard form may be difficult. This paper examines 

the language rights issue in its linguistic dimension. 

Paper six: Coming to terms with 'Euro-English': but in and on our own terms 

Prof. Barbara Seidlhofer 

English department, University of Vienna 

Barbara.seidlhofer@univie.ac.at 

Throughout Europe, there is a general awareness and expectation that the demand for English as a 

patently useful means of communication will be self-sustaining, at least in the short and medium term. 

In relation to the declared aims of European language policy of linguistic diversification and 

plurilingualism, therefore, the question to address is not "English or other/our languages?" but "How to 

reduce English to equality?" 

This contribution will seek to demonstrate that it is both desirable and feasible for Europeans to 

appropriate the English they so widely use as a lingua franca. It will be argued that we need to 

reconceptualize 'English' as the property of all who use it as a handy instrument, alongside the 

traditional concept of English as the property of its native speakers. The latter can stay intact for those 

who want to take it up, but they are likely to be a diminishing minority. 

This reconceptualization of English as global rather than local also means, of course, that 'English' has 

to be uncoupled from the culture(s) of its origins and appropriated for the expression of the cultures 

and identities of its international users. It also follows that the native speakers no longer regulate the 

norms governing the use of English as an international language. Such a conclusion is legitimate and 

indeed logically necessary as soon as 'English' is proclaimed to be a global means of communication 

of unprecedented proportions. All this also means that we urgently require a description of how users 

of English as an international language actually talk and write in order to be able to derive an 

endonormative concept and, ultimately, pedagogical models of this lingua franca. 

Based on data from VOICE, the Vienna-Oxford International Corpus of English, this contribution will 

focus on discussing evidence of how users of English as a lingua franca from various European 

backgrounds manage to co-construct the 'English' that serves their purposes best, while at the same 

time clearly retaining their identities and voices as members of quite diverse linguacultures. 


September, 2004


Paper seven: Communicating in new public spaces: The website “Europa” and its implications 

Prof. Ruth Wodak 


Linguistics Department, University of Lancaster, UK 

Ruth.wodak@univie.ac.at 

Scott Wright, MA. 

Department of Political Sciences, University of East Anglia, Norwich 

Scott.wright@uea.ac.uk 

This paper will illustrate qualitative and quantitative research on Internet debate forums (EU websites), 

about the EU and related topics. Specifically, we will be concerned with the following questions: 

� In which languages do people communicate with each other on the “web”? 

� Do they actually interact with each other, which genres are used? 

� Are dialogues created or do unrelated statements follow each other? 

� Who uses these possibilities? With which implications? 

� Who has access? 

Lastly, we are interested if these new “virtual” spaces create possibilities for European citizens to 

exchange and debate their problems about the EU; and, following this question, if these debates allow 

for more transparency, participation and democratization in the EU. 

We combine two methodological approaches: quantitatively, statistical analysis of huge data samples 

provides an overview of such debate forums. A qualitative discourse analysis, based on relevance 

theory and argumentation theory allows for an in-depth analysis of a case study, concerning a debate 

on “European language policies” in several EU working languages. 

References: 

Anderson, Benedict. 1991. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of 

Nationalism. London: Verso. 

Assmann, Jan. 1999. Das kulturelle Gedächtnis. München: Beck. 

Bauböck, Rainer. 1995. Transnational Citizenship: Membership and Rights in International Migration. 

Aldershot: Edward Elgar. 

Bauböck, Rainer. 2003. Im Missverstandniss vereint? Assymetrie in Multinationalen Föderationen. In: 

In: Monika Mokre, Gilbert Weiss, and Rainer Bauböck (eds.) Europas Identitäten: Mythen, Konflikte, 

Konstruktionen. Frankfurt a.M.: Campus: 117-144. 

Bellier, Irène, and Thomas M. Wilson. (eds.). 2000. An Anthropology of the European Union: Building, 

Imaging and Experiencing the New Europe. Oxford: Berg. 

Brague, R. (1993) Europa. Eine exzentrische Identität. Frankfurt: Campus. 

Busch, Brigitta, and Michał Krzyżanowski. forthcoming. Inside and Outside the European Union: 

Migration Policies, Security Issues and the EU Enlargement. To be published in: James Anderson and 

Warwick James. (eds.). Europe’s Borders and Geopolitics: Expansion, Exclusion and Integration in the 

European Union. 

De Cillia, Rudolf, Hans-Jürgen Krumm, and Ruth Wodak. (eds.). 2000. Loss of Communication in the 

Information Age. Vienna: Austrian Academy of Sciences. 

De Cillia, Rudolf, Hans-Jürgen Krumm, and Ruth Wodak. (eds.). 2003. The Costs of Multilingualism: 

Globalisation and Linguistic Diversity. Vienna: Austrian Academy of Sciences. 

Haltern, Ulrich. 2002 Pathos and Patina: The Failure and Promise of Constitutionalism in the 

European Imagination. Con-WEB: Constitutionalism Web Papers, no. 6/2002. 

Hermann, Richard, Marilyn Brewer, and Thomas Risse (eds.). 2004. Identities in Europe and the 

Institutions of the European Union. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. 

Ifversen, Jan. 2002. Europe and European Culture: a Conceptual Analysis. European Societies 4(1), 

2002: 1-26. 

Jessop, Robert. 1990. State Theory: Putting the Capitalist state in its Place. Cambridge: Polity Press. 

Krzyżanowski, Michał. forthcoming. European Identity Wanted: On Discursive Dimensions of the 

European Convention. To be published in: Ruth Wodak and Paul Chilton (eds.) New Research 

Agenda in CDA: Theory and Multidisciplinarity. Amsterdam: Benjamins. 

Malmborg, Mikael af, and Bo Stråth. 2002. Introduction: The National Meanings of Europe. In: Mikael 

af Malmborg and and Bo Stråth (eds.). The Meaning of Europe. Oxford: Berg, 1-27 

Mokre, Monika, Gilbert Weiss, and Rainer Bauböck. (eds.). 2003. Europas Identitäten: Mythen, 

Konflikte, Konstruktionen. Frankfurt a. M.: Campus; Muntigl, Peter, Weiss, Gilbert, Wodak, Ruth 

(2000). EU-Discourses on Un/Employment. Amsterdam: Benjamins. 


September, 2004


Oberhuber, Florian. forthcoming. ‘Deliberation‟ or „Mainstreaming‟? Empirically Researching the 

European Convention. To be published in: Ruth Wodak and Paul Chilton (eds.) New Research 

Agenda in CDA: Theory and Multidisciplinarity. Amsterdam: Benjamins. 

Stråth, Bo (ed). 2000. Europe and the Other and Europe as the Other. Brussels: PIE-Peter Lang 

Weiss, Gilbert. 2002. Searching for Europe: The problem of legitimisation and representation in recent 

political speeches on Europe. Journal of Language and Politics 1(1): 59-83 

Wodak, Ruth and Sonja Puntscher-Riekmann. 2003. Europe for All: Diskursive Konstruktionen 

Europäischer Identitäten. In: Monika Mokre, Gilbert Weiss, and Rainer Bauböck (eds.) Europas 

Identitäten: Mythen, Konflikte, Konstruktionen. Frankfurt a.M.: Campus: 283-304. 

Wodak, R. & Weiss, G. 2004. Visions, ideologies and utopias in the discursive construction of 

European identities: Organizing, representing and legitimizing Europe, in Pütz, M., Neff, A., van 

Aertselaer, G., van Dijk, T.A. (Eds.) Communicating Ideologies: Language, Discourse and Social 

Practice, Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang: 225-252 (forthcoming). 


September, 2004


SIG Colloquia 

Multimodality SIG Colloquium: Multimodality and Learning 

Dr Lesley Lancaster 


l.lancaster@mmu.ac.uk 

Dr Regine Hampel 

Dep. of Languages, Faculty of Education and Language Studies, The Open University 

R.Hampel@open.ac.uk 

Dr Mirjam Hauck 

Dep. of Languages, Faculty of Education and Language Studies, The Open University 

M.Hauck@open.ac.uk 

Prof Gunther Kress (Discussant) 

Institute of Education, University of London 

g.kress@ioe.ac.uk 

Multimodality is a developing area of research, and one which could be considered to involve a shift of 

paradigm in thinking about the communication and representation of meanings. It has been the 

subject of a number of recent conferences across Europe. 

As a SIG we recognize its significance across a number of disciplines and fields, and this is reflected 

in the varied backgrounds of its members. This colloquium, however, is focusing on just one of these 

areas. In recent years multimodality has led to important developments in thinking about teaching and 

learning. This colloquium reflects some of the theoretical diversity and practical applications in this 

area. 

We are presenting six short papers. The first two focus on pre-school children and their multimodal 

explorations and expressions of meaning. The next two look at the continuum of multimodality in texts 

and teaching in secondary education. The final papers explore the relevance of multimodality in online 

environments for language learning at tertiary level. 

ABSTRACTS 

Multimodal learning in the early years 

Dr. Rosie Flewitt 

School of Education, University of Southampton 

rsf@soton.ac.uk 

This paper considers how young children use the different modes of talk, body movement, facial 

expression and gaze to communicate and learn during their first year of preschool. Sample extracts 

from data collected in ethnographic video case studies of 3 year olds in an English preschool 

playgroup illustrate how children interact multimodally with peers and adults in different preschool 

activities, and how practitioners can support young children‟s multimodal explorations and expressions 

of meaning. The paper argues that recognising the multimodality of children‟s meaning making not 

only allows children space and time to adapt to the new kinds of communicative practices they 

encounter in preschool, but also draws attention to the need for practitioners and policy makers to 

value how children learn in diverse modes. 

The UK Foundation Stage Curriculum for 3-5 year olds recognises that children learn „in different 

ways‟ through „movement and all their senses‟ (DfEE/QCA 2000: 20-21), yet practical and theoretical 

approaches to how children learn in different modes remain under-researched. More rigorous 

understandings are needed throughout Europe and beyond, as multimodal approaches to early 

learning reach across languages and cultural contexts. Understanding multimodal learning is 

particularly relevant in contemporary UK education, where, contrary to the principles of the Foundation 

Stage, research has found an increase in the direct teaching of numeracy and literacy to 3 and 4 year 

olds in preschools, suggesting a fundamental lack of understanding of the principles of early years 

provision in reception classes (Adams et al, 2004). 

Reference 

Adams, S. Alexander, E., Drummond, M.J. and Moyles, J. (2004) Inside the Foundation Stage: 

Recreating the Reception Year (Final Report) London, Association of Teachers and Lecturers (ATL) 


September, 2004


Grammaticisation in early mark making 

Dr Lesley Lancaster 


l.lancaster@mmu.ac.uk 

The capacity of children under three to interpret and construct graphic signs in ways that show 

structural understanding of writing or drawing systems is frequently questioned. Until they are able to 

transcribe speech and produce realistic representations, their attempts might be considered creative, 

but not essentially related to such systems. In addition, since they are still developing as language 

users, it is rarely possible to ask them what they mean. 

However, this paper will argue that they are able to both interpret and generate quite abstract features 

of these systems. These include the kinds of categories and relationships which underpin the 

grammatical structures necessary for the production of meaningful written texts. This paper will look at 

how children around the age of two depict these in their graphic representations. Examples of this 

basic grammaticisation will be considered: how children use variation within a category of mark in 

order to generate a range of meanings, how size and location give marks representational 

significance, and how the placing and juxtaposition of marks suggest syntactic strategies. 

This activity is characterized by an essentially social and bodily engagement with texts in which the 

physical process of production is often incorporated into the meaning. The use of multimodal 

description and analysis of the process can, it is argued, start to provide a much clearer picture of the 

cognitive procedure involved than would be possible using more conventional forms of analysis. It has 

the capacity to move the boundaries of thinking about the abilities of very young children. In this 

regard, the paper will consider whether evidence of grammatical development in the written mode 

might have a distinct phase, prior to the production of alphabetic writing. 

A multimodal ecology of the text in „A‟Level English language examination 

Dr Tim Shortis 


Tim.Shortis@bristol.ac.uk 

Dr Carey Jewitt 

Institute of Education, University of London 

C.Jewitt@ioe.ac.uk 

In this paper we compare the representation of texts in a sample of „A‟Level English Language 

Examination papers set over the past decade in order to explore the changes in 'what constitutes 

English and its assessment'. Prior to the year 2000, texts used in the examination papers were re-set 

in a word processed format, stripped of colour, font, layout, accompanying images, and devoid of the 

material marks of its 'history'. In 2001 the texts for examination papers were reproduced in facsimile 

form to include the original graphology of the texts. This added graphology to the linguistic framework 

for the study and assessment of texts in the English curriculum (an aspect that other countries such as 

Australia had already incorporated into the English curriculum). The sample of texts that we discuss in 

the paper present a 'continuum of multimodality': from the word processed linguistic texts of the 1995 

examination paper through to the visual texts of 2004 with typographic detail, colour, and complete 

with creases and stains. Taking a multimodal approach to these texts we identify what 

representational and technological changes have occurred across the sample and ask what this 

means for 'what English is' and the implications for the work of students in analysing texts for 

examination and assessment. 

The forest, the king and the elephant herd – symbolic processes in a student response to 

history 

Shirley Palframan 

University of London, Institute of Education 

Spalframan@ioe.ac.uk 

In Kress and van Leeuwen‟s typology of visual representation, symbolic processes are those that 

establish what a represented participant is or means. Symbolic processes can be attributive – 

conferring identity on a carrier through an externalised symbolic attribute, for example a label. They 

can also be suggestive, establishing the mood or atmosphere of the representation of the carrier itself 

for example through the use of colour. 

This paper will examine in detail the symbolic processes in a student produced visual text – a plan of 

the ancient city of Benin. The sample text was produced in a London secondary school as part of a 

year nine History project. Having been given a range of multimodal sources relating to features of the 


September, 2004


ancient city, students were required to produce their own, visual, representations. This study takes a 

single text sample and looks in detail at the symbolic processes involved. 

The paper will also exemplify the theoretical approach of „tracking semiosis‟; a system of placing 

resource texts alongside their transformations in order to expose the kind of choices implicit in their 

creation. With this approach the sample text is regarded as a creative response to available semiotic 

resources. The choice-making inherent in specific representational processes will be opened up for 

analysis providing valuable insights into students‟ learning. 

Multimodal virtual learning spaces 

Dr Regine Hampel and Dr Mirjam Hauck 

Department of Languages, Faculty of Education and Language Studies, The Open University 

R.Hampel@open.ac.uk, M.Hauck@open.ac.uk 

Developments in technology are not only enabling us to store, process and access information more 

easily but the introduction of the internet has also had an effect on the way we communicate. This in 

turn has had a profound impact on language teaching and learning, where we have seen a move to 

embrace new internet-based technologies such as email, chatting or conferencing. One of the 

questions that need to be asked is whether it is sufficient to see the new learning spaces as replicates 

of the conventional settings and to transpose theories and good practice that were developed for faceto-face 

settings to computer mediated communication, i.e. principles from second language acquisition 

or sociocultural theories. 

We suggest that it may also be useful to look to semiotics and the concept of multimodality, which 

explores how meaning is made in certain environments, using the modes and media available. This 

helps us not only investigate the constrictions but also the possibilities of the new media of information 

and communication with their different modes: notions of design and authorship, of dissemination, and 

the increasing importance of the visual in the virtual learning spaces. In this paper we will look at how 

multimodality can inform the development of language tuition using an audiographic conferencing tool 

and help us understand better both the demands made by synchronous online conferencing on 

developers, tutors and learners and its potential. Based on the evaluation of data collected over the 

past two years at the Open University („classroom‟ observation, logbooks, questionnaires and 

interviews) we are examining ways in which learners can be offered a combination of different modes 

(acoustic, visual and textual) to suit certain tasks as well as individual learning styles. The main 

purposes of this study are to identify crucial elements of task design, interaction and teacher/learner 

control. 

Multimodal data collection and analysis in task-based instruction 

Junko Hondo 

Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Pennsylvania 

hondoj@sas.upenn.edu 

The proliferation of multi-media and the growth of the Internet have introduced a wide range of 

pedagogical applications for generating socially constructed semiotic events beyond the physical 

classroom. These applications provide an environment rich in data for empirical research and suggest 

new modes of analyzing the processes of knowledge construction. In this investigation of Foreign 

Language Acquisition (FLA) / Second Language Acquisition (SLA), learners of Japanese were 

involved in tasks designed to focus on non-salient forms and phonological development. These tasks 

were carried out via a voiceboard program, WIMBA. 

Spontaneous output representing conceptual shifts evidenced in images and in oral forms during task 

completion established a foundation for tracking semiosis. It also provided assessment resources not 

only for the researcher/practitioner but also for the learners themselves. 90% of ill uttered forms were 

modified interactively during the task and resulted in 96.5% accuracy in a delayed post-test. 58% of 

targeted phonological adjustments were evident two weeks later following the provision of imagery 

and oral feedback. 

These results suggest that, when amalgamated with multimodal assessments, web-based 

communication in semantically contingent sequences can promote interlanguage modification among 

learners. The technologies employed in this study also have potential as longitudinal data collection 

tools as well as instructional tools. Unlike the stimulated recall or think aloud protocols, these 

multimodal analytical procedures reveal the subjects‟ cognitive processes without risking distorted 

recollection or adding to meta-cognitive stress by trying to multiply the directions of executive control. 

Although this project in its current stage was intended for incorporation in classes for FLA/SLA, the 

approach developed could be applicable to any other educational venue. The general accessibility of 

the web lends itself to the support of cooperative ventures between educational institutions across 


September, 2004


national boundaries, extending opportunities for a wider dialogue regarding both research and 

pedagogy. 

Linguistic Ethnography SIG Colloquium 

Coordinators: 

Prof. Ben Rampton 

Department of Education and Professional Studies 

King‟s College London 

ben.rampton@kcl.ac.uk 

Richard Barwell 


Richard.Barwell@bristol.ac.uk 

Jan Blommaert 


jan.blommaert@ugent.be 

James Collins 

University at Albany, SUNY 

james.Collins@kvab.be, collins@albany.edu 

Stef Slembrouck 


stef.slembrouck@ugent.be 

This whole-day colloquium consists of ten papers. The five papers in Part I consider the analysis of 

different time-scales and the relationship between the global and local in linguistic ethnography, 

attending to a variety of cultural arenas, media and genres (literacy, popular culture, verbal style, 

narrative, face-to-face interaction). This theoretical and methodological agenda then forms a 

background for the five papers in Part II, which analyse multilingualism across a range of sites and 

„levels‟. 

Thirty minutes will be allocated for presentation and discussion of each paper, and there will be 30-40 

minutes for open discussion at the end of each Part, led off by a discussant. It is planned that each 

part should last 3 hours and 20 minutes, and we would very much like to hold both parts on the same 

day. 

Part I 

Time, the Global & The Local: Theoretical and methodological explorations 

Does the „linguistic‟ in linguistic ethnography mean that LE is necessarily focused on the fine details of 

situated interaction and events? How do we deal with processes that are longer term and widely 

spread? How do we reckon with, for example, history, globalisation or diaspora in our analyses? 

What difference do they make to the way we go about our work? Do they really count in our 

analyses? Or should we really only count them as a secondary interest? 

1. Time after time: Literacy and the recontextualisation of meanings. 

Catherine Kell 

University of Auckland/ Open University 

cathy.kell@xtra.co.nz 

In this paper I address a recent and influential question asked by Brandt and Clinton (2002). The 

question is “Can we not recognise and theorise the transcontextual aspects of literacy without calling it 

decontextualised?” Brandt and Clinton are concerned with what they call “methodological and 

conceptual impasses” in the social practice approach which they claim cannot adequately account for 

the way in which literacy moves between the local and the global. In my research I am trying to 

develop a method for the systematic study of “recontextualisation” as a possible way of answering the 

above question. This situates the research within the broader social sciences where attempts are 

being made to understand the world as a series of flows and trajectories and tries to shift the focus in 

literacy research from what Rampton (2000) has called “production-within” to “projection-across”. 


September, 2004


The data is drawn from a lengthy ethnographic project on housebuilding processes amongst shany 

town dwellers in Cape Town South Africa, where interactions occur within a participatory development 

project between the housebuilders, architects, buidlers, suppliers, local government officials and so 

on. I take Kress and van Leeuwen‟s model of communicative practice – “discourse, design, production 

and distribution” (2002) and I approach it from different angles, exploring theoretical and 

methodological approaches to the study of context and then examine the ways in which meanings are 

entextualised and recontextualised across time and space. I examine the flow of meanings formed 

and carried by written texts as they traverse contexts in sequences of discrete events which make up 

the trajectories or life histories of these meaning-making processes. Literacy practices are brought to 

bear in each of these trajectories in differing ways and are locked into the participation structures and 

activities of each event. The affordances of literacy are explored and the couplings and switches of 

different communicative modes in the context of economies of meanings and signs which are 

characterised by severe inequality and social struggle. 

References: 

Brandt, D. and Clinton, K. (2002) Limits of the Local: Expanding Perspectives on Literacy as a Social 

Practice. In Journal of Literacy Research. 34:3. 337-356. 

Kress, G and Van Leeuwen, T. (2001) Multimodal Discourse: TheModes and Media of Contemporary 

Communication. London: Arnold Publishers 

Rampton, B. (2000) Continuity and Change in Views of Society in Applied Linguistics. In Trappes- 

Lomax (ed) Change and Continuity in Applied Linguistics. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. 

2. Popular culture in class 

Prof. Ben Rampton 

Department of Education and Professional Studies, King‟s College London 

ben.rampton@kcl.ac.uk 

Contemporary theorists make potentially very consequential claims about the way our daily lives are 

being changed by techno-popular culture, but there are a lot of empirical contingencies on the paths 

between global cultural trends and the details of everyday life. This paper addresses the claim that 

traditional classroom authority relations have been changed by popular media culture. It draws on a 

Spencer-funded project 'Interaction, Media Culture and Adolescents at School', and it focuses on 

humming and singing in class. The account involves a quantitative survey, ethnography and microinteraction 

analysis, and it addresses the conditions and ethos in particular schools and classrooms, 

the cultural resources and dispositions that students bring with them, the positioning of individuals at 

school and in the peer group, the discourse within particular communicative events, and the kinds of 

interactional use to which different media are put. But it would be very hard to take any one of these 

and to read off its more general implications for the relationship between schooling and popular 

culture, or to say which counted most, and in the end, following Bakhtin and many others, I conclude 

that 'genres' are a key site for analysis of the way in which large-scale change impacts on everyday 

experience. 

Reference: 

M Bakhtin (1986). Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Austin: University of Texas Press 

3. Seeking explanations for Penans‟ patterns of speech 

Peter Sercombe 

Northumbria University 

peter.sercombe@unn.a.c.uk 

Ethnography is a social construct that has been shaped by ideas and values outside the discipline. 

New ethnography, influenced by linguistics, has tended towards systems of classification that have 

been encouraged by methods in linguistic analysis. For descriptive purposes this may be adequate, 

but the significance of other variables, whether geographical, historical, cultural, social or economic, 

becomes salient when explanations are sought to account for descriptions that have been made. In 

order to understand patterns of language behaviour among Penans in Borneo, it was important for me 

to grapple with issues outside the Penan community I studied. This contribution provides examples of 

Penan discourse and argues, with supporting evidence, that to comprehend why and how Penans 

spoke in the ways they did can only be understood by looking beyond the community - at, for example, 

national government policy, Penans' relationships with other communities and ways in which they are 

perceived by members of neighbouring groups. 


September, 2004


4. Timescales, migration and autobiographical narratives 

Kate Pahl 

University of Sheffield 

k.pahl@sheffield.ac.uk 

This paper will draw on Lemke (2000)‟s work on artefacts and their accrued meaning in relation to 

timescales. It will also draw on work by Wortham (2003) in analysing the way timescales are linked to 

constructions of identity. This presentation will look at data collected from homes, both taped talk, and 

photographs, and analyse talk, and photographs of artefacts using a timescale frame of analysis. The 

analysis will consider how semiotic affordances of specific artefacts, connected to narratives and 

collected in homes, interact with timescales (van Leeuwen and Caldas Coultard 2004). The 

presentation will draw on this analysis to present the following question: How do migratory accounts 

present themselves in autobiographical narratives in relation to timescales? These accounts will be 

analysed alongside photographs of artefacts. The presentation will particularly focus on extended 

ethnographic interviews with three women, presenting their past in relation to their children‟s 

experience of schooling. The autobiographical narratives, however, ranged in timescale from recent 

memories to memories stretching back to experiences of colonialism and narratives of violence, 

migration and displacement. How does an analysis which focuses on timescales, and globalisation 

inform discussions of identity in linguistic interactions? 

References: 

Lemke, J.L. (2000) „Across the Scales of Time: Artifacts, Activities and Meanings in Ecosocial 

Systems‟. Mind, Culture and Activity. 7 (4) pp273 – 290 

Van Leeuwen, T & Caldas-Coulthard, C (2004 in press) The Semiotics of Kinetic Design 

Wortham, S and Rymes, B. (2003) eds. Linguistic anthropology of education Westport, CT: Praeger, 

2003. 

5. Local interactions and global structures: a communicative model 

Julia Struck-Soboleva 

University of Birmingham 

jsoboleva@hotmail.com 

This paper builds directly on the findings of my doctoral research into the mass migration of ethnic 

Germans from the former Soviet Union to Germany. It focuses on the communicative aspects of the 

integration process of Russian Germans in Germany. The article presents a communicative model that 

has been developed by the author in order to explore the linkages between face-to-face interactions in 

various routine and informal situations in migrants‟ every-day life and global social, political and 

economic structures involved in the processes of migration and integration. The application of this 

model in the analysis of face-to-face interactions between RG and NG (Native Germans) 

demonstrates how the accounts of wider structural environment of RGs‟ situation can be 

complemented with an explanation based on the patterns of interpersonal communicative behaviour. 

Part II 

Ethnographies of Communication in Multilingual Spaces 

Coordinators: Jan Blommaert, Jim Collins, & Stef Slembrouck 

Universiteit Gent, University at Albany, SUNY & Universiteit Gent, KVAB 

jan.blommaert@ugent.be, collins@albany.edu, stef.slembrouck@ugent.be 

In this part of the colloquium, our thesis is: Communication problems in multilingual situations are the 

result of how individuals and their communicative baggage are inserted into regimes of language valid 

in particular spaces. That is, we do not focus on shortcomings of individual repertoires, abilities, or 

competencies, but instead we seek to examine how communicative situations are part of scaling 

processes which link local to national to global, bringing together perduring hierarchies of language as 

well as real-time interactional practices. The papers that make up this session explore from within 

linguistic ethnographies issues of diasporic identities and language practices, multi-sited language 

assessments, and language learning. Session contributors present work from studies in the 

Netherlands, Belgium, Italy, South Africa, and the Ivory Coast. They address issues central to 

contemporary Linguistic Ethnography, including (a) the interplay of communicative action and social 

structuration, (b) the questioning of received categories of analysis for language or community, (c) the 

exploring of language difference as a resource and a problem in human endeavors, both in 

communicative practice and ideological response. 


September, 2004


1. Spaces of multilingualism in urban Flanders 

Jan Blommaert, Jim Collins, & Stef Slembrouck 

Universiteit Gent, University at Albany, SUNY & Universiteit Gent, KVAB 

jan.blommaert@ugent.be, collins@albany.edu, stef.slembrouck@ugent.be 

This paper explores from within neighborhood ethnographies issues of diasporic identity and language 

practice, multi-sited language assessment, and language learning in five immigrant neighborhoods in 

urban Flanders. We address the thesis that communication problems in multilingual situations are the 

result of how individuals and their communicative „baggage‟ are inserted into regimes of language 

valid in particular spaces. Key theoretical concepts are polycentricity, scalarity, and indexicality. 

Drawing on observational, interview, and audiovisual data, we analyze how language users make 

sense of multilingual contact in Flemish-dominant national institutions, immigrant-oriented 

neighborhood businesses, and community-centers that consciously address diverse populations. We 

find, for instance, that unlike schools, Flemish health service institutions grapple with questions of 

multilingualism by providing a range of translation and interpretive services, but from within a particular 

language hierarchy and with recourse to problematic assumptions about literacy and orality. 

Conversely, immigrant-oriented businesses take multilingual practices for granted, with language 

hierarchies oriented to functional competencies (for example, serving drinks to a predominantly 

Turkish-speaking population but with provision for Albanian speakers and the occasional Flemish or 

Dutch-speaking customer). In community centers consciously oriented to diverse populations, such as 

a neighbourhood theatre which also serves a variety of immigrant outreach projects, the role of 

language mediators is highlighted, bringing into sharp relief the interplay between interactional 

negotiations of language difference and indexical processes of social-linguistic classification. In 

conclusion, we argue that spatially-organised regimes of language need to be studied because they 

cut across familiar institutional domains and call into question received understandings of language 

competence as properties of individuals. 

2. Local reproductions of a school regime on how to share knowledge 

Mariëtte de Haan & Ed Elbers 

University of Utrecht 

m.j.dehaan@fss.uu.nl, e.elbers@fss.uu.nl 

This study focuses on the diversity in communicative strategies that students use in a multi-ethnic 

classroom in the Netherlands when they work in small groups. The analyses are based on 20 hours 

transcribed audio tapes and consists both of in depth qualitative descriptions and of a quantitative 

scoring system. The results show that while most of the collaboration patterns in this classroom 

manifested a symmetrical, peer collaboration pattern, an asymmetrical tutor model, in which one 

student adopted the role of „teacher,‟ was used predominantly by Dutch students when teaching 

minority students. These differences are interpreted as a variety of local productions or reworkings of 

the school regime for how to communicate and share knowledge in which status relationships 

between students and different norms that students have for knowledge sharing play a role . 

At the same time we consider these local productions as related to other sociocultural levels, both with 

respect to time scales (differences in past experiences) and space (other domains in which status 

relationships between ethnic groups play a role). The status relationships between Dutch and minority 

groups that exist elsewhere inform the way these were locally reproduced. Also, different experiences 

with and cultural norms for what a tutor‟s role is have informed this particular variety of knowledge 

sharing practices. Moreover, we argue that in these local reworkings of the school regime for 

communication strategies and norms for knowledge sharing cultural and structural dimensions 

constantly interact. For instance, we suggest that the power structure in this classroom has been a 

condition for the development of the peer-based collaboration for migrant students but that the 

culturally informed rejection of asymmetric relationships by migrant students has also been a condition 

for the (further) development of specific local power positions between the migrant and the Dutch 

students. 

3. „There are no White Africans‟: Territoriality, language, and identity among Francophone 

African migrants in Cape Town 

Cécile B. Vigouroux 

Université de Nanterre, Paris 

cevigouroux@yahoo.com 

The purpose of this paper is to articulate the notion of territoriality in relation to language and identity, 

based on field research conducted among a heterogeneous group of francophone African migrants in 

Cape Town (South Africa). We want to demonstrate the relevance of territoriality to the analysis of 


September, 2004


language practice and attitude. We distinguish three territorialities: 1) physical or topographical space; 

2) symbolic, space constructed according to a set of beliefs, and 3) social space, constructed by a set 

of actions and practices. While they can be considered as one whole � because they are interrelated 

and shape each other � they must also be considered separately � because they can compete with 

each other. We want to consider the extent to which language practice can be approached as a 

dynamic and continuously negotiated (re)production of territorialities. We also address the following 

question: What particular advantages does such a dynamic model offer over traditional approaches to 

understanding the topic of overlapping and competing identities? We examine the interactions in 

different settings between the studied population, the ethnographer, the host population, and fellow 

African migrants. 

Territoriality will also be related to visibility, which is relevant to migration issues, because it provides 

factors that enter into (sometimes misleading) inferences about individuals‟ identities. “Outsiders” are 

often identified on the basis of phenotypes (such as skin colour), attire, or language. We will show how 

(fear of) visibility � in a social context where African migrants often are or feel verbally or physically 

threatened � organizes migrants‟ social and linguistic practices. 

4. „Our Baka brothers obviously do not speak French‟: Articulating scales in the controversy 

over the exhibition of Baka „Pygmies‟ 

Karel Arnaut 

University of Gent 

karel.arnaut@ugent.be 

The subject of this paper is the controversy over an exhibition of and about Baka people in „The 

Rainforest‟ natural park in Yvoir, a village in the Walloon part of Belgium. The controversy was 

boosted and sustained by associations of Belgian Africans who accused the exhibition organiser of 

exploiting the Baka and of humiliating Africans in ways reminiscent of colonial times. In August 2002, a 

dozen organisations of protestors created a Brussels-based platform called the Collective for the 

Defence of the Baka that took a firm pan-Africanist stance, networked with organisations and 

authorities at different levels both in Cameroon and in Belgium, and mobilised the regional, national 

(Belgian and Cameroonian) and international press. While a momentary and momentous „space of 

engagement‟ (cf Cox) was emerging from which Belgian Africans were launching a rather successful 

„voyage in‟ (cf. Said), a gradual disaffection between the Collective and the group of Baka was taking 

shape. This divergence opened space for bilateral negotiations between Belgian and Cameroonian 

national authorities and ultimately led to the repatriation of the Baka. 

As the above account already indicates, my analysis of the controversy intends to bring out the 

different scales (from rainforest and „Rainforest‟ settlements, over national „platforms‟, to global media 

coverage) that are activated and constructed by the most important participants. In this, I focus on the 

way language issues (choice of language, problems of translation) constitute the scalar dynamics of 

the Baka exhibition and the controversy. This is dramatically spelled out at a public (media-covered) 

joint meeting of the Collective and a delegation of Baka, during which a break occurs between the 

French-speaking Belgian Africans and the „non-French-speaking‟ Baka. In this way, the meeting that 

was meant to celebrate pan-African solidarity broke down: while French assisted in upscaling the 

Brussels glocal elite of African émigrés, the Baka were downscaled by their presumed 

monolingualism. 

5. Adriatic linguascapes: Transidiomatic practices in a deterritorialized world 

Marco Jacquemet 

San Francisco 

mjacquemet@usfca.edu 

This paper seeks to assess the communicative mutations resulting from the intersection between 

mobile people and mobile texts. Sophisticated technologies for rapid human mobility and global 

communication are transforming the communicative environment of late modernity. Yet, until recently, 

among the linguistic studies who have engaged with global phenomena, the majority tended to depict 

the worst possible scenarios: linguistic imperialism, endangered languages, language death. The 

experience of cultural globalization, and the sociolinguistic disorder it entails, cannot be understood 

solely through a dystopic vision of linguistic catastrophe, but demand that we also take into account 

the recombinant qualities of language mixing, hybridization, and creolization. Analyzing 

communicative data collected during a recent multisited fieldwork in Albania and Italy (from everyday 

talk to the media idioms of soap operas and internet news sites), this paper calls for a serious 

reconceptualization of many of the basic tenets of the ethnography of communication, such as 

“speech community” or the concept of “language” itself. 


September, 2004


Corpus SIG Colloquium 

Learning about language using corpus evidence 

Convenor: Dr Paul Thompson 

School of Linguistics and Applied Language Studies, Language Resource Centre, University of 

Reading 

P.A.Thompson@reading.ac.uk 

This colloquium will explore the relationship between learning and corpus linguistics. Corpus-based 

approaches to language description have provided language researchers with a wealth of new 

perspectives, and a range of powerful methods and resources for the empirical investigation of 

language. Corpora are sources of evidence about language use and the programmes used to search 

the corpora are the means to investigate the evidence, but the ability to pose useful, meaningful 

queries, and to interpret the output of the queries, has to be learnt. One aspect of the relationship of 

corpora to learning, then, is the learning to do corpus linguistics. A second aspect discussed in this 

colloquium is the direct application of corpus methodologies in language learning, or learning about 

language, in the contexts of foreign language learning and of first language literacy work. 

Each of the presentations will be 15-20 minutes in length, with 5-10 minutes allocated for discussion 

between the talks. 

The colloquium will be of interest to members of the Corpus Linguistics SIG. 

Paper 1: Teaching Corpus Linguistics as a Subject 

Pernilla Danielsson and Susan Hunston 

University Of Birmingham 

pernilla@ccl.bham.ac.uk, S.E.Hunston@bham.ac.uk 

„Corpus Linguistics‟ is increasingly taught as a subject at both undergraduate and postgraduate level, 

either as a module on an MA in Applied Linguistics or similar, or as an area in its own right. As the 

term „corpus linguistics‟ refers to a method rather than a body of theory, teaching and assessing 

students often involves a different set of issues from those found in other programmes. This paper 

describes two teaching contexts: a research preparation Masters programme in Corpus Linguistics; 

and a module forming part of an MA TEFL. It discusses issues arising from those contexts, 

specifically: (a) teaching programming to students embarking on corpus research; and (b) teaching 

non-specialist students to interpret corpus data. 

Programming 

Students in the humanities rarely have programming backgrounds. Whereas many may be fluent 

users of computers, learning the additional skills needed to change formats of corpus data, perform 

part-of-speech tagging, lemmatising and aligning texts, may appear as an insurmountable task. In this 

part of the paper we will discuss not only how to get the students to acquire such skills in less than a 

year, but also the importance of critically analysing the outcome of computationally processed data. 

Interpreting corpus data 

This part of the paper looks at problems that students have in observing regularity in concordance 

lines, and in finding meaning in collocation. As the other side of the coin, examples are given where 

students observe more than was expected. This raises issues of how neophytes in a discipline are 

trained in „seeing‟, and who has the right to supervise such training. 

Paper 2: Engaging the language learner in corpus-based learning 

Barbara Seidlhofer 

University of Vienna 

barbara.seidlhofer@univie.ac.at 

In this presentation I discuss the uses, in teaching about language, of learner corpora made up of 

texts that the learners themselves have generated. This approach has been adopted both in courses 

in linguistics at the University of Vienna, Austria, and in advanced foreign language classes where it 

was used in language awareness activities, and also in intertextual activities such as summarising and 

reacting to texts. 


September, 2004


In each of these courses, a written learner corpus consisting of short complete texts, written by the 

students, is created. Corpus analysis tools make it possible to exploit the usual advantages of corpus 

linguistics, in particular the easy retrieval and analysis of a large collection of relevant but basically 

anonymous texts, while the inclusion in the corpus of learner-generated texts offers the motivational 

asset of allowing students to work on language data which are personally meaningful to them and 

which they feel they have a stake in. This approach enables students to be both participants in and 

analysts of their own language use. Furthermore, the work extends the practice of „learner corpus 

research‟ in that the advanced learners not only provide the corpus data for corpus analysis but are 

also the researchers working on this corpus. 

The relevance for language learning and language teaching is that the learner corpus is not used 

simply for research purposes but it is also used in work with the learners, on a corpus to which they 

themselves have contributed. A related objective is to situate teaching in a specific local context that 

takes into account where learners are coming from linguistically and culturally. This challenges the 

„deficit view‟ of much work with learner corpora, in which the learner corpus is compared unfavourably 

with native speaker norms as represented in large L1 corpora. 

Paper 3: Primary learning through corpora 

Alison Sealey and Paul Thompson 

School of Linguistics and Applied Language Studies, University of Reading 

A.J.Sealey@reading.ac.uk, P.A.Thompson@reading.ac.uk 

This paper will report on some specific aspects of an ESRC-funded project investigating the potential 

of corpus-based approaches to teaching children of primary school age about language. 

The presentation will begin with a brief description of the context for this innovative use of corpusbased 

teaching, namely state-funded primary schools in England, in two schools where English is the 

native language of the majority of the pupils. Teaching in this context is constrained by two farreaching 

policy documents – the National Curriculum for English and the National Literacy Strategy – 

so all the activities carried out under the auspices of this research project had to relate to the 

objectives of these policies. 

We shall go on to describe the considerations involved in making corpus-based learning accessible to 

young children (aged 8 – 10), including issues such as how to introduce the concept of „a corpus‟ and 

of „concordance lines‟. We shall explain how we adapted a range of the activities derived from corpusbased 

foreign language learning for use with this particular group of learners. Examples of the 

activities include both meaning-focussed and pattern-focussed tasks. 

Our project makes use of a specially adapted version of Oxford Wordsmith Tools, and we shall 

describe the features which these young children found particularly useful. The corpus that we worked 

with was tagged for part-of-speech, and we will illustrate how this resource was exploited in their 

explorations. 


September, 2004


Track Papers 

Anthroponymy and Applied Linguistics: personal names from Sudan and Botswana 

Dr Sheena Gardner 

CELTE, University of Warwick 

S.F.Gardner@warwick.ac.uk 

Naming trends reflect social change in societies, and names acquire varying significances across time 

and social context. Many Africans are proud of the meaningful nature and religious or ethnic 

identification in their names, though appreciate that such names may acquire different significance in 

'Western' contexts (e.g. BBC Africa Live December 2003). This paper brings together findings from 

two research projects that illustrate how such significance can be investigated, and the potential 

contribution of anthroponymy to applied linguistics (Gardner 1999b). 

The first study shows trends in naming practices over five generations of northern Sudanese (Gardner 

1994, 1995, 2000). The trends reflect specific cultural and religious changes in the society and may be 

viewed as harbingers of changing religious values. 

The second study, from Molelowakgotla through Michael to Mpho, examines the role of English vs 

African first name-giving in Botswana through the twentieth century, comparing numbers of people 

with only African, with only English, and with both African and English names. The results show 

parallels between early contact with English and the use of Christian names; and although English is 

increasingly the language of official and educational communication in Botswana, the practice of 

giving English names is declining (Gardner 1999a). Moreover, the attitudes to English names are 

more ambivalent than the positive attitudes reported for English generally. (Mathangwane and 

Gardner 1998, 1999) 

UK organisations working with people from different naming systems may appreciate that knowing the 

naming system of a particular group is an important foundation for understanding, and that traditional 

naming systems may be used in varied ways by people both in their countries of origin and in 

adaptation here (e.g. Judges Equal Treatment Benchbook, 2002). Future research into the reasons for 

such adaptations would inform understanding of change in name significances, and provide insights 

on experiences of Africans overseas. 

References: 

Gardner, S. (2000) Religious significance among Sudanese urban personal names. In Onomastik. 

Band II: Namensysteme im interkulturellen Vergleich, in Zusammenarbeit mit Rudolf Srámek 

herausgegeben von Dieter Kremer, Max Niemeyer Verlag Patronymica Romanica, 18:, 263-278. 

Gardner, S. F. (1999a) From Molelowakgotla through Michael to Mpho: the role of English from an 

onomastic perspective. Marang. Special Issue: Language Literacy and Society: A Conference in 

Honour of Bessie Head. 16-19 June 1998. 16-29. 

Gardner, S. F. (1999b) Personal Names as Neglected Sociolinguistic Resource: Use of English in 

Botswana. Names: A Journal of Onomastics. 47.2 139-156. 

Mathangwane, J. T. and S. F. Gardner. (1999) Ambivalent Attitudes to English and African names in 

Botswana. Marang. Special Issue: Language Literacy and Society: A Conference in Honour of Bessie 

Head. 16-19 June 1998. 84-93. 

Mathangwane, J. T. and S. F. Gardner. (1998) Language Attitudes as portrayed by the use of English 

and African names in Botswana. Nomina Africana. 12(2) 74-87. 

Gardner, S. (1995), Namesakes, euphony and linguistic meaning: Trends in their relative influence 

over name-giving. Onomastica Canadiana, 77 1-17. 

Gardner, S (1994) Generations of change in name-giving. In Y. Suleiman (Ed), Arabic sociolinguistics: 

Issues and perspectives (pp 101-126). London: Curzon Press. 

Intertextuality and Literacy Development in the African classroom 

John L. Holmes 


J.L.Holmes@education.leeds.ac.uk 

For most African children, becoming literate is a process which involves more than one language, and 

inputs from rich traditions in both oracy and literacy. (Horowitz 1995) In practice, children may attain 

levels of literacy competence which vary widely across their different languages, and their ability to 

use literacy as a life skill may not be consistent. (Ghebrebrhan and Holmes 1998). 

This issue can be seen from either a global perspective as linguistic or cultural (Cameron 2002) or can 

be explored from the point of view of „local knowledge‟ (Canagarajah 2002). The study reported in this 


September, 2004


paper arises from frequent visits to a group of rural primary schools in Eritrea over the period 2000- 

2004 and therefore takes a „local knowledge‟ perspective for the research methodology. In tracing the 

different linguistic and literary layers in the pupils‟ own language we have used the concept of 

intertextuality (Holmes 2004) as a focus for the data analysis. 

The paper reports on a case study involving primary schools in the Bilen community of Northern 

Eritrea. Textbooks in the Bilen language have recently been introduced in primary schools, 

(Ghebreab, 2002; Sulus 1999;) while English continues to be the language used at secondary level 

throughout Eritrea. The study focuses on the way that English has been acquired, identifying the ways 

in which inputs from the mother tongue have influenced the ways in which teachers and pupils use 

English. The role of languages outside the classroom is examined as is the teaching of initial literacy 

in the mother tongue. This enables us to trace the rich intertextuality that influences the way that 

pupils read and write in English. Finally a critique is offered of the way that language teaching in both 

L1 and L2 often fails to take this intertextual dimension into account. 

References: 

Cameron, D. Globalization and the teaching of „communication skills‟ in Block and Cameron (eds.), 67- 

82 

Canagarajah, S. (2002) „Reconstructing local knowledge‟ Journal of Language, Identity and Education; 

1/ 4 243-260 

Ghebreab, A.N. (2002) An investigation into the current practices of using the Bilin Language as a 

Medium of Instruction; Unpublished Dissertation; University of Lancaster, St. Martin‟s College 

Ghebrebrhan, O. and Holmes, J. L. (1998) The State of High School Education in Eritrea; Asmara: 

Ministry of Education 

Holmes, J.L. (2004) 'Intertextuality in EAP; An African context' in Journal of English for Academic 

Purposes 3/1 73-89 

Horowitz, R. (1995) „Orality in Literacy: The uses of speech by bilingual and bicultural writers‟ in Rubin, 

L. (ed.) Composing and Social Identity in Written Language; Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum 

Associates 47-74 

Sulus, B. (1999) The Bilen language: prospects and challenges in introducing it as a medium of 

instruction. Unpublished Dissertation for MA in Linguistics; University of London; School of Oriental 

and African Studies. 

'Black Males Don‟t Count... or Do They? 

Mark Krzanowski 

Academic Co-ordinator for ELT, Dept of PACE, Goldsmiths College, University of London 

markkski1@btinternet.com, m.krzanowski@gold.ac.uk 

The aim of this talk is to present results of a research into the reasons why British-settled or born 

males of Afro-Caribbean origin may underperform throughout their university studies in UK. 

The presenter will start by examining the historical context in which Afro-Caribbean males find it 

difficult to enter British universities, and once admitted may either „drop out‟ or underperform 

throughout their studies. Different causes will be quoted, including „lack of role models‟. 

The main focus of the talk will be on students‟ language ability and how it has been conditioned by the 

environment in which they were raised. The interviewed students reflect on their language ability: what 

it was like before they started their courses, and what it is like now, in their first, second or third year 

(some master‟s students will also be interviewed). The talk will also examine the cases of Afro- 

Caribbean males who have never been able to enter British HE, and will reveal the reasons why they 

have not managed to do so. 

The lecturer will present a video compilation of short extracts of the most interesting parts of the 

interviews. 

The author will use numerous visual aids/materials to support his findings: commercial materials will 

be briefly referred to, and the speaker will demonstrate self-produced language materials aimed at 

helping such learners to improve their academic language skills so that they can function effectively in 

academia. Similarities and differences will be drawn between the teaching of EAP (English for 

Academic Purposes) & ESP (English for Specific Purposes) to overseas/international students, and 

the teaching of ALS (Academic Literacy Skills) to British home (and frequently „native‟) students. 

Finally, the author will discuss practical implications for teaching ALS for British Home Students. There 

will be 10 minutes for questions from the audience towards the end of the talk. 


September, 2004


The trilingualism policy in Rwandan education almost 10 years ago 

Dr Evariste Ntakirutimana 

National University of Rwanda 

evntaki@caramail.com, evrstevrs@netscape.net 

The Ministry of Education adopted the policy of trilingualism, whereby the medium of instruction for the 

first 3 years of Primary school is Kinyarwanda with French and English taught as subjects. From 

Primary year 4 to the end of Secondary school, the medium of instruction is either English or French 

with language not selected, plus Kinyarwanda, taught as subject. 

After providing the Government‟s rationale for the policy, the paper goes on to describe and present 

the result s of s study conducted on the proficiency of students and teachers in French, English and 

Kinyarwanda at Primary, Secondary and Tertiary levels. 

Assessment of reading and of spoken competence in English, French and Kinyarwanda were carried 

out in 6 Primary schools and 6 Secondary schools (at years 4 and 6 in both cases), while 

assessments in French and English only were carried out at 2 Higher Education institutions 

Findings overall indicate very low levels of competence in English, moderate levels in French, and 

very high levels in Kinyarwanda. The paper discusses the implications of these results for the Policy 

noting the problems that relate to: 

(i) teacher linguistic competence, especially at primary school; 

(ii) language teaching methodology; 

(iii) language curricula; (iv) language textbooks; and 

(v) relationship between language curricula and other subject curricula. 

These issues are put in the context of the present political and linguistic situation of the country and 

the possibilities for the future from the perspective of an “insider” who has been both a student and 

teacher in the country 

The effect of the vehicular language on classroom participation in Malawi 

Dr Eddie Williams 

Department of Linguistics, University of Wales, Bangor 

else03@bangor.ac.uk 

In Malawi the national language, ChiChewa, is used as the medium of instruction for years 1-4 of 

primary schooling, with English as a subject; in years 5-8 there is a switch to English as the medium, 

with ChiChewa as a subject. This video shows how the language of instruction affects classroom 

participation in a rural primary school, in a class filmed towards the end of their fourth year, i.e. shortly 

before the switch to English medium. First we see an English reading lesson and then the same class 

and the same teacher in a ChiChewa reading lesson. 

The most striking difference between the two lessons is degree of children's participation. In the 

English lesson very few children volunteer to read or to answer questions, while those that do, do so 

with great hesitation. Furthermore, the teacher tends to concentrate on the same few children. This 

contrasts with the ChiChewa lesson where children are eager to read and to answer questions, and do 

so confidently, while the teacher invites far more children to respond (all ChiChewa utterances in this 

video are subtitled in English). 

We then see individual children from the class reading and talking about two passages, one in English 

and one in ChiChewa. Again children read more fluently, with richer responses in ChiChewa than in 

English. This confirms the classroom evidence that for Malawian schoolchildren difficulties in reading 

in English are language problems, not reading problems, and calls into question the policy of English 

as a medium of instruction. 

Is englishization reconfiguring or disfiguring the linguistic landscape of Europe? 

Prof Richard J. Alexander 

Department of English Business Communication, Wirtschaftsuniversität Wien / Vienna University of 

Economics and Business Administration 

richard.alexander@wu-wien.ac.at 

Addressing purported English dominance in Europe, this paper focuses mainly on the seemingly close 

alignment of language-policy developments in European higher education with broader societal 

change (Phillipson, 2003). How does englishization interlock with the catch-all term Œglobalization¹ in 

Europe? Multilingualism is seen by some business people and officials to be preventing real 

integration and development of the European Union (quoted in Phillipson & Skutnabb-Kangas, 1999: 

22). Also some British universities find language departments superfluous (Times Higher, ŒAxe 


September, 2004


hangs over top UEA school¹); and student registrations are falling in German departments in Benelux 

universities too. Yet the European Commission regularly invokes diversity as a major comparative 

advantage of Europe and declared 2001 to be the ŒEuropean Year of Languages.¹ 

Such varied observations suggest deep-seated conflicts of interest underlying language policy issues. 

And englishization may confront applied linguists with controversies and dilemmas. 

The author, head of a department of business English at a European university, draws on and selfreflexively 

analyzes experience of being a personal part of the Œenglishization¹ process in Europe. 

During this time the manifestations of the New World Order within the European Union have been 

flanked both epiphenomenally and causally by extensive alterations in language use patterns. 

Onetime independent, non-English-speaking, national traditions of both university education and 

industrial management practice are being modulated, especially by marketization trends from other 

cultures. But does the shift to English constitute a shift in over-all culture? 

Reports of university international study programmes and studies of languages used for science and 

scholarship will illustrate the analysis. Finally some consequences for a multilingual European future 

will be adumbrated. 

References 

Phillipson, Robert & Skutnabb-Kangas, Tove. 1999. "Englishisation: one dimension of globalisation." 

The AILA Review 13: 19-36. 

Phillipson, Robert. 2003. English-Only Europe? Challenging Language Policy. London: Routledge. 

Whose English is it anyway? Culture, language and identity: ethnographic portraits from 

Oaxaca, Mexico 

Ángeles Clemente 

Universidad Autónoma Benito Juárez de Oaxaca, México 

angelesclemente@hotmail.com 

Michael J. Higgins 

Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropologia Social de Oaxaca, México 

mjhiggi55@hotmail.com 

In this paper we will present a series of ethnographic portraits of students who are in the process of 

learning and teaching English at the Centro de idiomas, which is part of the state university in the city 

of Oaxaca, Mexico. These portraits will focus on how the students at the Centro navigate the cultural 

and social complexities of learning and teaching English as an additional language. Our argument will 

focus on how the process of the accumulation of symbolic and cultural capital, modes of identity 

construction, and the dynamics of social agency affect the means for learning an additional language 

(Bourdieu 1991 and Pavlenko 2002). The young working and middle class Oaxacan students at the 

Centro are involved in the pursuit of various forms of linguistics and symbolic capital. Moreover, they 

use their various identity locations as a means of learning, using and teaching English. These identity 

locations involve issues concerning gender, sexuality, ethnicity and assumptions about standards of 

English. These students move between these assumptions and their own desires about language 

performance. They use their own agency to recompose English as something beyond such 

assumptions (Sayer, Clemente & Higgins 2004). We will present these ethnographic portraits to 

represent how students use their own social agency framed by their various identity locations to 

pursue a diversity of language learning activities. For Fernanda, the issues of gender and ethnicity 

frame her pursuit of English; in the case of Eduardo, the pursuit of English provides him with a safe 

zone for exploring his sexuality; whereas for Freda and Braulio, they used their language skills to 

appropriate for themselves the street vernacular of English. For these students the use of English is a 

means of accumulating various forms of linguistic and symbolic capital within the context of their 

existing and emerging identities. These social and language activities take place in what we refer to as 

learning cultures. Learning cultures represent two co-existing social domains: the social/cognitive 

dynamics of language learning and the overall cultural context of that learning (Clement and Higgins 

2003). With these ethnographic portraits we hope to capture the social actions of these learning 

cultures by listening to and seeing how students relocate themselves, so that their English 

competency is not only „knowledge of themselves as the other‟ but also „knowledge of themselves‟ as 

creative and communicative language actors. 


September, 2004


Poems and Mines: 

The reconfiguration of social class in the talk of young British women. 

Pia Pichler 

Middlesex University, Tottenham Campus 

P.Pichler@mdx.ac.uk 

In this paper I shall explore the meaning and relevance of social class in the discursive construction of 

adolescent British femininities, demonstrating both an awareness of dominant class-related norms and 

the local re-negotiation of these larger-scale norms in the talk of three groups of British girls. The 

spontaneous conversational data I shall discuss in this paper support my argument that a focus on the 

local constructedness of (gender) identities (Eckert and McConnell-Ginet 1995, 1999) needs to 

complement rather than replace an analysis of macro-social structures. Moreover, differently from 

Rampton's (2001, 2002) study of social class as a stylisation (Bakhtin 1981) of posh and Cockney 

speech in the talk of London adolescents, my data suggest that it is significant to examine the 

positions that these young speakers take up in relation to traditional and frequently stereotypical 

notions of social class. 

My comparative analysis shows that the group of British Bangladeshi girls aligns itself most clearly 

with the stereotypes of British working class adolescents, by highlighting their lack of appreciation for 

school, their tendency to play truant, their preference of 'having a laugh' over discussing serious (and 

personal) issues and by engaging in face threatening swearing and teasing. By contrast, the white 

working class girls distance themselves from many of these practices and position themselves as 

sheltered and responsible. Ironically, the white public school students use more swearwords than the 

white working class girls, although they never direct their swearing at each other like the Bangladeshi 

girls. Similarly, the public school girls' expression of anti-school feelings, and their display of coolness 

in relation to drugs and non-mainstream music is largely absent in the talk of the white working class 

girls. Thus the public school girls position themselves in opposition to the sheltered middle class 

femininities that the white working class girls are seeking to accomplish. 

However, the two white groups are united in their efforts to 'other' (Said 1978) their respective social 

class backgrounds, whereas the five Bangladeshi girls adopt discursive practices that accomplish 

more traditional British working class femininities. 

A corpus-based cross-linguistic study of clause linking 

Christelle Cosme 

Research Fellow, Belgian National Scientific Research Fund (F.N.R.S.), Centre for English Corpus 

Linguistics, Belgium 

cosme@lige.ucl.ac.be 

Clause linking plays a prominent part in information packaging and discourse organisation, two macro 

skills that advanced L2 learners are expected to master. Yet, few learners seem to have reached 

„syntactic maturity‟ in those fields (Kameen 1983). The improvement of stylistic proficiency being an 

important objective at an advanced stage of learning (Granger 1997), grammars and writing textbooks 

should aim to raise learners‟ awareness of the importance of clause linking. 

In this paper, it is demonstrated how a corpus-based contrastive approach can address this issue. The 

study investigates whether English and French differ as to their preferences for certain types of 

interclausal relations. It emerges from the introspective claims made in the contrastive literature that 

English prefers coordination, while French favours subordination (Chuquet & Paillard 1989). 

In an attempt to check whether this tendency is confirmed by authentic corpus examples, two types of 

bilingual corpora are resorted to (Johansson & Hasselgård 1999). On the basis of a comparable 

corpus of editorials in English and French, I first examine whether, as suggested in the contrastive 

literature, the use of interclausal and in English differs both quantitatively and qualitatively from the 

use of interclausal et in French (Hoarau 1997). This part of the analysis is carried out using Scott‟s text 

retrieval package WordSmith Tools (1996). Secondly, an English-French bidirectional translation 

corpus is used to investigate sentence shifts, i.e. cases where coordination with and or et 

corresponds to a subordinate construction in the other language. For this part of the analysis I make 

use of the bilingual concordancer MultiConcord (Woolls 1997), which facilitates the linguistic analysis 

and has the added advantage of allowing for the generation of useful exercise sheets that can be used 

in both consciousness-raising (cf. Johns & King‟s Data-Driven Learning) and production activities. 


September, 2004


Semantic prosodies of CAUSE and PROVIDE: A contrastive study 

Wang Haihua 

Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China 

hhwang@sjtu.edu.cn 

One major part of lexical patterns that is crucial in collocation is semantic prosody, revealed by the 

exploration of a computer-readable corpus. Although there are some studies dealing with semantic 

prosody in English (Sinclair 1987, 1991, 1996, 2003; Louw 1993; Stubbs 1995, 1996, 2001; Partington 

1998; Channell 2000; Hunston 1995, 2002), no research has looked at the issue of contrasting native 

speakers¡¯ use of words carrying semantic prosodies with that of EFL learners. Therefore, the present 

study is a tentative exploration of semantic prosodies, mainly based on the Chinese EFL learners‟ 

corpus: the Chinese Learners English Corpus (CLEC: one million words) and the British National 

Corpus (BNC). The research is devoted to a contrastive study of the semantic profiles of two words: 

CAUSE and PROVIDE. In this study, the uses of the lemma CAUSE (which have overwhelmingly 

negative semantic prosody), and the lemma PROVIDE (which carries mainly positive semantic 

prosody) are analyzed on the basis of the two corpora to see if there exist any differences between 

Chinese EFL learners and native speakers in the patterns of the two words. In what follows, a number 

of co-occurrences are analyzed contrastively by scrutinizing both co-text and inter-text. The results 

show that Chinese EFL learners, as for the collocates of CAUSE, significantly overuse words of 

positive connotations, and significantly underuse those of negative connotations, and for the 

collocates of PROVIDE, there is no significant difference between Chinese EFL learners and the 

native speakers whatsoever. Following this, the results will be discussed from several perspectives 

such as L1 influence, pragmatics, and styles as well. Chinese EFL learners‟ deviancy from the native 

typicality would cause misunderstanding in communication. Also, it is a kind of rhetorical devices to 

express the writers or speakers attitudes. Some examples are extracted to illustrate and support my 

assumptions. The paper ends with general conclusions. 

Personal and impersonal argumentation strategies in on-line conferencing and traditional 

essay writing 

Dr Ann Hewings and Dr Caroline Coffin 

Centre for Language and Communications 

Faculty of Education and Language Studies 

The Open University 

a.hewings@open.ac.uk 

c.coffin@open.ac.uk 

Writing for assessment in higher education in the UK frequently requires the writer to adopt a new 

linguistic variety which favours an apparently objective, impersonal stance towards subject matter. At 

the same time, students may be asked to respond in less formal ways to arguments on disciplinary 

content. Their experiences of face-to-face arguments or discussions are often of opinions and 

evidence presented in a very personal way. However, for arguments to be accepted academically they 

commonly need to be framed impersonally. 

This paper looks at how UK national students and students from Greece, Italy and Germany adapted 

to writing and portraying themselves and their opinions in two contexts – on-line discussions and 

traditional essays. The writing took place in the context of a distance taught Master‟s degree run by 

The Open University. The students‟ move from the more involved and personalised stance of 

discussions with peers is compared with more traditional academic writing. The tasks underlying the 

on-line discussion are related to the ways in which students engage in argument and whether it is 

suitable preparation for traditional essay writing. Features of the tasks set by different tutors and the 

tutors‟ feedback/contribution to the on-line discussions are evaluated in relation to the students‟ 

construction of academic identities. The research is situated within the field of academic literacies with 

the linguistic analyses drawing on systemic functional grammar and corpus analysis. 


September, 2004


Displaced or delivered? Discourses of refugees and asylum seekers in newspaper and UN 

corpora. 

Prof Tony McEnery and Dr Paul Baker 

Department of Linguistics and Modern English Language, Lancaster University 

A.McEnery@lancs.ac.uk 

j.p.baker@lancaster.ac.uk 

Asylum seekers and refugees are two identity groups which have been subject to an increasing 

amount of media coverage and debate across Western Europe. However, as with many 

disempowered or minority identities, these groups have little access to the ways that they are 

represented in prevailing or hegemonic discourses (Van Dijk 1993). 

The paper, carried out in conjunction with the Refugee Studies Centre at Oxford University, examines 

discourses surrounding refugees and asylum seekers in corpora of British newspaper articles and 

news stories released by the United Nations High Commission for Refugees. Both sets of authors of 

these texts are in positions of influence, being able to disseminate discourses to a large audience, 

backed up by access to information not normally available to the public. However, newspapers and 

the UNHCR are motivated by different goals and political perspectives which are likely to influence 

how discourses of asylum seekers and refugees are represented. 

A variety of corpus-based techniques were carried out on the data, including keywords comparisons to 

elicit the most salient lexical items in each corpus, mutual information analyses to uncover the most 

commonly occurring collocational patterns surrounding refugees and asylum seekers and 

concordance based analyses in order to uncover discourse prosodies (Stubbs 2001). Salient lexical 

items or terms in these corpora were compared to their typical contexts of usage in the British National 

Corpus in order to uncover connotational meanings. 

The analysis reveals how a number of competing discourses are constructed around refugees and 

asylum seekers e.g. a discourse of refugees as a natural disaster vs. a discourse of refugees as a 

criminal nuisance. Additionally, the use of agency, metaphor and lexical choice are shown to be key 

elements in the construction of different discourses. 

Factors which influence the collocational behaviour of business English nouns and verbs 

Crayton Walker 

University of Birmingham 

CPW222@bham.ac.uk 

In this paper I will examine the collocational behaviour of groups of semantically-related verbs (e.g. 

head, run, manage) and nouns (e.g. issue, factor, aspect) from the domain of business English. The 

results of this corpus-based study show that some of the collocational behaviour exhibited by these 

lexical items can be explained by examining a number of factors which influence the collocational 

process. These underlying factors include the use of metaphor, semantic prosody, and the semantics 

of the individual items themselves. 

Some of these business English nouns and verbs collocate with other items to form fixed or semi-fixed 

phrases (e.g. take issue with, run the show) which have themselves become further lexicalised over 

time. Although these fixed or semi-fixed phrases exhibit some degree of idiomaticity, I will argue that 

they should be seen as the products of a collocational process, and that the meaning of a particular 

phrase can be derived from an understanding of the semantics of one or more of its constituents. 

I intend to show that it is possible to explain, and therefore teach,certain types of collocation by 

considering the underlying factors which influence the collocational process. This paper will be of 

interest to those working in the area of corpus linguistics, and to teachers of English as a foreign 

language (EFL, ESP, EAP) who may be grappling with the task of teaching collocations in the 

classroom. 

The role of backchannel responses in audiological consultations 

Peter E. Czigler, Annelie Liss, Helena Stålnacke 

Department of Caring Sciences, Örebro University 

Kirk P.H. Sullivan 

Dept of Philosophy and Linguistics, Umeå University 

kirk.sullivan@ling.umu.se 

The listener in a conversation gives verbal and non-verbal vocal and non-vocal backchannel 

responses to the speaker. These backchannel responses confirm to the speaker that the listener is 

actively participating in the conversation. They enhance communication efficiency by expressing 


September, 2004


solidarity, disliking, or uncertainty. A backchannel response indicating uncertainty is often a trigger for 

the speaker to adjust their communication behaviour by re-wording or repeating, by use of clarifying 

prosodic markers, such as stress, or by slowing down the speech rate. Such adjustments are essential 

for an audiological consultation to be successful. That is, for the caregiver to be assured that the 

patient fully understands the information given in spite of the use of unfamiliar medical and linguistics 

terms. 

This project examines the nature of patient backchannels responses with regard to their role as 

triggers for communication adjustments by audiologists. 

Ten audiologist-patient consultations (approximately 450 minutes) have been audio-tape recorded. 

Two of these consultations (approximately 130 minutes) have been transcribed, and a combination of 

discourse analysis and acoustical analysis has been used to explore the nature of patient's 

backchannel responses. 

The preliminary results show that the frequent occurrence of a large number of different verbal and 

non-verbal vocal backchannel responses are used by patients to indicate the need for re-wording and 

clarification. We have categorised two types of backchannel responses as being triggered by the 

audiologist. Category 1 occurs in the pauses made by the audiologist, and category 2 interrupts the 

audiologist's talk. The nature of these two categories of backchannel and the range of audiologist 

response will be presented and discussed with regard to providing suggestions to the audiologist to 

improve the success of audiological consultations. 

Listening in twenty-one languages 

John Field 

Kings College London 

jcf1000@dircon.co.uk 

In a reconfigured Europe of 21 working languages, communication across linguistic boundaries is 

bound to play an increasing part in professional, academic and social life. Considerable attention has 

traditionally been paid to one side of the communication partnership the fifty per cent that involves 

speaking. But the other side remains seriously neglected. We urgently need to know more about the 

processes that underlie second language listening if we are to understand the nature of cross-lingual 

transaction and interaction, and to detect and avoid potentially grave failures of understanding. 

In conditions of uncertainty, lexical knowledge plays a critical part in decoding a second-language 

speech signal even to the extent of overruling the evidence of the listener‟s ears. It nevertheless 

remains difficult to explain how it is that a listener succeeds in segmenting stretches of connected 

speech into individual words. The leading psycholinguistic model of first-language lexical 

segmentation suggests that listeners use the salient features of their language (particularly rhythmic 

features) to detect where word boundaries lie. 

This theory will be reassessed. It will firstly be suggested that the languages that have been studied by 

researchers (mainly ones from the Community of 15) may not be entirely typical and that some of the 

languages of the new Community may provide a clearer guide to lexical segmentation elsewhere in 

the world. Questions will also be raised about the extent to which segmentation theory depends upon 

the questionable distinction between stress- and syllable-timed languages. It will be suggested that a 

more likely criterion, at least for English and French, is syllable length and structure. 

The proponents of the segmentation theory suggest that L1-specific strategies are relatively fixed and 

prevent the listener from acquiring a strategy appropriate to a second language. This view will be 

challenged with evidence suggesting that native speakers of French adjust to the segmentation 

techniques of English speakers, even without specific instruction. It may be that novice listeners are 

much more sensitive to the rhythmic, syllabic and vocalic features of a second language than has 

been generally supposed. 

History of Ideas on Language Organization in the Brain in Early 19th century Ireland 

Marjorie Perlman Lorch 

School of Languages, Linguistics and Culture, Birkbeck College, University of London 

m.lorch@bbk.ac.uk 

The history of acquired disorders of language (aphasia) in the 19th century is typically told from a 

continental European perspective (e.g. Broca, 1861 and Wernicke, 1874) with minor mention of 

English contributions (e.g. Hughlings Jackson, 1864). However, there was a very active centre of 

medical research in Dublin in the first half of the 19th century whose efforts included work on aphasia. 

The neurolinguistic research of the Irish physician Robert Graves and his colleagues was highly 


September, 2004


regarded by contemporaneous French physicians such as Trousseau but has not propagated through 

the literature of the 20th century. 

Numerous papers on language disorders appeared in the Dublin Journal of Medical and Chemical 

Science from the 1830s to 1860s. Two significant early case studies of aphasia by Osborne (1833) 

and Steele (1848) will be examined in detail. Consideration will be giving to methods of elicitation and 

assessment of language function in different language modalities (e.g., perception, comprehension, 

production, reading and writing) description of symptoms and explanatory models will be addressed. 

The particular strengths of this Irish work will be discussed with reference to the western theoretical 

perspectives on language organization in the brain in the 19th century. 

A psycholinguistic study of the English –s plural in Swedish: Or how high-proficiency in 

English among Swedes may have paved the way for the English –s plural to become the 

regular plural form in Swedish 

Dr Gabriella Rundblad 

School of Language, Linguistics and Translation Studies, University of East Anglia 

g.rundblad@uea.ac.uk 

Swedish is one of the weakest languages in the EU. Part of this reason may lie in the fact that 

Swedish EU representatives hardly ever request interpreting at meetings and are instead happy to use 

one of the major EU languages, especially English. Swedish proficiency in English is conspicuously 

high, often near-native, and has given the Swedes an enormously important advantage on the 

international arena. The importance of English has grown during the last few decades and with it its 

influence upon Swedish, which many now consider a threat not just to the Swedish lexicon, but also 

syntax and morphology. 

In a recent psycholinguistic study, I found indications that there is a change in progress in the Swedish 

plural form system. This is particularly interesting since Swedish is the only language studied so far 

that seems to be going through a shift in regular plural form, and since the potential shift involves a 

change from the Swedish –er plural to the English –s plural as the regular. The –s plural is now 

recognised as one of seven Swedish plural forms, though it only occurs on less than 1% of nouns, 

compared to ca 30% for –er. However, whether a form is the regular or not cannot be explained in 

terms of high frequency and the most frequent plural form is not necessarily the regular one, as the 

case of German and now Swedish shows. 

This paper will deal with the English–s plural, its origin, spread and current status in Swedish. I will use 

results from three different age groups to show whether –s is really taking over, and I will discuss the 

possible relation between this shift and high-proficiency in English as a second language. 

The Predictive Power of Age and Nonverbal Short-term Memory for Phonological Processing 

Ability 

Fu-hsing Su 

Department of Foreign Languages, National Chiayi University, Taiwan 

fhsu@mail.ncyu.edu.tw, 

Li-szu Huang 

Department of Foreign Languages, Fooyin University, Taiwan 

en027@mail.fy.edu.tw 

This study explored the predictive relationship between nonverbal short-term memory (STM) and 

English phonological processing for Chinese-speaking children. It as well attempted to determine the 

joint power of age and STM in forecasting the ability of phonological processing. Subjects were 27 sixgraders 

from an elementary school at a mountain area in eastern Taiwan. As novice learners of 

English, they maintained a minimal level of phonological knowledge or skill of the target language. 

The subjects first took the Digit Span subtest of the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children--Third 

Edition (WISC-III), the Chinese version. This subtest contained two parts of forward and backward 

span and was discriminatorily powerful in evaluating nonverbal STM. The subjects were also 

administered phonological measures which tapped their knowledge or skill at different levels. These 

measures were in the forms of the Phoneme Counting Task (PCT), the Onset Oddity Task (OOT), the 

Rime Oddity Task (ROT), and the Syllable Doubling Task (SDT). 

The research data were analyzed using both the simple and multiple regression paradigms. Simple 

regression analyses demonstrated a weak predictive power of nonverbal STM over the performance 

on the PCT, the OOT, the ROT, and the SDT. The R values, in a proper order, were 0.220, 0.235, 

0.445, and 0.305 respectively. As for the joint predictive power of age and STM was concerned, 


September, 2004


multiple regression analyses indicated an effect at a small scale. The R values were 0.225, 0.267, 

0.456, and 0.306 in the case wherein the two variables predicted the PCT, the OOT, the ROT, and the 

SDT. The slight changes of R values suggested that adding age as an independent variable would not 

greatly improve the predictive power of STM. Several factors were identified as the potential 

confounding variables that contributed to the weak associations observed in the study. 


September, 2004


Plenary Sessions 

Urban multilingualism in Europe: The status of immigrant minority languages at home and at 

school 

Prof Guus Extra 

Director of Babylon, Center for Studies of the Multicultural Society, Tilburg University, the Netherlands 

Guus.Extra@uvt.nl 

Abstract 

As a consequence of socio-economically or politically determined processes of migration and 

minorization, the traditional patterns of language variation across Europe have changed considerably 

over the past decades. The status of immigrant minority languages at home and at school will be 

addressed from phenomenological, demographic, sociolinguistic, and educational perspectives. In this 

context, the goals, methods, and outcomes of the Multilingual Cities Project, carried out in six major 

multicultural cities in different European Union member states will be presented. In the participating 

cities, ranging from Northern to Southern Europe, Germanic and/or Romance languages have a 

dominant status in public life, as outlined below. 

Dominant Germanic Mixed form Dominant Romance 

Swedish German Dutch French Spanish 

Göteborg Hamburg The Hague Brussels Lyon Madrid 

The MCP has been carried out under the auspices of the European Cultural Foundation, established 

in Amsterdam, and it has been coordinated by a research team at Tilburg University. First of all, a 

phenomenological account will be given of how immigrant minority groups and their languages are 

referred to in the public discourse. Given the decreasing significance of established demographic 

criteria like nationality and birth country in the European context, it will then be shown that the 

combined criteria of ethnicity and home language use are potentially promising alternatives for 

obtaining basic information on the multicultural composition of (school) population groups. Moreover, 

crossnational and cross-linguistic perspectives and empirical evidence will be offered on the 

distribution and vitality of immigrant minority languages at home and at school in each of these cities, 

and on the educational management of language diversity in the increasingly multicultural and 

multilingual context of European nation-states. 

Unity in Diversity: English as a lingua franca for Europe 

Prof Juliane House 

University of Hamburg, Germany 

jhouse@uni-hamburg.de 

Abstract 

In this paper I discuss ways of managing linguistic and cultural diversity in Europe. I shall argue that 

the adoption of a lingua franca as a useful communicative tool does not necessarily pose a threat to 

multilingualism and multiculturalism in Europe, rather it may be the only realistic way of coping with a 

multitude of languages in contact, and may also – paradoxically - be a means of promoting the very 

diversity it is often said to “kill”. In pursuing this argument, I shall consider different views put forward 

against the use and spread of English in Europe such as those from Whorfian, linguistic, sociopolitical, 

didactic, purist and economic vantage points. 

I will discuss these arguments in the light of the results of several relevant research projects. These 

results can also be taken to illustrate how applied linguistics can contribute to describing, explaining 

and hopefully also shaping the reconfiguration of Europe, on the basis of empirical findings rather than 

on the basis of ideological preconceptions. 


September, 2004


Figuring out the Englishisation of Europe 

Prof Robert Phillipson 

Copenhagen Business School, Denmark 

rp.eng@cbs.dk 

Abstract 

For sociolinguists analysing English in „Europe‟ there are empirical challenges in addressing central 

paradoxes: is Bourdieu (2001) right to claim that English is not the language of England but of the 

American economic and cultural empire? Or House (2003) that English is neither? In the management 

of multilingualism in EU institutions, how can one reconcile the treaty-enshrined commitment to 

maintain linguistic diversity, and substantial translation and interpretation services and a raft of EU 

„Actions‟ to promote language learning, with the reality of linguistic hierarchies and linguistic 

nationalism? Is Chaudenson (2001) right to see the rhetoric of multilingualism as a smokescreen for 

more English? Can the admirable principles in some Council of Europe and EU language policy texts 

work through in practice to create a „language-friendly‟ multilingual environment, or is the fragile 

ecology of language up against stronger market forces and monolingual ideologies (Blackledge 

2004)? 

There are methodological and conceptual challenges in ensuring that Europeans are not talking at 

cross-purposes, or is this inevitable when scholars derive from different disciplinary traditions and 

different national communities of language policy and language pedagogy practice. 

There are theoretical challenges in building trans-disciplinary bridges with scholarly activities in 

political science and law, which acknowledge the contribution of applied linguistics to clarifying 

language rights, and with economics, where hard data on the costs of language learning and the 

benefits of language competence are leading to differentiated criteria for multilingual governance, and 

raising the issue of the injustice and asymmetry between monolingually-oriented „English-speaking 

countries‟ and the colossal investment in learning English elsewhere (Grin 2004, van Parijs 2003). 

Links are stronger with education, sociology, and critical theory. 

There are professional challenges in ensuring that whatever applied linguistics has to offer is not 

confined to the domain of academic discourse but influences language policies at macro levels 

(national and supranational) and at micro levels (implementation decentrally, bottom-up processes, 

attitude formation). There are rare examples of the fusion of academic and political agendas 

(Catalonia, Finland, Sweden), whereas elsewhere laissez faire and tradition have freer rein. But 

perhaps NGOs are over-optimistic in expecting that political leaders, for instance in the Convention on 

the Future of Europe that led to the Draft Constitutional Treaty, would address language policy issues? 

Perhaps the hope that my English-only Europe? Challenging language policy (2003) might be read by 

journalists, politicians and bureaucrats, as well as by academics and Esperanto idealists, was 

misplaced? 

The interlocking of globalisation with intensive European integration and increasing Englishisation 

requires more intensive efforts to figure out equitable and visionary language policy scenarios and 

their implementation. The role of states has changed, the role of “state” languages likewise, as has the 

role of inter-statal, inter-national, and inter-local languages. The concept „lingua franca‟ in particular 

needs critical unpicking. Building on Steiner (1992), we need to re-think our conceptual tools for 

understanding and promoting European linguistic diversity. Adapting Eco (1995), we need to intensify 

the search for the perfect language policy. 

The devil is in the kaleidoscope: Can Europe speak with a single voice in many languages? 

Prof Arturo Tosi 

Royal Holloway, University of London 

A.Tosi@rhul.ac.uk 

Abstract 

„Europe speaks with a single voice in many languages’ is a slogan that was often used to promote 

awareness of multilingualism during the celebrations for 2001, the Year of Languages. However, many 

cast doubts on the management of this project, because the current system of multilingual translation 

leaves little scope for mediation between cultures. When the habit of using all languages 

simultaneously for drafting purposes was replaced by the practice of drafting in one language and then 

translating into all other languages, multilingual translation was introduced without a detailed informed 

discussion, rather as a mere administrative procedure. An atomistic approach emerged that 

encouraged procedures allowing for the straightfoward substitution of all items in a text. In the past, all 

EU translators operated with a microphone and a tape recorder. Today, the workbench system 

connects translators to huge multilingual memories, which help to retrieve past translations and other 


September, 2004


documents that can be consulted and adapted directly from the main EU server. In situations of 

language contact with speaker interaction, changes are normally adopted in the spoken language long 

before they have become accepted in writing. Now the electronic processing of words is interfering 

with the usual processes of standardization in national communities. Choices made at the click of a 

mouse by EU translators operating under pressure can become final solutions when they are 

memorized by the workbenches. Although different language versions of the texts are made available 

on the EU‟s web pages, it is most unlikely that speakers in member states will succeed in challenging 

the validation of the choices made by a translator‟s terminal once they have been put into cyberspace 

to feed a memory for years to come. Linguists spell out that multilingualism and language contacts 

enrich the language and culture of any country. However, this is not the case when Europe speaks an 

obscure language, manufactured by its mutilingual translation system that treats speaker interaction 

as less relevant than its imperfect technologies. 


September, 2004


Posters 

Problems in Spanish scientific prose: dissonance in translated texts 

Inmaculada Alvarez-de-Mon 

Dept. de Lingüística Aplicada a la Ciencia y la Tecnología, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid 

ialvarez@euitt.upm.es 

One of the most popular scientific journals for the general public in Spain is Investigación y Ciencia, 

which is the Spanish version of Scientific American. The Spanish journal mainly publishes translations 

of the articles that have appeared in the journal in English two months earlier. The aim of this poster is 

to raise awareness of a „problem‟ in scientific and technical translation into Spanish. Specifically, this 

poster will focus on the analysis of a corpus of target texts from Investigación y Ciencia and its 

corresponding source texts in Scientific American. In the translated texts, it is usual to find expressions 

which sound peculiar but cannot be described as translation mistakes. The analysis of the 

corresponding source texts reveals that these translations reflect the wording from the texts in English. 

The problem is mainly lexical and, in some cases, related to the notion of phraseology. To illustrate 

this problem, several examples from Investigación y Ciencia will be presented. In these examples, it is 

possible to find many collocations that do not hinder comprehension, but give a distinctive flavour to 

the text. In fact, this flavour, which I refer to as dissonance , stems from the ST original sentences. 

This poster is aimed at getting feedback from those interested in scientific translation. Several 

adaptations of the original translations in the TTs will be presented for evaluation and also the 

linguistic features of the corresponding STs will be discussed. The issue is whether the presence of 

dissonance is inevitable or even irrelevant since scientific popularization is mainly read for 

entertainment and readers do not pay attention to the quality of the prose. 

The ESOL Effective Practice Project 

Mike Baynham 

James Simpson 


M.Baynham@education.leeds.ac.uk 

Celia Roberts 

Melanie Cooke 

King's College London 

The ESOL Effective Practice Project (EEPP) is a major study investigating the teaching of ESOL to 

adults in the UK. It is associated with the government drive to improve adult literacy and numeracy, 

Skills for Life. It is one of a suite of five projects initiated by the National Research and Development 

Centre for Adult Literacy and Numeracy (NRDC) which aim to identify effective practice in literacy, 

numeracy and ESOL. 

The aims of the project are: to investigate the range of approaches to the teaching of ESOL to adult 

learners; to establish where possible correlations between the approaches identified and student 

progress; and to make recommendations on effective practice and for further classroom-based 

research. To do this, we draw on a combination of qualitative and quantitative measures. A total of 40 

classes are observed across sites which reflect the demographic diversity of Adult ESOL provision, 

both urban and rural, metropolitan and regional. 

The research is carried out primarily through lesson observations and interviews with learners and 

practitioners. The work on this project began in October 2003 and will continue until June 2006. It is 

based at two main sites: Leeds (and the Yorkshire area) and Kings College London (and the Greater 

London area). 

This poster displays the research design of the project and some preliminary findings from its first 

phase. A multi-method approach is described, combining: literature review; quantitative data collection 

via observation schedules, assessment scores and questionnaires; qualitative data using 

ethnographic observation, audio-recording, the training and use of bilingual interviewers, and 

interviews with ESOL learners and tutors. 

Irvine Welsh Porno: a translation quality assessment 

Rowena Coles 

Istituto di Lingue, Università degli Studi di Urbino Carlo Bo 

r.coles@uniurb.it 

The poster proposes the outline of a quality assessment of the Italian translation of the latest novel by 

Irvine Welsh, Porno, published in 2002. Welsh continues the trend of reproducing restricted language 

codes, particularly those used by young people, frequently found in literature since the 1960s. His 


September, 2004


novels reflect the dynamic, ever-changing, unconventional variety of English used at the time of writing 

by British youth and Porno is a torrent of jargon, slang, innovative expressions and words. All varieties 

of language are subject to constant change, but the restricted language codes used by youth today 

seem to have speeded up in their transitivity, aided by global communication systems which allow a 

term used on one side of the globe to be accessed almost immediately by young people on the other. 

This tendency to rapid change is the greatest challenge a translator faces when working on young 

peoples language. Not only must the translator have knowledge of the particular language code used 

by one particular group of young people in one particular place of the planet at a specific time in 

history, but he must be able to match it in the same dimensions to the restricted code used by young 

people in the target language. The assessment is carried out using the framework offered by Juliane 

Houses recently revisited model for translation quality assessment. The model offers a pragmatic 

scheme for analysing and comparing an original text with its translation through a series of parameters 

called situational dimensions. The study identifies the problems that have to be dealt with when 

translating young peoples language, illustrates how such problems have been resolved in the 

translation and what shifts of meaning have occurred due either to linguistic restrictions or to translator 

choice. 

Language, Power and Oppression: The impact and implications of the Sign Language 

interpreting in the Workplace 

Jules Dickinson 

University of Central Lancashire 

julesdickinson@hotmail.com 

Profoundly Deaf people who use sign language are a marginal and oppressed group within 

mainstream society, frequently denied the opportunity to participate fully in employment. Improved 

access to Further and Higher Education, the impact of the Disability Discrimination Act and attitude 

change over the past decade has led to Deaf people moving into employment fields that were 

previously not open to them. Sign Language interpreters are now deployed in office and workplace 

settings, enabling interaction to take place between Deaf and hearing people. There has been very 

little exploration of the dynamics of interpreted discourse in the workplace and the provision of 

interpreters in this setting is virtually unique to the field of sign language interpreting. In order to 

generate a rich and detailed description of how interpreters function in this setting an interdisciplinary 

study is required, drawing on the Sociolinguistics and Applied Linguistics. By taking an ethnographic 

approach, the research will further examine the theory of the interpreter as participant in interpreted 

discourse, building upon and continuing the work of Wadensjö (1998), Metzger (1999) and Roy 

(2000). The project will also draw upon social interaction and behavior in the workplace (Holmes 2000, 

2002, Drew and Heritage 1992) and compare those aspects of institutional discourse with what occurs 

in an interpreted event. Video evidence of interpreter mediated events will be collected and analyzed, 

with a view to identifying problems and difficulties experienced by practitioners in the field. Outcomes 

will be considered with reference to existing interpreter theory and the research will then go on to 

explore the potential for change in current interpreting practice. 

From submission to publication: mapping textual revisions in research process writing 

Ma. del Carmen Fumero-Pérez 

Universidad de la Laguna, Canary Islands 

mfumero@ull.es 

Contrastive studies of research writing have typically given their attention to finished products or the 

work of novice writers. The focus of this poster presentation is the process of revision applied to a 

paper written in English by an established Spanish researcher in the field of educational psychology. 

We chart the changes made, by both the researcher and an English-speaking background (ESB) 

colleague working in the field of Applied Linguistics. The corpus for our study was composed of the 

first and two subsequent drafts of a research article submitted to and ultimately accepted for 

publication in the Journal of Educational Psychology. Our analysis of the revision process shows that 

the majority of changes were at either the level of organization of information in the text (thematization 

and signalling devices) or rhetorical structure (moves and steps in the various sections of the paper). 

In our poster we illustrate this through examples drawn from the three drafts and final published 

version of the paper and through a quantification of the modifications (lexico-grammatical, textual, 

socio-pragmatic) suggested by the applied linguist editor and implemented by the author. Our study 

has broad implications for researchers from language backgrounds other than English when working 

with ESB editors and translators on papers submitted to international journals. We suggest that non- 

English-speaking background scholars need to be willing to make changes to the text beyond the level 


September, 2004


of syntax and lexis. Furthermore, in ideal circumstances the ESB editors who take part in the revision 

process should approach the task as peers and fellow professionals who possess the knowledge and 

expertise to recognize the need for changes at the textual and socio-pragmatic levels. 

Aptitude and Fossilization: Validating Genetic Predisposition as a Putative Fossilization Factor 

Arpad Galaczi 

Teachers College, Columbia University 

ag486@columbia.edu 

Since the concept of fossilization was introduced by Larry Selinker (1972) into the Second Language 

Acquisition (SLA) literature, researchers have identified a large number of causal factors which alone 

or in combination can bring about fossilization (See Han, in press for a comprehensive list of factors). 

The present paper pinpoints one of these factors genetic predisposition (Selinker and Lamendella 

1978) and reports on an empirical study conducted towards its validation. Genetic predisposition was 

chosen for validation because, although it makes intuitive sense that inborn capacities can play an 

important role in the cessation of language development, there is hardly any mention of it, other than 

its name in fossilization studies. First, a brief introduction about fossilization is offered, after which the 

relevant literature is reviewed. The thrust of the argument developed in the literature review is the 

justification for operationalizing genetic predisposition as language aptitude something that has not yet 

been offered in SLA studies. The literature review further discusses characteristics of aptitude and 

overviews findings of empirical studies which linked aptitude and L2 performance. The final part of the 

study reports on an empirical investigation based on measurements of aptitude and L2 performance 

conducted with 50 Hungarian high school students enrolled in EFL classes. The results show a 

significant correlation between aptitude and L2 performance measures, which is proposed as 

evidence pointing towards the existence of genetic predisposition as a potential fossilization factor. 

Working with Grounded Theory, Ethnography, and NUDIST: Unit of Analysis in Qualitative 

Research and Writing a PhD Thesis 

Mostafa Hasrati 

Department of English, Razi University 

hasrati@yahoo.co.uk 

This paper has two aspects: a methodological and a practical. The methodological aspect of this 

paper will deal with the relation of ethnography, grounded theory, and QSR.NUDIST. Drawing on an 

earlier work on the process of academic socialisation of a group of Iranian PhD students in the UK in 

the fields of engineering and the social science/humanities (Hasrati 2003), I will present a comparison 

of ethnography (Wolcott 1994), grounded theory (Glaser and Strauss 1967, Charmaz 2000), and 

QSR.NUDIST software for analysing qualitative data (Gahan and Hannibal 1998). Using Wolcott's 

(1994) classification of working with qualitative data at the levels of description, analysis, and 

interpretation, I will argue that QSR.NUDIST can only be used at the level of description, though its 

contribution to better interpretation of ethnographic data is invaluable. 

The second section of this paper will deal with the more practical aspect of resolving the issue of unit 

of analysis in qualitative research using the three tools discussed in the first section of the paper. I will 

argue that in qualitative research, we can think of a main unit of analysis and some subunits of 

analysis. These correspond to the 'core variable' in grounded theory and 'index tree nodes' in 

QSR.NUDIST respectively. I will specifically elaborate on how ethnography, grounded theory, and 

QSR.NUDIST (or its more recent version N-Vivo) can be used to help PhD students write different 

chapters of their theses. I will refer to my own PhD process and data to illustrate my points in his 

paper. 

An Exploratory Format for Assessing Productive Knowledge of English L2 Polysemy 

Li-szu Huang 

Department of Foreign Languages, Fooyin University 

en027@mail.fy.edu.tw 

Fu-hsing Su 

Department of Foreign Languages, National Chiayi University 

fhsu1999@ms32.hinet.net 

In recent applied linguistics literature there has been a noticeable abundance of studies on English L2 

learners‟ vocabulary knowledge. However, few of them have specifically focused on the productive 

knowledge these learners develop toward English polysemy. This status quo is largely due to the 

immense difficulty in developing valid tasks that tap productive knowledge of polysemous words as 

lexemes with multiple related senses. 


September, 2004


This paper proposed a test format for assessing L2 learners‟ productive knowledge of English 

polysemy. The exploratory measure reported here was developed adopting the principles formulated 

in the Vocabulary Knowledge Scale by Wesche and Paribakht (1996). The measure, comprising 50 

sense items drawn from 15 higher- and lower-frequency polysemous verbs, was further divided into 

two task components. The sense judgment component requested L1 translation of a target sense 

along with a self-rating scale. The sentence construction component asked test-takers to compose a 

semantically appropriate sentence by using each target sense. 

This self-developed measure was pilot tested on 85 college EFL students in Taiwan. The results 

revealed that the exploratory format was able to capture the participants‟ self-perceived and 

demonstrated knowledge of target senses. It also worked well in distinguishing their performance in 

send judgment from that in sentence construction. The former taps more receptive than productive 

knowledge whereas the latter displays the degree of mastery of the sense. The limitations of the 

exploratory measure, however, lay in complexity of scoring, difficulty in the simultaneous 

measurement of multiple items, and lack of alternative instruments for estimating concurrent validity. 

Additional problems concerning the design of semantic knowledge measures for English L2 learners 

will also be highlighted. 

Japanese Wartime and Peacetime Newspaper Discourses: World War Two and FIFA World Cup 

Games in Japan 

Noriko Iwamoto 

Kanagawa University 

Iwamon04@kanagawa-u.ac.jp 

This paper on language, discourse and politics examines the use and function of language for 

propaganda purposes. The main focus of the research inquiry is the wartime discourse of Japanese 

newspapers during the Second World War. The research demonstrates and characterizes the major 

stylistic and linguistic features of a wartime register as a representation of real war. The secondary 

area chosen for the purpose of contrastive analysis is newspaper texts of FIFA World Cup Games cohosted 

by Japan and Korea in 2002 as an example of peacetime discourse about international 

competition. By applying the theory of transitivity in Functional Grammar combined with those of 

modality and point of view, the research attempts to clarify and compare how linguistic resources are 

used to structure, transform, and sometimes cloud reality in a different way between wartime and 

peacetime international conflict/competition discourses. 

The study has found that the discoursal and stylistic differences observed in wartime and peacetime 

competition rhetoric derive from differences in point of view, a particular way of conceptualizing, worldview 

or ideology. The propagandistic discourse during wartime reflects positive mode of commitment 

based on internal, subjective point of view, while peacetime international competition discourse 

reflects negative mode of commitment based on more objective, external point of view. These 

differences in point of view or authorial attitude produce different manifestation in transitivity and 

modal patterns, too. Wartime discourse adopts actor-oriented transitivity patterns with deontic or 

strong epistemic modality foregrounded. By contrast, peacetime discourse adopts more objective 

transitivity patterns with participant functions such as actor or goal assigned to each participant more 

explicitly. Also peacetime discourse employs weaker modality than in wartime discourse. The research 

concludes that there is a close relationship between the context of situation, linguistic structure and 

stylistic features in texts, which is particularly observable in politicized texts. 

The developmental process of EFL student writers and some academic discourse instruction 

to help them develop as academic writers 

Taeko Kamimura 

Department of English, Senshu University 

taekok@isc.senshu-u.ac.jp 

nobu@isc.senshu-u.ac.jp 

English written discourse has been traditionally classified into four modes: narration, description, 

exposition, and argumentation. Though it has been argued that narration is the easiest mode for 

student writers to produce while the argumentation the most difficult, there has been little empirical 

evidence for this argument especially in the context of EFL writing. The purpose of the present study is 

to examine the relative difficulties that EFL student writers have in producing different modes of 

writing, and to provide some pedagogical suggestions to help those students develop in an academic 

EFL context. 

In the present study, Japanese EFL students were told to write compositions of different modes all on 

a topic related to a city life and/or a country life. The students' compositions of the respective modes 


September, 2004


were compared both quantitatively and qualitatively to investigate where their writing performance 

start to deteriorate, that is, which mode of writing imposes considerable writing difficulties on the 

students' writing performance. 

The result of the analysis showed that the students were able to achieve fluency and coherence in 

writing narrative compositions. However, when producing argumentative writing, their compositions 

started to lack both fluency and logical organization. 

The study attempts to trace the developmental process of EFL student writers. It shows actual sample 

compositions to explain the quantitative changes in the number of words, types of vocabulary as well 

as the qualitative changes in holistic score. The study introduces some concrete examples of writing 

instruction that could help EFL students first notice several characteristic features of academic written 

discourse in English, and then later integrate those features into their own writing. Finally, the study 

adds that this kind of instruction might be especially important for students who might have their own 

non-Western notion of academic discourse. 

Inferring Japanese Learners' English Ability by way of Measuring Their Vocabulary Size 

Katagiri Kazuhiko 

English Department, Reitaku University 

kkatagir@reitaku.u.ac.jp 

In my previous studies, it was found that we can approximately infer Japanese EFL learners' English 

ability through measuring their receptive knowledge of vocabulary, because middle to high correlations 

were found between the amount of receptive vocabulary knowledge and general English tests among 

second-year junior high school students (r=.70, p.


research. The staged performances, first written, then oral, provide shared and separate challenges 

in terms of audience, scope and focus, and use of tutor and peer feedback. 

The findings suggest that successful students set aside their teacher identity and expertise. They work 

with might be termed a student identity, and from this, develop a researcher perspective on issues of 

learning and teaching. The discussion section links these findings to the development of research 

methods courses at this initial stage of postgraduate education, and more widely, to two teachingresearch 

hypotheses: i) these activities are complementary ways of knowing and acting, and greater 

integration benefits both enterprises; and ii) they are different, and integration or bridging is always 

going to have limited success. 

Orphans, robbers, prostitutes: The discursive construction of Romanians in the Austrian daily 

press 

Veronika Koller 

Department of English Business Communication, Vienna University of Economics & Business 

Administration 

veronica.koller@wu-wien.ac.at 

This poster addresses the discursive construction of Romanians in the Austrian daily press at the turn 

of 2003/2004. The underlying assumption is that Romania's status as an EU accession country, 

combined with anti-Slavic prejudice, leads to a portrayal of Romania and Romanians in negative 

terms. 

To verify this hypothesis, I compiled a corpus of 410 articles featuring the search term Rumän* 

(Romanian/s, Romania) from four Austrian daily newspapers. The corpus was subsequently tagged 

for topics and a concordancer was employed to analyse search word frequency, topic and word class 

distribution, as well as semantic prosody and actor roles. 

Results show individual Romanians to be over-represented in the local section of tabloids, where they 

mostly feature as criminals, while quality papers also record a number of relevant articles on home 

affairs and business, focusing on the more abstract notion of Romania as a political or economic 

player. 

As for collocational patterns and actor roles, all papers display more or less pronounced negative 

prosody, especially when it is Romanian citizens who function as actors or affected entities, with 

collocates mostly originating from law enforcement. Human actors are furthermore divided along 

gender lines, with men, who account for most mentionings, exclusively seen as perpetrators, children 

as victims and women in ambiguous roles. The country features mostly in adverbial phrases but 

shows more neutral or sometimes even positive prosody when depicted as actor, as it occasionally is 

in quality papers. 

However, such alternative constructions are limited. On the whole, findings indicate that earlier tabloid 

discourses portraying Romanians as economic refugees and Romania as politically and economically 

inferior (Matouschek and Wodak 1995) still persist, having been aggravated by the overwhelming 

depiction of Romanians as criminals. In a socio-political context, these discursive strategies are 

interpreted as a racist reaction against further Eastern enlargement of the EU. 

The contribution of Applied Linguistics to widening participation in European Higher 

Education: The European Social Fund and the English for Excellence project at the University 

of Luton 

Dimitra Koutsantoni, Mihye Harker, Martha Pennington 

Language Research Centre, University of Luton 

dimitra.koutsantoni@luton.ac.uk 

The European Social Fund is one of the European Union's most important financial instruments for 

promoting employment and developing human resources. The ESF provides European Union funding 

on a major scale for programmes which develop or regenerate people's „employability‟ 

(http://europa.eu.int/comm/employment_social/esf2000/introduction-en.htm), aiming to respond 

effectively to the new challenges of economic and social cohesion in Europe. In the UK, ESF is 

delivered under three Objectives. Objective 3 aims to support adapting and modernising policies and 

systems of education, training and employment and comprises three main themes, one of which is 

Widening Access to Higher Education. 

One of the programmes the ESF funds together with the University of Luton is English for Excellence 

(EfE), which aims to widen participation in Higher Education and increase retention of students of 

ethnic minority backgrounds born in the UK. The EfE is motivated by the high rate of non-completion 

in UK Higher Education (http://www.aut.org/uk/meda/html/studentretention1.html; Johnson, 2002), 


September, 2004


and the problems of underachievement observed with students from ethnic minorities (Demack et al., 

1998; Guardian, 27 October 2000; Morgan and Malde, 2003; TES, 19 October 2001). 

The EfE project aims to develop students‟ Academic English skills, increase their academic literacy 

and performance, and thus their academic self-esteem, which is very important for continuation of 

studies (Patrick, 2001). The EfE researchers have drawn on Applied Linguistics research in the fields 

of English for Academic Purposes, Genre analysis, Discourse analysis, Composition Studies, and 

Computer-Assisted Language Learning to develop original computer-mediated teaching materials. 

These are presented in a web-based environment as a tutor-supported learning programme mainly 

focused on academic reading and writing. 

The paper presents the theoretical basis of the project and the ways insights from Applied Linguistics 

research have been utilised in the development of the teaching materials and syllabus design of the 

EfE programme, in addition to interim evaluation results of its delivery 

„Speech community‟ in a European context in transition 

Juana Rodríguez-Mendoza 

Instituto de Lingüística Andrés Bello, Universidad de la Laguna 

jrmendo@ull.es 

Studies of language variation and change have consistently raised issues of both definition and 

delimitation of the notion of „speech community’. Such issues become all the more patent in research 

conducted in communities such as San Sebastian de la Gomera (Canary Islands), the focus of this 

poster presentation. In the poster, I outline the characteristics of this community whose geographical, 

cultural and linguistic situation places it at the frontiers between Europe, Latin America and Africa. As 

is well-known, Columbus in fact sailed from San Sebastian de La Gomera in 1492. Five centuries 

later, the town is both multilingual and multicultural. There are now people living in San Sebastian de 

la Gomera from other parts of the island, from the other Canary Islands, from elsewhere in Spain and 

indeed from Latin American. There are also residents from Germany, the UK and Africa. These 

characteristics have implications for language users in terms of their relationships to larger 

communities of speakers in the rest of the Spanish-speaking world and indeed to other speech 

communities, principally speakers of German and several varieties of English. As Dua (1981), 

suggests in such a complex situation it is no longer possible to make use of the concept of speech 

community as Bloomfield first conceived it. In the poster I seek to map the relationship of this 

community to other communities and illustrate how these relationships might condition the way in 

which speech community is defined and understood. I also suggest that researching San Sebastian 

from the point of view of other concepts, such as communities of practice or social networks, might 

ultimately prove more illuminating in studies of socio-pragmatic features such as pronoun use. 

Fluency in Second Language Performance 

Peter Skehan 

Chinese University of Hong Kong 

pskehan@arts.cuhk.edu.hk 

Fluency is widely accepted as one of the major goals for second language learners to achieve, as 

reflected in the inclusion of scales of fluency within second language tests, but there is disagreement 

about its measurement, its nature, and the influences upon it. The poster will report on a quantitative 

approach to predicting fluency across a range of different types of performance, based on a 300,000 

words corpus of digitized speech. These performances include decision-making interactive tasks, 

monologic narratives under different conditions; and personal information exchange tasks. The tasks 

vary in terms of whether there was opportunity for pre-task planning time or not, and in the amount of 

formality in the language used. Fluency is measured through a range of indices, including measures of 

pausing and silence; repairs to the ongoing speech; and use of time creating devices, such as filled 

pauses and also filler words, such as “sort of”. The poster will explore (a) measurement issues 

associated with fluency measurement, (b) how the different measures of fluency inter-relate and which 

of them is most effective in characterizing fluency, and (c) what the influences on fluency are. 

Regarding (a) measurement, alternative lengths of time to define pausing will be explored, as well as 

the consequences of measuring pauses at different places, e.g. mid vs. end of clause. In terms of (b) 

the nature of fluency, the dimensions of fluency will be explored and it will be demonstrated that 

fluency is not unidimensional. Finally, concerning (c) influences, the data will be explored in terms of 

the impact of different types of task; of lexical differences; and of the inter-relationship between the 

fluency achieved and the complexity of the language which is used. These results have implications 

for our understanding of the fluency construct and of communicative language testing. 


September, 2004


Assessment of EFL Pragmatic Production and Perception Using Video Prompts 

Masao Tada 

Osaka International University 

sasahsbc@yahoo.co.jp 

This presentation describes an investigation of the development of EFL learners‟ pragmatic production 

and perception of the speech acts of requests, refusals, and apologies using video prompts, which 

were part of a computerized data collection instrument. These three face-threatening acts were 

chosen because of their importance and difficulty for non-native speakers of English. Forty-eight 

Japanese learners of English took part in this study. The results showed that pragmatic production 

develops hand in hand with overall English proficiency to some extent, whereas pragmatic perception 

is relatively independent of proficiency. This trend was consistent across the three speech acts, across 

two imposition levels, as well as in a variety of situations. The correlation analysis suggested that the 

learners‟ production and perception may be dependent upon different speech acts. Among possible 

explanations for the phenomena were the learners‟ linguistic constraints, the transfer of L1 pragmatic 

knowledge, and the learners‟ beliefs about L2 pragmatic rules. Neither production nor perception had 

developed fully from the perspective of the native speaker judges, probably because of the paucity of 

input containing these speech acts in the Japanese EFL context. These results suggest that the EFL 

learners need opportunities to receive input containing English speech acts and practice both 

perception and production in order to be pragmatically competent in L2 English. The low level of 

pragmatic development also suggested that inclusion of lower proficiency learners is important when 

investigating EFL learners‟ pragmatic abilities. In terms of the research methodology, the use of the 

video-prompted computerized procedure and the use of oral data proved to be useful. 

A New Approach to Assessing Strategic Learning: The Case of Self-Regulation in Vocabulary 

Acquisition 

Wen-Ta Tseng 


tseng_wenta@yahoo.com 

Research into language learning strategies was argued to have suffered from a series of problems: 

definitional fuzziness and the psychometric properties of the assessment instruments used. It was 

suggested that the relevant research of language learning strategies was problematic. This article 

therefore proposed a new, psychometrically-based measure of second language learners‟ selfregulatory 

capacity as an alternative to the scales traditionally used to quantify language learning 

strategy use. 

A „mixed method‟ approach combining qualitative and quantitative methodologies was adopted to 

develop the instrument. The self-regulation instrument was developed through a three-phase process, 

focusing on the realm of vocabulary learning. In the first phase of the research, three qualitative focus 

groups were set up to collect possible item candidates to develop the item pool. Analysis of the focus 

group data yielded 36 ideas which were written into instrument items. The second phase of the 

research entailed a detailed analysis of the initial instrument in a sizeable sample to screen out the 

inappropriate items, including item analysis and reliability analysis. The reliability results showed that 

the instrument performed well in terms of reliability. 

The final phase evaluated the revised instrument in a new sample to confirm again the reliability of 

instrument and also test its validity using confirmatory factory analysis (CFA) and exploratory factor 

analysis (EFA). The instrument was again found to be reliable with a mean scale coefficient of .77. 

The results of both CFA and EFA simultaneously showed that the hypothesised model fit well with the 

subject data and that unidimensionality of the instrument was supported. Both reliability and validity of 

the instrument were found to be satisfactory. It was therefore concluded that self-regulation 

instruments such as this could provide a more psychometrically-sound measure of the nature of 

strategic learning than the traditional behaviour-based survey questionnaires 

Second language conversational skill or grammatical development? 

Gillian Wigglesworth & Howard Nicholas 

Department of Linguistics and Applied Linguistics, University of Melbourne 

gillianw@unimelb.edu.au 

In judging how learners are progressing in their learning of a new language, teachers need to 

distinguish between perceptions based on the ways in which the learners converse with them and 

perceptions of features such as control of grammar. These judgments shape how learners are 

challenged to develop further and how their learning needs are defined. 


September, 2004


The presenters will report on data obtained in a longitudinal study of beginning (male and female) ESL 

learners from Iraq, countries in the Horn of Africa and the Peoples' Republic of China. Eighteen 

learners were followed over twelve to eighteen months. Samples of their spoken English were 

gathered on a regular basis in monolingual and bilingual interviews and classroom observation while 

the learners were enrolled in the Adult Migrant English Program in Australia. Perceptions from 

teachers were also gathered through interviews. 

The data were analysed for the development of grammatical features in the speech samples and the 

development of conversational strategies. These will be described and progress made by the learners 

will be compared. The influence of conversational behaviours will be analysed to see whether it 

reflects growth in grammatical control. Ways in which attributes such as gender and first language 

culture are involved in shaping conversational behaviour and perceptions of progress will be explored. 

The presenters will discuss the implications of these findings for the knowledge that teachers need to 

have in order to be able to make reliable judgments about learners' second language progress. 

Exploring links between culture, the individual and communication behaviour: An empirical 

investigation in an intercultural context 

Jules Winchester 

School of English and Modern Languages, University of Surrey Roehampton 

jules_winchester@yahoo.co.uk 

The cultural background under examination is Japanese, the individuals taking part in the study are a 

number of Japanese women living and working in Britain for varying lengths of time, and the 

communication behaviour being studied is linguistic politeness as realized in the interlanguage of 

English. 

The cultural level variables being researched are individualism and collectivism (I/C), the former 

emphasizing an „I‟ consciousness, autonomy and independence and the latter emphasizing a „we‟ 

consciousness, collective identity, dependence and group solidarity. There is a broadly accepted view 

that Japan is somewhat more collectivistic than Britain. 

It is theorized that these cultural effects can be traced at a psychological (i.e. individual) level through 

views of self (self-construals) which can be more independent (reflecting more individualistic values 

such as autonomy) or interdependent (reflecting more collectivistic values such as contextualism). 

These self-construals can be accessed through studying individuals‟ self-descriptions. 

It is hypothesized that individuals who hold more independent self-construals will exhibit a more 

„Western‟ style of linguistic politeness, emphasizing a more egalitarian relationship from the outset. 

This can be seen through extensive use of strategies showing camaraderie (e.g. use of colloquial 

language, taboo words, verbal agreement and support) whilst individuals who hold more 

interdependent self-construals will exhibit a more „Asian‟ style, assuming initially that deference is the 

proper attitude to take in relation to a stranger. Strategies for this include hesitancy in speech, 

question intonation, hedges and euphemisms. 

Links between cultural level I/C and individual level self-construal have been explored in a number of 

other studies. To my knowledge, however, they have never before been connected to realization of 

linguistic politeness at behaviour level, nor has such a study been conducted in an intercultural 

context. Furthermore, there is a lack of empirical research to support theoretical assumptions in this 

field. It is hoped that this study will further contribute to this area and will have implications for 

intercultural communication. 


September, 2004

Colloquia - British Association for Applied Linguistics

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