English in a global voluntary work context:a case study of spoken interaction and its implications for language pedagogy

This study analyses a sample of spoken interaction between a Japanese volunteer working for JICA (Japan International Co-operation Agency) and one of her co-workers in Jamaica. Details of the research context are provided, followed by a theoretical grounding of the project, which relates to publications in English as a Lingua Franca and related fields. In terms of methodology and epistemology, the research aligns with discourse analysis, specifically linguistic ethnography and interactional sociolinguistics. After presenting an an analysis of the spoken interaction based on these approaches, the resulting implications for language pedagogy are considered. This includes recommendations for specific aspects of language teaching and testing practice based on the research findings, which could be incorporated into a needs-driven localized pedagogy for future Japanese volunteers. These findings also carry significant implications for other contexts of language education, not only in terms of specific pedagogical practices but also regarding broader conceptions of language and communication.

Something to talk about: Content and Language Integrated Learning in Modern Languages in British Higher Education. A case study of German at Aston University

This thesis investigates Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) in German undergraduate programmes in the UK. At its core is a study of how one German department integrates the teaching of language and content in its undergraduate programmes and how instructors and students experience this approach. This micro-context is embedded in the wider macro-context of UK Higher Education and subject to outside forces - be they political, economic, socio-cultural - whose effects will manifest in more or less obvious ways. Data was collected via an online survey of Heads of German at British universities to determine the status quo of CLIL in UK Higher Education and to investigate how certain institutional parameters determine the introduction of CLIL in Higher Education. This project employs a mixed-method case study approach and is based on student questionnaires and semi-structured interview with German teaching staff. The study brings to light a number of significant aspects. For example, contrary to popular belief, content provision in the L2 is rather common at British universities, which is currently not reflected in the research. Student data indicates that German students perceive clear advantages in the university’s approach to CLIL. They consider German-taught content classes challenging yet beneficial for their language development. Staff interviews have yielded intriguing information about perceived advantages and disadvantages of CLIL, about its implications for classroom practice, and about instructors’ attitude towards teacher training, which echo findings from similar investigations in European contexts. Finally, the results of the macro-analysis and the case study are compared and contrasted with findings from European research on ICLHE/CLIL to determine differences and similarities with the British context, a set of recommendations is made regarding CLIL practice at the case study institution, and some implications these indings may have for the future of CLIL in British higher education are discussed.

Studying language:English in action

This book introduces key ideas and current critical debates about how English functions within its social and cultural contexts, and provides practical examples and guidance on how to approach further work in these areas. It introduces core topics of language study; language variation, pragmatics, stylistics, critical discourse analysis, language and gender and language and education. Each chapter includes case studies providing worked analysis of sample texts, suggestions for further project work and an annotated further reading section.

Token codeswitching and language alternation in narrative discourse: a functional-pragmatic approach

This study is concerned with two phenomena of language alternation in biographic narrations in Yiddish and Low German, based on spoken language data recorded between 1988 and 1995. In both phenomena language alternation serves as an additional communicative tool which can be applied by bilingual speakers to enlarge their set of interactional devices in order to ensure a smoother or more pointed processing of communicative aims. The first phenomenon is a narrative strategy I call Token Cod-eswitching: In a bilingual narrative culminating in a line of reported speech, a single element of L2 indicates the original language of the reconstructed dialogue – a token for a quote. The second phenomenon has to do with directing procedures, carried out by the speaker and aimed at guiding the hearer's attention, which are frequently carried out in L2, supporting the hearer's attention at crucial points in the interaction. Both phenomena are analyzed following a model of narrative discourse as proposed in the framework of Functional Pragmatics. The model allows the adoption of an integral approach to previous findings in code-switching research.

Die Sprache der Auricher Juden. Zur Rekonstruktion westjiddischer Sprachreste in Ostfriesland:to reconstruct westjiddischer language residues in Ostfriesland

Western Yiddish, the spoken language of the traditional Jewish society in the German- and Dutch-speaking countries, was abandoned by its speakers at the end of the 18th in favour of the emerging standard varieties: Dutch and German, respectively. Remnants of Western Yiddish varieties, however, remained a medium of discourse in remote provinces and could be found well into the 19th and sometimes the 20th century in some South-western areas of Germany and Switzerland, the Alsace, some areas of the Netherlands and in parts of the German province of Westphalia. It appears that rural Jewish communities sometimes preserved in-group vernaculars, which were based on Western Yiddish. Sources discovered in 2004 in the town of Aurich prove that Jews living in East Frisia, a Low-German speaking peninsula in the North-west of Germany, used a variety based on Western Yiddish until the Second World War. It appears that until the Holocaust a number of small, close-knit Jewish communities East Frisia, which depended economically mainly on cattle-trading and butchery, kept certain specific cultural features, among them the vernacular which they spoke alongside Low German and Standard German. The sources consist of two amateur theatre plays, a memoir and two word lists written in 1902, 1928 and the 1980s, respectively. In the monograph these sources are documented and annotated as well as analyzed linguistically against the background of rural Jewish life in Northern Germany. The study focuses on traces of language contact with Low German, processes of language change and on the question of the function of the variety in day-to-day life in a rural Jewish community.

Political discourse analysis from the point of view of translation studies

Political discourse very often relies on translation. Political Discourse Analysis (PDA), however, has not yet taken full account of the phenomenon of translation. This paper argues that the disciplines of Translation Studies (TS) and PDA can benefit from closer cooperation. It starts by presenting examples of authentic translations of political texts, commenting on them from the point of view of TS. These examples concern political effects caused by specific translation solutions; the processes by which information is transferred via translation to another culture; and the structure and function of equally valid texts in their respective cultures. After a brief survey of the discipline of Translation Studies, the paper concludes with outlining scope for interdisciplinary cooperation between PDA and TS. This is illustrated with reference to an awareness of product features, multilingual texts, process analysis, and the politics of translation.

Language against the odds, or rather not:the weak central coherence hypothesis and language

EV is a child with a talent for learning language combined with Asperger syndrome. EV’s talent is evident in the unusual circumstances of her acquisition of both her first (Bulgarian) and second (German) languages and the unique patterns of both receptive and expressive language (in both the L1 and L2), in which she shows subtle dissociations in competence and performance consistent with an uneven cognitive profile of skills and abilities. We argue that this case provides support for theories of language learning and usage that require more general underlying cognitive mechanisms and skills. One such account, the Weak Central Coherence (WCC) hypothesis of autism, provides a plausible framework for the interpretation of the simultaneous co-occurrence of EV’s particular pattern of cognitive strengths and weaknesses. Furthermore, we show that specific features of the uneven cognitive profile of Asperger syndrome can help explain the observed language talent displayed by EV. Thus, rather than demonstrating a case where language learning takes place despite the presence of deficits, EV’s case illustrates how a pattern of strengths within this profile can specifically promote language learning.

The advanced learner variety:the case of French

This volume originates from a workshop entitled 'Revisiting advanced varieties in L2 learning' organized by the editors at Aston University (Birmingham, UK) in June 2006. It consists of a peer-reviewed selection of the best contributions. Many different approaches have been used in the study of advanced learners and their characteristics. Specific areas of language have repeatedly been found to remain problematic even at advanced levels, and much empirical research has been carried out. In particular, areas of grammar such as the tense or agreement systems often pose difficulties, as well as lexical idiosyncrasies such as formulaic sequences, and the discourse/pragmatic constraints operating in French. This volume brings together recent research exploring the advanced learner capabilities in each of those domains, as well as possible explanations for the difficulties they raise for the L2 learner of French. Additionally, one of the areas which has received considerable attention in the French L2 literature on advanced learners, tense and aspect, is also explored from the point of view of French learners of English, to explore any parallels. In presenting this research, the book clarifies the concept of the advanced learner: how does s/he differ from native speakers and why?

Squaring the circle: the cultural relativity of 'good' shape

The Gestalt theorists of the early twentieth century proposed a psychological primacy for circles, squares and triangles over other shapes. They described them as 'good' shapes and the Gestalt premise has been widely accepted. Rosch (1973), for example, suggested that shape categories formed around these 'natural' prototypes irrespective of the paucity of shape terms in a language. Rosch found that speakers of a language lacking terms for any geometric shape nevertheless learnt paired-associates to these 'good' shapes more easily than to asymmetric variants. We question these empirical data in the light of the accumulation of recent evidence in other perceptual domains that language affects categorization. A cross-cultural investigation sought to replicate Rosch's findings with the Himba of Northern Namibia who also have no terms in their language for the supposedly basic shapes of circle, square and triangle. A replication of Rosch (1973) found no advantage for these 'good' shapes in the organization of categories. It was concluded that there is no necessary salience for circles, squares and triangles. Indeed, we argue for the opposite because these shapes are rare in nature. The general absence of straight lines and symmetry in the perceptual environment should rather make circles, squares and triangles unusual and, therefore, less likely to be used as prototypes in categorization tasks. We place shape as one of the types of perceptual input (in philosophical terms, 'vague') that is readily susceptible to effects of language variation.

Is it all tough talking at the top? A post-structuralist analysis of the construction of gendered speaker identities of British business leaders within interview narratives

This paper uses a feminist post-structuralist approach to examine the gendered identities of a sample of British business leaders in Britain. While recent national surveys offer many material reasons why women are acutely under-represented as business leaders, the role of language is rarely addressed. This paper explores the ways in which ten senior women and men construct their sense of leadership identities through the medium of interview narratives. Drawing upon two poststructuralist models of analysis (Derrida’s 1987 theory of deconstruction and Bakhtin’s 1927/1981 concept of double-voiced discourse), the paper shows how both females and males are able to shift pragmatically between interwoven corporate discourses, which demand competing cultural allegiances from one moment to the next, allegiances constantly tested by the rapid change and uncertainty that characterise global business. While male leaders experience a relative freedom of movement between different cultural discourses, female leaders are circumscribed by negative and reductive representations of female speech and behaviour. In sum, senior women are required constantly to observe, review, police and repair their use of leadership language, which potentially undermines their confidence and authority as leaders.

An investigation into formal and functional characteristics of qualifications in legislative writing and its application to English for academic legal purposes.

The present investigation is based on a linguistic analysis of the 'Housing Act 1980' and attempts to examine the role of qualifications in the structuring of the legislative statement. The introductory chapter isolates legislative writing as a "sub-variety “of legal language and provides an overview of the controversies surrounding the way it is written and the problems it poses to its readers. Chapter two emphasizes the limitations of the available work on the description of language-varieties for the analysis of legislative writing and outlines the approach adopted for the present analysis. This chapter also gives some idea of the information-structuring of legislative provisions and establishes qualification as a key element in their textualisation. The next three chapters offer a detailed account of the ten major qualification-types identified in the corpus, concentrating on the surface form they take, the features of legislative statements they textualize and the syntactic positions to which they are generally assigned in the statement of legislative provisions. The emerging hypotheses in these chapters have often been verified through a specialist reaction from a Parliamentary Counsel, largely responsible for the writing of the ‘Housing Act 1980’• The findings suggest useful correlations between a number of qualificational initiators and the various aspects of the legislative statement. They also reveal that many of these qualifications typically occur in those clause-medial syntactic positions which are sparingly used in other specialist discourse, thus creating syntactic discontinuity in the legislative sentence. Such syntactic discontinuities, on the evidence from psycholinguistic experiments reported in chapter six, create special problems in the processing and comprehension of legislative statements. The final chapter converts the main linguistic findings into a series of pedagogical generalizations, offers indications of how this may be applied in EALP situations and concludes with other considerations of possible applications.

An applied linguistic analysis of the simplification of narrative texts

Simplification of texts has traditionally been carried out by replacing words and structures with appropriate semantic equivalents in the learner's interlanguage, omitting whichever items prove intractable, and thereby bringing the language of the original within the scope of the learner's transitional linguistic competence. This kind of simplification focuses mainly on the formal features of language. The simplifier can, on the other hand, concentrate on making explicit the propositional content and its presentation in the original in order to bring what is communicated in the original within the scope of the learner's transitional communicative competence. In this case, simplification focuses on the communicative function of the language. Up to now, however, approaches to the problem of simplification have been mainly concerned with the first kind, using the simplifier’s intuition as to what constitutes difficulty for the learner. There appear to be few objective principles underlying this process. The main aim of this study is to investigate the effect of simplification on the communicative aspects of narrative texts, which includes the manner in which narrative units at higher levels of organisation are structured and presented and also the temporal and logical relationships between lower level structures such as sentences/clauses, with the intention of establishing an objective approach to the problem of simplification based on a set of principled procedures which could be used as a guideline in the simplification of material for foreign students at an advanced level.

Bilingualism and educational achievement:a study of young bilinguals in Birmingham schools and colleges

This study aimed firstly to investigate current patterns of language use amongst young bilinguals in Birmingham and secondly to examine the relationship between this language use and educational achievement. The research then focussed on various practices, customs and attitudes which would favour the attrition or survival of minority languages in the British situation. The data necessary to address this question was provided by a sample of three hundred and seventy-four 16-19 year olds, studying in Birmingham schools and colleges during the period 1987-1990 and drawn from the main linguistic minority communities in Birmingham. The research methods chosen were both quantitative and qualitative. The study found evidence of ethnolinguistic vitality amongst many of the linguistic minority communities in Birmingham: a number of practices and a range of attitudes indicate that linguistic diversity may continue and that a stable diglossic situation may develop in some instances, particularly where demographical and religious factors lead to closeness of association. Where language attrition is occurring it is often because of the move from a less prestigious minority language or dialect to a more prestigious minority language in addition to pressures from English. The educational experience of the sample indicates that literacy and formal language study are of key importance if personal bilingualism is to be experienced as an asset; high levels of oral proficiency in the L1 and L2 do not, on their own, necessarily correlate with positive educational benefit. The intervening variable associated with educational achievement appears to be the formal language learning process and literacy. A number of attitudes and practices, including the very close associations maintained with some of the countries of origin of the families, were seen to aid or hinder first language maintenance and second language acquisition.

Technology for enabling : the implications for management science of a hermeneutics of distinction

One way of describing this thesis, is to state that it attempts to explicate the context within which an application of Stafford Beer's Viable System Model (VSM) makes cybernetic sense. The thesis will attempt to explain how such a context is presently not clearly ennunciated, and why such a lack hinders communications of the model together with its consequent effective take-up by the student or practitioner. The epistemological grounding of the VSM will be described as concerning the ontology of the individuals who apply it and give witness to its application. In describing a particular grounding for the Viable System Model, I am instantiating a methodology which I call a `hermeneutics of distinction'. The final two chapters explicate such a methodology, and consider the implications for the design of a computer system. This thesis is grounded in contemporary insights into the nervous system, and research into the biology of language and cognition. Its conclusions emerge from a synthesis of the twin discourses of Stafford Beer and Humberto Maturana.

Managerial cognitions in technological innovation processes:a study of interpretative processes

In this research, conceptualizations of the links between technological innovation and organizational change are explored and recommendations in the literature concerning such changes are reviewed and criticized. Such recommendations do not usually address the details of social interactions by which organizational changes take place. As a consequence, the issue of how these recommendations become relevant for the actors who would carry them out is not addressed. The complexity of organizational change processes highlights the role of actors' interpretations of organizational reality. Interpretations take place through the use of language in the interaction between actors. Theoretical contributions and recommendations concerning organizational changes should be seen therefore as discourses which contribute to these interpretations. They will influence the process of change only if they become relevant for organizational actors'. A method for analysing discourse in organizations is presented. It is used to identify the variety of discourses which are put forward in organizations, and to describe the structure of their distribution among actors. The structures of discourses in three companies suggest that knowledge about technological innovation processes becomes relevant to the extent that it contributes to political/discursive processes maintained by actors attempting to secure or change their role definitions. It follows that recommendations concerning planned organizational change should take into account these processes explicitly. It is therefore suggested that the analysis of discourse can be a valuable instrument for monitoring change processes. Suggestions for further research are made, concerning (i) the development of the method itself and its use in real situations (ii) the study of how discourse structures evolve over time and episodes of change.