'You' and 'I' in university seminars and spoken learner discourse

You and I may be little words but they do a great deal. In spoken discourse they reference shared knowledge and mark stance. In pedagogical contexts, they maintain relations in teacher-student discourse. However, language classrooms may rarely explore this array of pragmatic meanings. A lack of awareness of the variety of these functions may be problematic for learners when seeking to construct interpersonal relations and operate successfully in particular spoken contexts. This paper presents a study of you and I in two spoken corpora: a corpus of English language learner task talk and a corpus of university seminar talk. Findings illustrate different patterns of I and you between the two corpora: I and you have a higher rate of occurrence in learner discourse, and pronoun repetition is more frequent in learner discourse, though it does not account for the higher rate of you and I. These findings suggest that language learner task talk displays more features tied to speech production and self-regulation and fewer features associated with attempting to point to the informational space of others, a key feature of university classroom talk. This paper concludes by outlining pedagogical applications to overcome features perceived as disfluent.

Let's talk about health: shoppers' discourse regarding health while food shopping

Objective: The present study aimed to examine the role of health in consumers’ food purchasing decisions through investigating the nature of people’s discourse regarding health while conducting their food shopping.

Design: The study employed the think-aloud technique as part of an accompanied shop. All mentions of health and terms relating to health were identified from the data set. Inductive thematic analysis was conducted to examine how health was talked about in relation to people’s food choice decisions.

Setting: Supermarkets in Dublin, Republic of Ireland and Belfast, Northern Ireland.

Subjects Participants: (n 50) were aged over 18 years and represented the main household shopper.

Results: Responsibility for others and the perceived need to illicit strict control to avoid ‘unhealthy’ food selections played a dominant role in how health was talked about during the accompanied shop. Consequently healthy shopping was viewed as difficult and effort was required to make the healthy choice, with shoppers relating to product-based inferences to support their decisions.

Conclusions: This qualitative exploration has provided evidence of a number of factors influencing the consideration of health during consumers’ food shopping. These results highlight opportunities for stakeholders such as public health bodies and the food industry to explore further ways to help enable consumers make healthy food choices.

English Language Education at University: Trends and Challenges in Teaching and Learning Academic Discourse in the UK

This chapter discusses English Language Education at university and highlights a number of trends and their associated challenges in teaching and learning academic discourse. Academic discourse refers to the ways in which language is used by participants in academia. It encompasses written discourse, from article and book publishing, PhD theses to course assignments; spoken discourse, from study groups, tutorials, conference presentations to inaugural lectures; and more recently, computer-mediated discourse, from asynchronous text-based conferencing to academic blogs. The role of English language educators in preparing students and academics for successful participation in these academic events, or the academy, in English is not to be underestimated. Academic communication is not only vital to an individual’s success at university, but to the maintenance and creation of academic communities and to scientific progress itself (Hyland, 2009). This chapter presents an overview of academic discourse and discusses recent issues which have an impact on teaching and learning English at university and discusses their associated challenges: first, the increasing internationalisation of universities. Second, the emergence of a mobile academe in its broadest sense, in which students and academics move across traditional geopolitical, institutional and disciplinary boundaries, is discussed. Third, the growth of UK transnational higher education is examined as a trend which sees academics and students vicariously or otherwise involved in English language teaching and learning. Fourth, the chapter delves into the rapid and ongoing development in technology assisted and online learning. While responding to trends can be difficult, they can also inspire ingenuity. Furthermore, such trends and challenges will not emerge in the same manner in different contexts. The discussion in this chapter is illustrated with examples from a UK context but the implications of the trends and challenges are such that they reach beyond borders.

Using Comparative Constitutionalism in Human Rights Discourse:Ireland’s Past and Scotland’s Future

The article considers the use of comparisons in constitutional development, specifically the use of comparative reasoning in the context of debates about human rights in newly emerging independent states, using the examples of Ireland and Scotland.

Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis (MCDA)

Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) has probably made the most comprehensive attempt to develop a theory of the inter-connectedness of discourse, power and ideology and is specifically concerned with the role that discourse plays in main-taining and legitimizing inequality in society. While CDA’s general thrust has been towards the analysis of linguistic structures, some critical discourse analysts have begun to focus on multimodal discourses because of the increasingly impor-tant role these play in many social and political contexts. Still, a great deal of CDA analysis has remained largely monomodal. The principal aim of this chapter is therefore to address this situation and demonstrate in what ways CDA can be deployed to analyse the ways that ideological discourses can be communicated, naturalised and legitimated beyond the linguistic level. The chapter also offers a rationale for a multimodal approach based on Halliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), by which it is directly informed

Institutional Discourse

Institutions (and how they work) have long been the object of many investigations in the fields of media, cultural, and organizational studies. More recently, there has been a “linguistic” turn in the study of institutions with many language-focused explo- rations of how power and discourse may function in specific institutional and organi- zational settings, such as schools, courtrooms, corporations, clinics, hospitals, and pris- ons. Many of these studies have been concerned with the ways in which language is used to create and shape institutions and how institutions in turn have the capacity to create, shape, and impose discourses on people. Institutions thus have considerable control over the organizing of our routine experiences of the world and the way we classify that world. They also have the power to foster particular kinds of identities to suit their own purposes.

Somatic pedagogies: Critiquing and resisting the affective discourse of the neoliberal state from an embodied anarchist perspective.

This paper takes as its context widespread feelings of anxiety within neoliberal society caused by a combination of material and discursive factors including precarious access to work and resources. It is argued that the state uses ‘discourses of affect’ to produce compliant subjects able to deal with (and unable to desire beyond) neoliberal precarity and anxiety. Critical education theorists have argued that discourses of ‘well-being’, emotional support and self-help have gained increasing purchase in mainstream education and in popular culture. These discourses are dangerous because they are individualized and depoliticized, and undermine collective political struggle. At the same time there has been a ‘turn to affect’ in critical academia, producing critical pedagogies that resist state affective discourse. I argue that these practices are essential for problematizing neoliberal discourse, yet existing literature tends to elide the role of the body in effective resistance, emphasising intellectual aspects of critique. The paper sketches an alternative, drawing on psychoanalytic and practiced pedagogies that aim to transgress the mind-body dualism and hierarchy, in particular Roberto Freire’s work on Somatherapy.

Bush and Lula's political identity constructions: are they so different? A critical discourse analysis of presidential speeches of North and South America

Dissertação de mest., Linguística, Faculdade de Ciências Humanas e Sociais, Universidade do Algarve, 2007

‘A true feeling of authentic portuguese golf'? The discursive construction of the Algarve region in portuguese golf websites

In an increasingly competitive global marketplace, the need for golf destinations to differentiate themselves from competitors has become more critical than ever. This paper raises questions about the promotional strategies employed by the golf sector in the Algarve, focusing on internet communication strategies, since this medium has become the biggest driving force towards the commoditisation of all aspects of the tourism experience. By offering a complementary perspective to the field of (critical) tourism studies, and drawing on a qualitative, multi-modal discourse analysis, this work-in-progress looks at the particular ways that representations and images presented on the Algarve golf websites constitute and frame identities (of people and places) and socio-spatial relationships. This paper analyses a corpus of 45 texts collected from official websites of the 40 Algarve golf courses and from five entities which promote the Algarve as a golf destination, along with the golf images that are displayed alongside them. Findings point to salient discursive and visual representations of a global setting enjoyed by the global elite. Whereas the courses‟ positioning in relation to their regional competitors draws on similar discursive strategies which reflect those used in tourism advertising discourses in general – e.g. reiteration of explicit comparisons, superlatives and hyperbolic statements -, representations of local emplacedness are not salient; in some cases local place seems to have been almost intentionally suppressed.