Planning for development or decline? Education policy for Chinese language in Singapore

This article examines how political discourse, language ideologies, recent Chinese curriculum reforms, and their representations in the media are inextricably related. Using the Speak Mandarin Campaign as background for the inquiry, I focus on textual features of the various media sources, TV advertisements, campaign slogans, official speeches, and newspaper excerpts to illuminate the status and changing role of the Chinese language in Singapore’s sociocultural, economic, and political development. Using critical discourse analysis as an analytical framework, I examine the contradictory ideologies that underpin the government’s language policies and planning activities. On the one hand, the government emphasizes the cultural and economic values of the Chinese language; on the other hand, government schools teach Chinese as a subject. In particular, the recent reforms in Chinese language curriculum have arguably further diluted the content of teaching. In addition I point out how conflicting ideologies behind language policies can lead to cultural confusion and educational uncertainty. These mixed messages make it difficult for schools to offer a consistent language education curriculum that will help students appreciate the value, be it economic, cultural or educational, of the Chinese language.

80,000,000 hooligans. Discourses of resistance to racism and xenophobia in German punk lyrics 1991-1994

The late eighties and early nineties in Germany were not only marked by the fall of the Wall and German unification, but also by the dramatization of the political issue of asylum, resulting in outbreaks of xenophobic violence. In the context of the asylum debate of the early nineties, a number of punk bands produced songs between 1991 and 1994 which criticise the xenophobic climate created by the asylum debate and undermine an exculpatory official discourse about the violent attacks. The lyrics of these songs will be analysed as instances of counter-discourse emerging from a subcultural sphere that nurtures a critical distance towards hegemonic public and political discourse, arguing that Critical Discourse Analysis should pay more attention to defiance of hegemonic discourse.

On the F-word: a corpus-based analysis of the media representation of Feminism in British and German press discourse,1990-2009

Research in social psychology has shown that public attitudes towards feminism are mostly based on stereotypical views linking feminism with leftist politics and lesbian orientation. It is claimed that such attitudes are due to the negative and sexualised media construction of feminism. Studies concerned with the media representation of feminism seem to confirm this tendency. While most of this research provides significant insights into the representation of feminism, the findings are often based on a small sample of texts. Also, most of the research was conducted in an Anglo-American setting. This study attempts to address some of the shortcomings of previous work by examining the discourse of feminism in a large corpus of German and British newspaper data. It does so by employing the tools of Corpus Linguistics. By investigating the collocation profiles of the search term feminism, we provide evidence of salient discourse patterns surrounding feminism in two different cultural contexts.

Advances in Discourse Studies

Methods of approaching the study of discourse have developed rapidly in the last ten years, influenced by a growing interdisciplinary spirit among linguistics and anthropology, sociology, cognitive and cultural psychology and cultural studies, as well as among established sub-fields within linguistics itself. Among the more recent developments are an increasing ‘critical’ turn in discourse analysis, a growing interest in historical, ethnographic and corpus-based approaches to discourse, more concern with the social contexts in which discourse occurs, the social actions that it is used to take and the identities that are constructed through it, as well as a revaluation of what counts as ‘discourse’ to include multi-modal texts and interaction. Advances in Discourse Studies brings together contributions from leading scholars in the field, investigating the historical and theoretical relationships between new advances in discourse studies and pointing towards new directions for the future of the discipline. Featuring discussion questions, classroom projects and recommended readings at the end of each section, as well as case studies illustrating each approach discussed, this is an invaluable resource for students of interdisciplinary discourse analysis.

Career journeys and turning points of senior female managers in small construction firms

There is under-representation of senior female managers within small construction firms in the United Kingdom. The position is denying the sector a valuable pool of labour to address acute knowledge and skill shortages. Grounded theory on the career progression of senior female managers in these firms is developed from biographical interviews. First, a turning point model which distinguishes the interplay between human agency and work/home structure is given. Second, four career development phases are identified. The career journeys are characterized by ad hoc decisions and opportunities which were not influenced by external policies aimed at improving the representation of women in construction. Third, the 'hidden', but potentially significant, contribution of women-owned small construction firms is noted. The key challenge for policy and practice is to balance these external approaches with recognition of the 'inside out' reality of the 'lived experiences' of female managers. To progress this agenda there is a need for: appropriate longitudinal statistical data to quantify the scale of senior female managers and owners of small construction firms over time; and, social construction and gendered organizational analysis research to develop a general discourse on gender difference with these firms.

Patterns of discourse semantics: A corpus-assisted study of financial crisis in British newspaper discourse in 2009

Corpus-assisted analyses of public discourse often focus on the lexical level. This article argues in favour of corpus-assisted analyses of discourse, but also in favour of conceptualising salient lexical items in public discourse in a more determined way. It draws partly on non-Anglophone academic traditions in order to promote a conceptualisation of discourse keywords, thereby highlighting how their meaning is determined by their use in discourse contexts. It also argues in favour of emphasising the cognitive and epistemic dimensions of discourse-determined semantic structures. These points will be exemplified by means of a corpus-assisted, as well as a frame-based analysis of the discourse keyword financial crisis in British newspaper articles from 2009. Collocations of financial crisis are assigned to a generic matrix frame for ‘event’ which contains slots that specify possible statements about events. By looking at which slots are more, respectively less filled with collocates of financial crisis, we will trace semantic presence as well as absence, and thereby highlight the pragmatic dimensions of lexical semantics in public discourse. The article also advocates the suitability of discourse keyword analyses for systematic contrastive analyses of public/political discourse and for lexicographical projects that could serve to extend the insights drawn from corpus-guided approaches to discourse analysis.

The neoliberal way of war: a critical analysis of contemporary British security in policy and practice.

Dominant paradigms of causal explanation for why and how Western liberal-democracies go to war in the post-Cold War era remain versions of the 'liberal peace' or 'democratic peace' thesis. Yet such explanations have been shown to rest upon deeply problematic epistemological and methodological assumptions. Of equal importance, however, is the failure of these dominant paradigms to account for the 'neoliberal revolution' that has gripped Western liberal-democracies since the 1970s. The transition from liberalism to neoliberalism remains neglected in analyses of the contemporary Western security constellation. Arguing that neoliberalism can be understood simultaneously through the Marxian concept of ideology and the Foucauldian concept of governmentality – that is, as a complementary set of 'ways of seeing' and 'ways of being' – the thesis goes on to analyse British security in policy and practice, considering it as an instantiation of a wider neoliberal way of war. In so doing, the thesis draws upon, but also challenges and develops, established critical discourse analytic methods, incorporating within its purview not only the textual data that is usually considered by discourse analysts, but also material practices of security. This analysis finds that contemporary British security policy is predicated on a neoliberal social ontology, morphology and morality – an ideology or 'way of seeing' – focused on the notion of a globalised 'network-market', and is aimed at rendering circulations through this network-market amenable to neoliberal techniques of government. It is further argued that security practices shaped by this ideology imperfectly and unevenly achieve the realisation of neoliberal 'ways of being' – especially modes of governing self and other or the 'conduct of conduct' – and the re-articulation of subjectivities in line with neoliberal principles of individualism, risk, responsibility and flexibility. The policy and practice of contemporary British 'security' is thus recontextualised as a component of a broader 'neoliberal way of war'.

Roles in construction projects: analysis and terminology

Standard form contracts are typically developed through a negotiated consensus, unless they are proffered by one specific interest group. Previously published plans of work and other descriptions of the processes in construction projects tend to focus on operational issues, or they tend to be prepared from the point of view of one or other of the dominant interest groups. Legal practice in the UK permits those who draft contracts to define their terms as they choose. There are no definitive rulings from the courts that give an indication as to the detailed responsibilities of project participants. The science of terminology offers useful guidance for discovering and describing terms and their meanings in their practical context, but has never been used for defining terms for responsibilities of participants in the construction project management process. Organizational analysis enables the management task to be deconstructed into its elemental parts in order that effective organizational structures can be developed. Organizational mapping offers a useful technique for reducing text-based descriptions of project management roles and responsibilities to a comparable basis. Research was carried out by means of a desk study, detailed analysis of nine plans of work and focus groups representing all aspects of the construction industry. No published plan of work offers definitive guidance. There is an enormous amount of variety in the way that terms are used for identifying responsibilities of project participants. A catalogue of concepts and terms (a “Terminology”) has been compiled and indexed to enable those who draft contracts to choose the most appropriate titles for project participants. The purpose of this terminology is to enable the selection and justification of appropriate terms in order to help define roles. The terminology brings an unprecedented clarity to the description of roles and responsibilities in construction projects and, as such, will be helpful for anyone seeking to assemble a team and specify roles for project participants.

Re-engineering construction: going against the grain

An overtly critical perspective on 're-engineering construction' is presented. It is contended that re-engineering is impossible to define in terms of its substantive content and is best understood as a rhetorical label. In recent years, the language of re-engineering has heavily shaped the construction research agenda. The declared goals are to lower costs and improve value for the customer. The discourse is persuasive because it reflects the ideology of the 'enterprise culture' and the associated rhetoric of customer responsiveness. Re-engineering is especially attractive to the construction industry because it reflects and reinforces the existing dominant way of thinking. The overriding tendency is to reduce organizational complexities to a mechanistic quest for efficiency. Labour is treated as a commodity. Within this context, the objectives of re-engineering become 'common sense'. Knowledge becomes subordinate to the dominant ideology of neo-liberalism. The accepted research agenda for re-engineering construction exacerbates the industry's problems and directly contributes to the casualization of the workforce. The continued adherence to machine metaphors by the construction industry's top management has directly contributed to the 'bad attitudes' and 'adversarial culture' that they repeatedly decry. Supposedly neutral topics such as pre-assembly, partnering, supply chain management and lean thinking serve only to justify the shift towards bogus labour-only subcontracting and the associated reduction of employment rights. The continued casualization of the workforce raises real questions about the industry's future capacity to deliver high-quality construction. In order to appear 'relevant' to the needs of industry, it seems that the research community is doomed to perpetuate this regressive cycle.

Television and the popular: viewing from the British perspective

The academic discipline of television studies has been constituted by the claim that television is worth studying because it is popular. Yet this claim has also entailed a need to defend the subject against the triviality that is associated with the television medium because of its very popularity. This article analyses the many attempts in the later twentieth and twenty-first centuries to constitute critical discourses about television as a popular medium. It focuses on how the theoretical currents of Television Studies emerged and changed in the UK, where a disciplinary identity for the subject was founded by borrowing from related disciplines, yet argued for the specificity of the medium as an object of criticism. Eschewing technological determinism, moral pathologization and sterile debates about television's supposed effects, UK writers such as Raymond Williams addressed television as an aspect of culture. Television theory in Britain has been part of, and also separate from, the disciplinary fields of media theory, literary theory and film theory. It has focused its attention on institutions, audio-visual texts, genres, authors and viewers according to the ways that research problems and theoretical inadequacies have emerged over time. But a consistent feature has been the problem of moving from a descriptive discourse to an analytical and evaluative one, and from studies of specific texts, moments and locations of television to larger theories. By discussing some historically significant critical work about television, the article considers how academic work has constructed relationships between the different kinds of objects of study. The article argues that a fundamental tension between descriptive and politically activist discourses has confused academic writing about ›the popular‹. Television study in Britain arose not to supply graduate professionals to the television industry, nor to perfect the instrumental techniques of allied sectors such as advertising and marketing, but to analyse and critique the medium's aesthetic forms and to evaluate its role in culture. Since television cannot be made by ›the people‹, the empowerment that discourses of television theory and analysis aimed for was focused on disseminating the tools for critique. Recent developments in factual entertainment television (in Britain and elsewhere) have greatly increased the visibility of ›the people‹ in programmes, notably in docusoaps, game shows and other participative formats. This has led to renewed debates about whether such ›popular‹ programmes appropriately represent ›the people‹ and how factual entertainment that is often despised relates to genres hitherto considered to be of high quality, such as scripted drama and socially-engaged documentary television. A further aspect of this problem of evaluation is how television globalisation has been addressed, and the example that the issue has crystallised around most is the reality TV contest Big Brother. Television theory has been largely based on studying the texts, institutions and audiences of television in the Anglophone world, and thus in specific geographical contexts. The transnational contexts of popular television have been addressed as spaces of contestation, for example between Americanisation and national or regional identities. Commentators have been ambivalent about whether the discipline's role is to celebrate or critique television, and whether to do so within a national, regional or global context. In the discourses of the television industry, ›popular television‹ is a quantitative and comparative measure, and because of the overlap between the programming with the largest audiences and the scheduling of established programme types at the times of day when the largest audiences are available, it has a strong relationship with genre. The measurement of audiences and the design of schedules are carried out in predominantly national contexts, but the article refers to programmes like Big Brother that have been broadcast transnationally, and programmes that have been extensively exported, to consider in what ways they too might be called popular. Strands of work in television studies have at different times attempted to diagnose what is at stake in the most popular programme types, such as reality TV, situation comedy and drama series. This has centred on questions of how aesthetic quality might be discriminated in television programmes, and how quality relates to popularity. The interaction of the designations ›popular‹ and ›quality‹ is exemplified in the ways that critical discourse has addressed US drama series that have been widely exported around the world, and the article shows how the two critical terms are both distinct and interrelated. In this context and in the article as a whole, the aim is not to arrive at a definitive meaning for ›the popular‹ inasmuch as it designates programmes or indeed the medium of television itself. Instead the aim is to show how, in historically and geographically contingent ways, these terms and ideas have been dynamically adopted and contested in order to address a multiple and changing object of analysis.

Formulaic sequences in native and non-native argumentative writing in German

Whereas there is substantial scholarship on formulaic language in L1 and L2 English, there is less research on formulaicity in other languages. The aim of this paper is to contribute to learner corpus research into formulaic language in native and non-native German. To this effect, a corpus of argumentative essays written by advanced British students of German (WHiG) was compared with a corpus of argumentative essays written by German native speakers (Falko-L1). A corpus-driven analysis reveals a larger number of 3-grams in WHiG than in Falko-L1, which suggests that British advanced learners of German are more likely to use formulaic language in argumentative writing than their native-speaker counterparts. Secondly, by classifying the formulaic sequences according to their functions, this study finds that native speakers of German prefer discourse-structuring devices to stance expressions, whilst British advanced learners display the opposite preferences. Thirdly, the results show that learners of German make greater use of macro-discourse-structuring devices and cautious language, whereas native speakers favour micro-discourse structuring devices and tend to use more direct language. This study increases our understanding of formulaic language typical of British advanced learners of German and reveals how diverging cultural paradigms can shape written native speaker and learner output.

Striking a balance: cultural conflicts or cultural adaptation

This paper explores the cultural representations embedded in the EFL textbooks for Primary English language education in China. In particular, it examines how cultural globalisation and localisation are competing with each other as the educational policy in English attempts to strike a balance between the local culture and ‘western’ culture. Using discourse analysis as an analytical framework, this paper argues that culture as a social construct is constantly evolving and traditions are fused with new cultural values and worldviews brought about by globalisation. As such, the analysis of the textbooks illustrates that culture as a social phenomenon has changed over the decades and glocalisation is gaining new perspectives in English language education in China. Importantly, the analysis shows that new cultural elements have been established and cultural globalisation has taken place when local culture adapt ‘foreign’ cultures to suit local needs. Acknowledging that there are cultural conflicts and competing ideologies in the texts, the paper argues that these conflicts and contradictories can be used to develop students’ critical language awareness and foster their critical analytical abilities. Importantly, the analysis can facilitate the students’ English language learning by providing them with opportunities to read beyond texts per se to cultural politics and practices. Juxtaposing different cultural and ideological perspectives can help students understand that cultural values are socially and politically constructed when they are confronted with complex linguistic and cultural environments in reality.

Contrastive analysis of keywords in discourses: intégration and integration in French and German discourses about migration

This article suggests a theoretical and methodological framework for a systematic contrastive discourse analysis across languages and discourse communities through keywords, constituting a lexical approach to discourse analysis which is considered to be particularly fruitful for comparative analysis. We use a corpus assisted methodology, presuming meaning to be constituted, revealed and constrained by collocation environment. We compare the use of the keyword intégration and Integration in French and German public discourses about migration on the basis of newspaper corpora built from two French and German newspapers from 1998 to 2011. We look at the frequency of these keywords over the given time span, group collocates into thematic categories and discuss indicators of discursive salience by comparing the development of collocation profiles over time in both corpora as well as the occurrence of neologisms and compounds based on intégration/Integration.

Creativity and discourse

This paper will consider the relationship between discourse analysis and creativity and elucidate the ways in which a discourse analytical approach to creativity might be distinguished from the ‘language and creativity’ approaches which currently dominate applied linguistics and sociolinguistics. In the ‘discourse and creativity’ approach I will be describing, creativity is located not in language per se, but in the strategic ways people use language in concrete situations in order to stimulate social change. I will explore how aspects of this approach are reflected in work carried out within the paradigm of world Englishes.

Constructing risk across timescales and trajectories: Gay men's stories of sexual encounters

This paper explores the way risk is constructed in the stories gay men tell of their sexual experiences. It focuses on how tellers use such stories to portray themselves both as rational actors and as legitimate members of their social groups by reconstructing the ‘orderliness’ of sexual encounters. An analysis of a corpus of stories derived from a diary study of gay male sexual behaviour in Hong Kong using current theories of discourse analysis reveals how narrators organize their experiences along two primary vectors of engagement: a sequential vector along which the trajectory of the sexual encounter is presented as a chain of occurrences, each occurrence contingent upon previous ones and warranting subsequent ones, and a hierarchical vector along which processes perceived on longer timescales are portrayed as exerting pressure on the ways processes on shorter timescales unfold. Examining how men portray these vectors in their accounts of risk behaviour can help us better understand both the situatedness of risk behaviour and the ways it is linked to larger social practices, identity projects and community histories