Colloquia - British Association for Applied Linguistics

BAAL Conference 2004 37 th Annual BAAL Meeting
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.
King‟s College, London 9 – 11 th - 28 -
September, 2004