Linguistics and Education最新文献

This methodological commentary extends and complicates earlier discussions of the need for ethnographic approaches to exploring “academic language.” While indispensable as a tool for contextualizing classroom language use, this commentary suggests that ethnography alone is insufficient to the task of elucidating academic language in school-based settings. Drawing on ethnographic and interactional data, this article argues for the necessity of looking across multiple scales of analysis in order to apprehend the complex, nuanced, and contradictory ways in which academic language is learned, produced, and perceived in schools.

Language assessment literacy, an evolving and dynamic research field, assumes a critical role in applied linguistics. This narrative review analyzes different epistemological understandings regarding language assessment literacy. Guided by the three cognitive interests as defined by Jürgen Habermas, the article illustrates the characteristics of three paradigms of language assessment literacy: language assessment literacy as a product from the technical perspective, as a process from the practical perspective, and as a praxis from the critical perspective. The advantages and drawbacks of each paradigm are also discussed. By analysing language assessment literacy through the lens of these cognitive interests, we offer insights into how the scope of language assessment literacy can be broadened and how a critical perspective can initiate democratic discussions on under-explored issues in this research field. Also, we argue that it is crucial for academics in applied linguistics to be open-minded about the coexistence of different paradigms, as this can lead to significant contributions to language education and language assessment policies.

Microteaching is a pedagogical approach that allows educators to enhance their teaching techniques through practice and feedback in controlled, classroom-like environments. This study uses multimodal conversation analysis to investigate how pre-service teachers at a Korean university, with English as their second language, manage student participation in microteaching sessions. The analysis reveals the intricacies of teachers’ hinting practices that are aimed at mobilizing and pursuing student responses. The excerpts exemplify how pre-service teachers use hints to foster an engaged and dynamic classroom environment, highlighting their contingent decision-making in question-and-answer sequences. These findings offer valuable insights into the teaching practices employed by pre-service teachers in a microteaching context and contribute to expanding our understanding of classroom interactional competence in teacher education.

Making meaning about disciplinary knowledge involves both disciplinary content and relevant semiotic resources (e.g., text structures) for communicating the content, as two sides of a coin. The purpose of this study is to contribute to research in science education with a model for visualising how the two sides of the coin are elaborated in classroom interaction, aiming to support students’ disciplinary knowledge development. The model was developed based on data from a series of lessons in a primary science classroom where the teacher and her students negotiated and made meaning about action and reaction forces. We show how the model can be used to deepen the understanding of how the meaning making through classroom interaction forms a pathway, visualising different levels of disciplinary literacy and hence the model's usefulness for both research and for designing teaching practices.

In this paper, featuring a collaboration between Ève, a white applied linguist from Réunion Island, and Giovanna, an Indigenous Yupik undergraduate student from Mountain Village, we offer perspectives from Alaska on the topic of academic language. Academic English has served as a tool to further marginalize Alaska Native students, who make up a large segment of the student population designated as English Learners in Alaska. After providing background information on the linguistic landscape of Alaska, we discuss considerations for the academic language construct, and end with implications for assessment, suggesting ways to indigenize our approach to language assessment.

The study explores the ways EFL teachers use multimodal resources to design classroom lead-ins on the basis of multimodal stylistic analyses of the lead-ins in six award-winning classroom demonstrations. Results show that verbal mode and image mode are mainly used in the lead-ins to establish cognitive framework for the new teaching topics, and body language, such as eye movements, facial expressions, and gestures, is particularly important in attracting students’ attention and motivate their participation. The foregrounded complementary reinforcement relationships within the multimodal ensembles in the lead-ins play significant roles in designing students’ learning experiences. Discussions on the multimodal stylistic features and their teaching effects also indicate that topic relevance, closeness to life, mode conciseness, proper use of body language, complementary reinforcement within mode ensembles, and dynamicity of mode choices are general guidelines for the design of effective multimodal classroom lead-ins. The study not only verifies the effectiveness of the multimodal pedagogical stylistic theory but also provides feasible implications for the design and implementation of multimodal classroom lead-ins in EFL teaching.

Including home languages in classrooms can increase multilingual students’ participation, improve literacy, and promote inclusion. It is a prevalent topic at academic conferences; however, home language use in classrooms is less common. This study was a microanalysis of home language use during Instructional Conversations at a linguistically diverse English-medium preschool. Data sources included 27 h of classroom videos of Instructional Conversations and interviews with educators who used children's home languages. Home language use during Instructional Conversations was rare in these data; however, when employed, it was followed by increased participation by the multilingual children, facilitating language and concept development. These findings indicate a need for explicit educator preparation on home language use in classrooms. Educators in this study who used children's home languages adopted alternative discourse patterns than those traditionally found in schools. They reported being motivated by the increased participation of multilingual children and positive responses from families.

Ecolinguistics, as an emerging paradigm in linguistic studies, provides an approach for analysing ecological constructions in texts. However, different contexts feature quite different ecological philosophical traditions. English textbooks, often including imported materials, raise consideration for its ecological suitability for different social contexts. This study examines the ecological evaluations of College English textbooks used in China to elucidate the underlying evaluations and assess them according to Chinese harmonious ecosophy. Adopting Martin and White's (2005) attitude system, this study analyses the selected textbooks from the aspects of affect, judgment and appreciation with the UAM Corpus Tool to annotate instantiations of natural resources. Semantic analyses suggest that the authorial construction of nature in textbooks propagate some inharmonious ecological worldviews. The study not only improves our understanding of stance of textbooks towards the natural world but also helps to explore the role textbooks play in ecological education.

In this article we develop translanguaging as a theoretical perspective in education by drawing together ideas of process and symbolic power. We first outline critiques of translanguaging, most particularly the issue of deconstructivism and concerns about transformative limitations. We then focus on the potential of translanguaging as a conceptual frame for how language mediates learning in the context of social inequity (schools). We primarily draw on Bakhtin's (1981) theorisation of language and Bourdieu's (1991) understanding of the relationship between language and symbolic power to suggest that taking sociohistorical context as central to translanguaging can help us to move beyond ‘internal’ structuralist debates and open up productive lines of inquiry at the intersection of language and learning.