Colloquia - British Association for Applied Linguistics

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BAAL Conference 2004 37 th Annual BAAL Meeting 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. King‟s College, London 9 – 11 th - 16 - September, 2004
BAAL Conference 2004 37 th Annual BAAL Meeting 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. King‟s College, London 9 – 11 th - 17 - September, 2004
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Colloquia - British Association for Applied Linguistics

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