Colloquia - British Association for Applied Linguistics

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BAAL Conference 2004 37 th Annual BAAL Meeting 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. King‟s College, London 9 – 11 th - 24 - September, 2004
BAAL Conference 2004 37 th Annual BAAL Meeting 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 King‟s College, London 9 – 11 th - 25 - September, 2004
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