About Collaboration, Interaction, and the Negotiation of Meaning in Synchronous Written Chats in L2-German

Open Access

Letters, authority and secrecy : The case of Karagwe in Tanzania

This paper aims to show how letters, as a genre of literacy, are used in Karagwe in Tanzania, in relation to authority and secrecy. It is shown that literacy, in the form of letters, plays an important role in the negotiation of authority. Authorities as well as ordinary people use letters according to official norms to claim or manifest authority, while grassroots forms of literacy, dominated forms, are used to resist authorities. Through secret messages and letters people find opportunities to resist that are less dangerous than open rebellion, although the effects may be limited because of the secrecy. It is also shown how children are socialized into this pattern of secrecies through literacy as they are used as messengers. When delivering secret letters and messages, they may be said to exercise a passive voice through literacy.

Languaging in virtual learning sites : studies of online encounters in the language-focused classroom

This thesis focuses upon a series of empirical studies which examine communication and learning in online glocal communities within higher education in Sweden. A recurring theme in the theoretical framework deals with issues of languaging in virtual multimodal environments as well as the making of identity and negotiation of meaning in these settings; analyzing the activity, what people do, in contraposition to the study of how people talk about their activity. The studies arise from netnographic work during two online Italian for Beginners courses offered by a Swedish university. Microanalyses of the interactions occurring through multimodal video-conferencing software are amplified by the study of the courses’ organisation of space and time and have allowed for the identification of communicative strategies and interactional patterns in virtual learning sites when participants communicate in a language variety with which they have a limited experience. The findings from the four studies included in the thesis indicate that students who are part of institutional virtual higher educational settings make use of several resources in order to perform their identity positions inside the group as a way to enrich and nurture the process of communication and learning in this online glocal community. The sociocultural dialogical analyses also shed light on the ways in which participants gathering in discursive technological spaces benefit from the opportunity to go to class without commuting to the physical building of the institution providing the course. This identity position is, thus, both experienced by participants in interaction, and also afforded by the ‘spaceless’ nature of the online environment.

Barns strategier och ekonomisk utsatthet : knappa resurser som utgångspunkt för en förhandling av positionerna i familjen

Economic hardship and children’s strategies – scarce resources as a starting point for negotiating family positions The aim of this article is to discuss how children and adolescents experience everyday life in economic hardship and how a negotiation of the family positions can be linked to these experiences. The article takes its theoretical starting point in childhood sociology, and is based on an interview study involving 17 children between the ages of 6–18 in families living on or below the limit for receiving welfare benefits. The purpose of these interviews is to explore how these children experience economic hardship at home and among friends, focusing their own strategies and agency. I argue that the financial situation in these families do indeed challenge the way that the child position is traditionally understood, which also has implications for the children’s identity work. Including children as participants in research therefore becomes crucial in order to fully understand the ramifications of child poverty. 

Att göra sig anställningsbar : Om instrumentella identitetspositioner och könad säljbarhet

To make oneself employable – instrumental identity positions and gendered marketability. The article takes up the question of the negotiation of expert discourses in career advice and constructing the self in the practice of CV writing. Drawing on data from semi-structured interviews with 19 students (11 women and 8 men) the stories about job search are analyzed. The concept of discursive positioning is used in order to analyze how the students position themselves in relation to career advice and position the self in CV writing. The results show that the female students had difficulties embodying the position as a marketing self as they described it as conflicting with feelings of ‘who they were’. ‘Being you’ in CVs and job interviews is, further, an ideal that is negotiated in relation to what to display as a job-seeking subject. CV writing involves a process of identifying suitable characteristics in an instrumental manner, but it is also combined with an introspective reasoning and identification to find ‘authentic’ strengths and characteristics in ‘who you are’.

Svenska för invandrarskap? : Språk, kategorisering och identitet inom utbildningsformen Svenska för invandrare

The overall purpose of this thesis and the four independent studies it builds upon is to examine how categorizations and identity positions are constructed and negotiated in the educational program Swedish for immigrants (SFI) both historically and among participants in the program at the beginning of the 21th century. The analytical focus is on the discourses that frame the development of the SFI program with a specific interest in categorizations and identity in relation to gender, language and national belonging. The empirical material includes historical texts (curricula, commission reports, public inquiries, political propositions, laws) from 1965 to 2010, as well as approximately 95 hours of audio and video recorded data and ethnographic field notes from five SFI classrooms. The results are presented primarily in the four articles but partly also in the thesis itself. Our analysis in the first study, that takes a sociohistorical perspective as a point of departure, indicates shifts in discourses with regards to the categories and aims of the educational program, thus, making certain identity positions more accessible than others at specific times. Using the approach of nexus analysis, the theoretical framework employed in the second study approaches language policies n terms of a dialectical elationship between policy and the learning that takes lace in the language focused classroom. Feminist and postcolonial frameworks re employed ore pecifically in the third and fourth studies. The historical nalysis presented in article three shows how the categories of “immigrant” and Swedes” ave been produced and negotiated in discourses on gender and gender quality in the SFI program since the early 1970s. The fourth study highlights he omplex relationship between gender equality and integration policies, as well as he perception of gender equality as a central part of Swedishness”, negotiated in he everyday conversations in the SFI classroom. Overall, the results illuminate he circulation of discourses both cross ime and between policy and classrooms. oreover, it contributes to a critical discussion about the intersection of language, ender and national elonging in the negotiation of boundaries between insiders and outsiders in Swedish society.

Conversación digital: copresencia y disponibilidad : Estudio pragmático del preámbulo de reuniones multipartitas por videoconferencia

The present thesis explores how interaction is initiated in multi-party meetings in Adobe Connect, 7.0, with a particular focus on how co-presence and mutual availability are established through the preambles of 18 meetings held in Spanish without a moderator. Taking Conversation Analysis (CA) as a methodological point of departure, this thesis comprises four different studies, each of them analyzing a particular phenomenon within the interaction of the preambles in a multimodal environment that allows simultaneous interaction through video, voice and text-chat. The first study (Artículo I) shows how participants solve jointly the issue of availability in a technological environment where being online is not necessarily understood as being available for communicating. The second study (Artículo II) focuses on the beginning of the audiovisual interaction; in particular on how participants check the right functioning of the audiovisual mode. The third study (Artículo III) explores silences within the interaction of the preamble. It shows that the length of gaps and lapses become a significant aspect the preambles and how they are connected to the issue of availability.  Finally, the four study introduces the notion of modal alignment, an interactional phenomenon that systematically appears in the beginnings of the encounters, which seems to be used and understood  as a strategy for the establishment of mutual availability and negotiation of the participation framework. As a whole, this research shows how participants, in order to establish mutual co-presence and availability, adapt to a particular technology in terms of participation management, deploying strategies and conveying successive actions which, as it is the case of the activation of their respective webcams, seem to be understood as predictable within the intricate process of establishing mutual availability before the meeting starts.