Linguistics and Education最新文献

This study contributes to the limited research on linguistic racism in higher education settings. It examines a transnational multilingual student's experiences with the English language and English literature across Indian and US universities, and the influences of language ideologies on her academic pursuits. Qualitative methods were used to collect data that include the student's written reflection on her experiences, talks-around-text interviews, and artifacts of her academic work. Raciolinguistics and positioning theory support data analysis. Findings indicate that, across Indian and US universities, the student was continuously positioned by others as lacking in English competence, resulting in academic and psychological trauma for her. However, the student also exercised agentive resistance and fought to reposition herself as a legitimate speaker of English and student of English literature. Implications are offered for research, theory, and educational practice.

The study explores literacy conditions for preschool children acquiring Nynorsk, a lesser used Norwegian written language. Norway has no official language policy for the use of Nynorsk and Bokmål, the majority written language, in preschool education. By observing when and how Nynorsk, Bokmål, and other varieties are involved in activities where texts and print play a role, we examine language policy appropriation in kindergartens in a community where the children are going to have Nynorsk as first written language when they attend formal education. The study shows that the predominant literacy practices create spaces for kindergarten staff's language policy agency, but that their choices are limited – especially by textual artefacts. Teacher-made materials are often in Nynorsk, while materials from the outside are in Bokmål. The lack of official language policy results in kindergarten staff being the ones, if anyone, to ensure written language stimulation for ‘the Nynorsk children’.

In this paper, we build on critical literacy scholarship and the affective turn, focusing particularly on the redesign process. A close and critical textual analysis of student responses to two assignments in the postgraduate education module Language and Literacy, Theories and Practices, enables us to trace the critical-creative-affective moves that students made when required to analyse and redesign university student recruitment advertisements. Students’ analyses and redesigns illustrate 1) how identification/disidentification with issues of power across gender, race, and (de)coloniality enable them to enter ‘relations of affective solidarity’ as a complex form of empathy, 2) the nuanced negotiations of affect in doing critical literacies across reading and redesign and 3) the ways in which affect surfaces differently for each student across contrasting genres and ‘revealed spaces’ (Boler, 1999).

This paper examines the role of writing in sequences of oral feedback during formal formative reading assessment in an elementary school classroom. Previous research indicates that writing-in-interaction is central to the interactional accomplishment of feedback. The limitations of writing-in-interaction research on feedback for the study of formal formative reading assessment lies in its preoccupation with the planned-use of written inscriptions. Without presuming that inscriptions are planned as resources for feedback, the study asks ‘what role does inscription play in the accomplishment of feedback during formal formative reading assessment interaction?’ Analyzing a single case using ethnomethodologically-inspired conversation analysis, the current study demonstrates how writing done initially to record a student's reading performance emerges later, unplanned, as resource for sequences of diagnostic and instructional interaction. The paper contributes to an understanding of inscription as a practical technology for formative assessment, and demonstrates how the formal assessment of reading performance is interactionally accomplished.

Role-playing games (RPGs) are interactionally complex activities in which participants use talk to coauthor narratives across player and character identities. Taking an interest in how talk and interaction mediate collaborative text production, I drew upon concepts and methods of conversation analysis (CA) to examine RPG play. Despite a breadth of CA scholarship that examines storytelling and gameplay, there is scant CA research that examines role-playing games. Contributing to the burgeoning program of education research on RPG literacies, I used CA to study how six adolescent boys negotiated game-based storytelling across their character and player identities. Findings illustrated how participants’ metagame talk worked to negotiate knowledge, fairness, relationships, and pacing during RPG play. Implications of this work call for youth and educators to develop a reflexive awareness of metagame talk to better negotiate storytelling and power relationships during game-based coauthorship.

Previous research on Chinese-English dual language programs in the United States has found that teaching effects are often compromised by communication and classroom management issues due to cultural differences. Since classroom teaching does not always unfold as language teachers’ planning, it is important for teachers to be able to cope with unscripted actions, and maintain the flow of teaching. Using multimodal conversation analysis, this research focuses on the contingent use of multimodal and verbal resources by a Chinese teacher in a Chinese immersion classroom of English-speaking young learners. Drawing on the theory of teacher contingency and translanguaging, this research shows through the contingent orchestration of semiotic resources, language teachers can transform unplanned moments or unexpected student responses into meaningful learning opportunities, establish rapport, and create improvised teaching materials.

With the increased frequency in the use of online translation tools (OTTs), such as Google Translate, in the foreign language classroom, teachers are reported to be concerned about students’ overdependence on these tools, their potential detrimental effects on learning, ethical issues of using them inappropriately and students’ lack of skills to use them critically. Thus, this study sets out to investigate the basis of teachers’ scepticism empirically by analysing OTT search sequences that display critical interactional strategies, where students reject the first translation option(s) offered by an OTT. The data analysed come from 22 h of video data of collaborative writing tasks, tracked using multimodal conversation analysis. The findings revealed five critical OTT strategies deployed to resolve emergent lexical issues. However, the pairs of students varied greatly in their use and range of critical OTT strategies, suggesting the need for explicit training in using different strategies.

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.