Linguistics and Education最新文献

This paper explores instructor elicitation practices used in mandatory one-on-one instructional sessions to prompt learners of Japanese to incorporate specific linguistic items in their responses. Specifically, the study is based on a corpus of 15 h of video-recorded interactions in a study abroad program in Japan. Drawing on multimodal conversation analysis, the study investigates: (1) how instructors design and sequentially place elicitations to prompt learners to use a specific target language form while engaging in meaning-focused activities; and (2) how these elicitation designs and placements affect the accomplishment of the intended pedagogical goal. The findings contribute to the understanding of elicitation practices for specific pedagogical purposes and yield empirically based insights that can inform interactional decisions.

A key manifestation of market forces permeating higher education is the marketised discourse in universities’ vision and mission statements, promoting institutional brands and offerings. This study set out to explore how 59 Ghanaian universities marketise themselves in their vision and mission statements. Drawing on critical discourse analysis (CDA) and a metadiscourse model of stance, a textual analysis revealed six key marketisation strategies: (1) trumpeting excellence, global aspirations and partnerships; (2) highlighting niche specialisations; (3) declaring commitment to knowledge creation and dissemination; (4) pledging positive societal impact: (5) promising holistic and quality education; (6) emphasising ethical, value-based education. In comparison with the public universities, the private and technical universities adopted a more assertive marketing language replete with boosters, attitude markers and hedging expressions. Thus, the identified discoursal differences align with university types and market orientations. These findings offer important implications for higher education development, policy-making of educational stakeholders and further research.

In face-to-face classrooms, when mutual visual and/or aural access to a digital device is needed but lacking during digital tasks, participants display an orientation to asymmetric access and resolve the issue through multimodal resources. This study examines the trajectory of negotiating access to digital devices held or handled by a coparticipant in peer classroom interactions. The data are audio-video recordings from English as a Foreign Language (EFL) classrooms, where individual and collaborative learning tasks are performed on or with digital devices. The findings show that pupils seek access to devices mainly through embodiment, such as body shifts, and rearranging material resources, and display a preference for not touching a device held by another pupil. Overall, the negotiation process reflects different types of situated roles and authority. The study contributes to an understanding of peer interaction around digital devices and offers important pedagogical implications for the implementation of technology in classrooms.

This study analyzes the peer-advice produced by practical nursing students in a study circle in which advisors provide low-threshold support. Our videotaped and transcribed data make a case for a conversation analytic study to investigate the sequences of talk involving students who narrate conflictual care situations and present the necessity of care giving in the form of advice. The study presents two action types of peer-advice given by students. These two action types involve students who base their advice either on knowing-that or on their practical knowing-how. More concretely, we determine the interactional devices linked to the advising used in narratives, such as reported speech and its sequential adjacency to necessive zero-person constructions. Students use these devices to demonstrate their expertise as well as to construct themselves as morally and ethically reliable caregivers. In terms of implications, the study demonstrates that peer-interaction in a study circle among those who are quasi equals provides an appropriate environment to discuss the practical dilemmas encountered in high-conflict patient care situations and this enables students to achieve expert and successful learner status.

In the context of globalization, the emergence of the "new worker-self" archetype has gained attention, with English proficiency playing a crucial role in Pakistan's socio-economic landscape. This study examines the 'English Works!' program brochures using Foucauldian theory to understand the construction of the "new worker-self" narrative and its alignment with global discourses. Through discursive strategies like student testimonials and skills emphasis, the brochures promote individual agency and market-oriented skills. However, this focus on skills may overlook structural inequalities and broader educational goals, emphasizing the need for a holistic approach to education. The study contributes to understanding the interplay of neoliberal ideologies, skills acquisition, and subjectivities in the global labor market.

In this article, recordings of academic supervision interactions are examined to inform a discussion of how ‘texts’ and ‘practices’ have been conceptualized in Academic Literacies (AL) research. AL perspectives have contributed to a shift in focus, from texts as linguistic objects to the practices in which texts are embedded. With a starting point in ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, we demonstrate the relevance of proximal textual practices as an intermediary between texts and the more abstract dimensions of practice targeted by AL, such as ideology, power, and institutional processes. Thereby we extend initiatives in AL to highlight direct interaction between learners and tutors as central to academic literacies pedagogy, and demonstrate the potential of detailed conversation analytic and ethnomethodological analysis for shedding light on the practices within which texts are embedded in the learning and teaching of academic writing.

This study explores the role of language and migrant students’ language use in the interplay of chronotopes (Bakhtin 1981) and language ideologies (Blommaert 1999) in vocational education and training (VET) in Finland. The study scrutinises how 16 educators imagined and situated migrant students’ language use and constructed values for the majority language and migrant students’ other languages. Data were gathered team-ethnographically in a VET institute. Critical sociolinguistic analysis showed that language use was spatiotemporally located in present education and present and future blue-collar worksites. In these timespaces, the majority language was valorised and viewed as a tool for graduating from VET and performing blue-collar work tasks. The findings indicate that migrant students’ imagined language use rarely extends beyond their VET education or worksites, and that their diverse language resources should thus be better considered and valued in VET.

Teachers operationalize various strategies to deal with lack of student participation in classroom interaction. Using longitudinal conversation analysis, this study examines three pre-service teachers’ orientations to their co-teaching in their reflections. I describe how the co-teaching pre-service teachers problematize the lack of student participation and attempt to resolve it. For this purpose, they orient to a turn allocation strategy, individual nomination, to elicit responses to their unanswered questions. I focus on the emergence and routinization of this strategy in five weeks in their reflections. The co-teachers’ use of we language in reflection sessions established the strategy as a shared practice. On the other hand, they used first-person plural and second-person singular pronouns when divergences occurred among group members. The findings suggest reflective sessions that PSTs engage in are integral to their professional development. The findings bring insights into the understanding of collaborative decision-making in reflective talk sessions.

This paper presents a discourse analysis of the role the label “different” plays in mitigating or constructing deficit discourses of Asian-Pacific Islander students in a school in the U.S. Some scholars argue that discourses of linguistic difference play a positive role in countering deficit ideologies (e.g., Paris & Ball 2009). Others disagree, claiming that discourses of difference index deficiency (e.g., Gorski, 2016). To address this debate, I analyze a discussion with a U.S. educator and the language we used to talk about her first- and second-generation Marshallese immigrant students. Both of us were trying to speak positively about both the students and Marshallese culture. Nonetheless, “different” inadvertently functioned as an index of deficiency and had the effect of racializing Marshallese students. This analysis illuminates some of the negative impacts a focus on “difference” can have and challenges academics to reconsider the role “different” plays in their research and advocacy.

Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) occupations and care work occupations are highly segregated by gender. School textbooks play an essential socializing role in determining which occupations are perceived as typically male or female. Existing research on the gender representation of STEM and care work occupations in textbooks is limited in scope. Therefore, we used quantitative text analyses in a large sample of 202 current German textbooks to examine the gender representation of STEM and care work occupations. We used collocation analysis to explore the nature of the occupational representations, focusing on agency and communion. Men were portrayed significantly more frequently than women in STEM and care work occupations. Adjectives of agency and communion occurred rarely in the collocations. Further research is required to test our findings in other cultures and to take a more differentiated look into the use of agency and communion in textbooks.