Abstracts – NORDAND 11 - Centrum för tvåspråkighetsforskning ...

Abstracts – NORDAND 11
Virtanen, Aija Lördag, sektion 6D, sal F420
University of Jyväskylä
Intersections of affordances: second language learning in hospital
settings
Work-related language skills have been under a public debate as the amount of international
workforce in the health care sector has been increasing in Finland. So far, however, there has
been little discussion about international nursing students and their language skills.
The aim of this study is to provide an insight into language learning opportunities that international
nursing students perceive during their practical training. This kind of relation between
the individual and the environment is defined as an affordance. The theoretical framework is
based on a sociocognitive approach, combining dialogical and sociocultural perspectives, where
language is seen as a shared, dynamic and varying phenomenon. (Linell 2009, van Lier 2004.)
A case study is reported: the data include a student’s narrative, her workplace interaction and
reflections about observed situation and a semi-structured interview with the student’s mentor.
To find out what the intersections of perceived affordances are, nexus analysis is applied
(Scollon & Scollon 2004) to highlight the dynamic nature and the historical context of the
action in situ.
The study is a part of the project Finnish as a work language: A sociocognitive perspective to
work-related language skills of immigrants (University of Jyväskylä 2011–2013).
References
Linell, P. (2009). Rethinking Language, Mind, and World Dialogically. Charlotte, N.C.: IAP Press.
Scollon, R. & Scollon, S.W. (2004). Nexus Analysis: Discourse and the Emerging Internet. London:
Routledge.
van Lier, L. (2004). The Ecology and Semiotics of Language Learning. A Sociocultural Perspective.
Boston: Kluwer Academic.
Vukovska, Boriana* & Maya Vukovska** Fredag, sektion 5A, hörsal F11
*University of Agder & **South West University of Blagoevgrad
“Girlsa skal rocke i kveld, u know”: On the use of Norwegian as a second
language in a super‐diverse community
In this paper, we aim at analyzing the use of Norwegian as a second language by native speakers
of Bulgarian in the social networks. Our analysis shows that the Norwegian they use in their
communication is not the “pure” bokmål they learned from the textbooks and theirteachers, but
a clear case of polylanguaging.
The relatively new term polylanguaging (coined by representatives of the Danish sociolinguistic
community; see Jørgensen, Karrebæk, Madsen & Møller 2011) is intended to substitute
other terms such as “bilingualism” and “multilingualism”, and covers phenomena
previously termed as “codeswitching”and “code-mixing”. A polylanguage utterance may consist
of linguistic featuresfrom two, three and even more lexicons, but the grammar and syntax that
bind them alltogether comes from only one of the languages (that is Norwegian in our case), and
can beillustrated by the following examples: “Gleder meg til å treffe my people i kveld.” “Hvor
fucked up er man når man legger mobilen sin i kjøleskapet!”
For our purpose we present examples of the observed language use from among youth in a
super-diverse community (such is the social network Facebook). We describe and analyze the
linguistic behavior of two Bulgarian female students, for whom Norwegian is a second
language, and who live, study and work in Kristiansand, Norway. The conversations are a mix
of bokmål, the local dialect, standard English, English slang, and Bulgarian (written in Latin
letters, not Cyrillic).
51