Colloquia - British Association for Applied Linguistics

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BAAL Conference 2004 37 th Annual BAAL Meeting 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 King‟s College, London 9 – 11 th - 26 - September, 2004
BAAL Conference 2004 37 th Annual BAAL Meeting 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 School of English Studies, University of Nottingham 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 King‟s College, London 9 – 11 th - 27 - September, 2004
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