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Ideology, Policy, and Potentials for Dialogue
Revisiting his dissertation journal, the author undertook an autoethnographic study of that period in his life. As a full‐time student within a U.S. research university, he had funded his studies by teaching international teaching assistants and undergraduates learning French and Arabic. In this study, he used inductive analysis to explore his language teacher identity (De Costa & Norton, 2017) and language teacher emotion (Han et al., 2023). Three identities and two emotions emerged: a challenged time manager (1) and an aspiring professional instructor (2), and the related emotions of pride in observing his former students and efficacy in bridging his teaching undergraduates and grad students. Nonetheless, managing these roles sensitized him to (adjunct) coworkers' cynicism. He started to become a cynic (3), bringing emotion labor (Benesch & Prior, 2023). Findings confirmed language teacher emotion as relational and conjoined to language teacher identity. This study urges the field of Applied Linguistics to rectify its past omissions by acknowledging today's “invisible practitioners”: adjuncted language instructors.
Second language (L2) researchers have often studied how L2 speaking anxiety and self-confidence influence various aspects of the language learning process whereas the sources of these emotions have remained under-explored. Drawing on Dweck’s (1999) theory of motivation, the present study examined L2 learners’ mindsets (beliefs about the malleability of their language learning intelligence) as potential sources of L2 speaking anxiety and L2 self-confidence. Questionnaire data was collected from 92 international teaching assistants who use English as a second language in their teaching practice at a U.S. university. Multiple regression results showed that whereas the Fixed L2 Mindset (the belief that language learning ability cannot change) positively predicted L2 Speaking Anxiety, the Growth L2 Mindset (the belief that language learning ability can grow) positively predicted L2 Speaking Self-Confidence, confirming the hypothesized relationships between the conceptual principles of the mindsets theory and the nature of L2 anxiety and self-confidence. Theoretical and educational implications and future research directions are discussed.
The present study examines how learners’ language mindsets (beliefs about the malleability of language intelligence) and achievement goals predict learners’ preferences for different types of corrective feedback (CF). Questionnaire data were collected from 537 learners of Spanish as a foreign language at two North-American universities. Factor analytic and multiple regression results showed two clear patterns. A growth language mindset (the belief that language learning ability is malleable) predicted preferences for all types of CF whereas a fixed language mindset predicted a preference for conversational recast and absence of CF. A development-approach goal (concerned with improving one’s language competence) positively predicted learners’ preference for the explicit types of CF whereas a development-avoidance goal (concerned with maintaining one’s L2 competence) positively predicted the more implicit types of CF. Demonstration-approach (concerned with displaying superior competence) did not predict any CF type and demonstration-avoidance (concerned with avoiding the display of incompetence) predicted a preference for absence of CF. Using an overarching cost-value model, we discuss how learners’ analysis of the self-presentation and ego costs as well as the value of different CF types have led to their preference for one versus another. Future directions and pedagogical implications are discussed.
The altruistic shield describes a psychological mechanism seen among English language teaching (ELT) professionals that allows them to exempt themselves from perpetuating inequity and racism because of what they imagine is the altruistic or self-sacrificial nature of their work. Such reasoning functions as a form of reflexive emotional defensiveness that works to impede racial equity. This article describes the forces that have created so problematic a mechanism and provides suggestions ELT professionals can use to increase their awareness of racial inequity and its remedies and thus serve their students more effectively.
The field of English language teaching (ELT) has long centred whiteness without acknowledging as much. Practitioners accept the field's racial disparities under the guise of the search for profit, yet hegemonic whiteness controls our institutions, our curricula, and our pedagogy unless we, as members of this field, consciously seek to counteract its influence. White ELT professionals are incentivized to maintain the racial status quo and many exhibit fierce resistance when efforts are made to discuss white supremacy in English teaching. In this article, I demonstrate how ELT frames whiteness as both a prize and a goal, explain the deleterious impact whiteness has on racialized students and teachers, argue for the necessity of decentring whiteness, and provide suggestions for ways we can push our field towards a future where whiteness no longer reigns supreme.
Research on language learning motivation has typically focused on the strength of different motives in isolation and often out of context. The present study aims to explore the applicability of Higgins’s (2014) global theory of motivation to integrate different perspectives. We investigated how adaptive interactions between learners’ motivations for value, truth and control effectiveness, and contextual factors led to varying motivational trajectories and patterns of emergent stability at different stages of the language learning experiences of six Iranian graduate students learning English in the USA. Using a retrospective-longitudinal design, quasi-narrative accounts of key phases of the learners’ language learning histories were documented through interviews. These data were analyzed following an analytic inductive approach (Saldaña, 2015) to identify the main events within different contexts, themes associated with each setting, and other bottom-up conceptual categories. Using a process tracing procedure (Bennett & Checkel, 2015), our results showed that dynamic processes and adaptive or competitive interactions between value, control, and truth-related motivations and the context in which they emerged resulted in specific motivational trajectories that shaped these learners’ language learning choices and experiences. We discuss the contribution of these novel frameworks for understanding the complex motivational development of language learners.
Focused on the effects of different type of feedback on learners’ written products, research on written corrective feedback (WCF) has cast second language writers as passive recipients rather than proactive agents in the feedback process. Revisiting the notion of WCF, this study introduces the notion of feedback-seeking behavior (Ashford & Cummings, 1983) to the field of second language writing and examines its motivational mechanisms using Dweck’s (1999) theory of mindsets and an overarching cost-value analysis framework (e.g., Ashford & Cummings, 1983; Anseel et al., 2015). Questionnaire data were collected from 128 foreign language writers from a major public university in the United States. Multiple regression and mediation analyses showed that a growth language mindset predicted the value of feedback, which, in turn, was a strong predictor of both feedback monitoring and feedback inquiry. A fixed language mindset, on the other hand, predicted the cost of feedback seeking, which, in turn, negatively predicted feedback monitoring. The findings offer new venues for second language writing research and pedagogy.
Most research focusing on the challenges that international teaching assistants (ITAs) encounter in US classrooms employs a linguistic perspective. The present study furthers that research by examining other challenges unique to ITAs, through the lens of the intercultural competence framework. Through individual interviews with fifteen ITAs, the study highlights the challenges related to competencies in knowledge and skills faced by ITAs in the US classroom. Findings reveal that knowledge about the US education system, expectations of the classroom culture, and assumptions about student-instructor relationships pose the greatest difficulties. Additionally, the ability of an ITA to demonstrate communication skills remains to be a significant challenge, including the negative perception of speaking with a foreign accent and selecting effective word choices to accurately represent content. The study's findings present practical implications for training ITAs for their pedagogical duties at US colleges.
This study investigated the concept of corrective feedback in second language learning as a learning resource, recasting it as feedback-seeking behavior. Dweck’s (1999) mindsets, Korn and Elliot’s (2016) achievement goals, and Ashford’s (1986) model of feedback-seeking behavior were re-operationalized in the context of language learning. Questionnaire data from 287 college students studying foreign languages in the United States confirmed that learners make calculated decisions regarding whether to seek feedback, by what method, and from what source, based on their own perceptions of the costs and values associated with different feedback-seeking strategies, which are, in turn, largely predicted by the learners’ language mindsets and achievement goals. Learners with a growth language mindset and development-approach goals sought feedback using both monitoring and inquiry methods and from teachers and others. Learners with a fixed language mindset and demonstration goals sought feedback only by method of inquiry but from different sources depending on the valence (approach vs. avoidance) of their goals.
When the ideas of capitalist globalisation appear to speak as one across the world, it is timely to re-examine the interconnections between language and ideology. The global market and its dominant neoliberal ideology, increasingly expressed in English, have led some to hold that the language itself constructs the hegemonic order of global capitalism. Others have focussed on language not only as the bearer of ideology but as part of the immaterial production of capitalism. This paper discusses the way in which language and ideology interconnect but argues that the ideology of neoliberalism cannot be adequately described as a discourse. Instead, it is an ideology with specific historical roots and which, as a dominant ideology, makes itself felt in language, although not without contradictions. Two aspects of language and neoliberal ideology are examined here: firstly the way in which the customer metaphor has been adopted in different and unexpected settings and, secondly, how models of listening and speaking in call centres are framed around neoliberal assumptions. Both processes aim to impose a kind of corporate speak to reinforce neoliberal ideas as common sense, but both also contain tensions because language is neither a straitjacket nor a settled ideological product. This paper argues that language and ideology are not the same and that it is in the dynamic of their interconnection that world views are both made and contested.
Applied linguists have been exploring approaches to second language acquisition and competence that move beyond a prioritization of cognition and grammar that was derived from the foundational structuralist legacy in linguistics. Recently, for example, they have collaborated in putting together an integrated alternative model (Douglas Fir Group, 2016) to move theory and pedagogy forward. Shifting further yet toward the material locus and spatiotemporal conditioning of communication, this article reports on the communicative practices of international STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) scholars. Its data analysis uses a spatial orientation informed by schools such as new materialism, post-humanism, and actor network theory, influenced largely by scholars in material and spatial sciences. The article calls for a fuller materialization, embodiment, and performativity in theorizing language competence than currently conceptualized in applied linguistics.
Recent research conceptualizes language mindsets as a 'lens' through which learners view language challenges as either deficits of aptitude (i.e. entity beliefs) or opportunities to improve (i.e. incremental beliefs). Extending this meaning-system approach in an intercultural context, we proposed that language mindsets influence migrants' experience of intercultural interaction and cultural adaptation through language-based rejection sensitivity (RS) (i.e. the tendency to anxiously expect rejection from native speakers due to a lack of language proficiency). Two studies of 292 English-as-a-second-language speakers in Canada demonstrated that those who held or were primed with entity beliefs (vs. incremental beliefs) reported stronger language-based RS, which in turn predicted more intergroup anxiety towards members of the target language community, less perceived connectedness with the host country, and worse cross-cultural adaptation. These effects persisted after controlling for perceived language competence and length of residence, thereby highlighting the unique importance of language mindsets in predicting intercultural communication and cross-cultural adaptation. Migrants' settlement programmes that promote incremental beliefs may thereby lessen concern about social rejection and reduce their anxiety when using a second language.
After outlining why a systematic review of research in English medium instruction (EMI) in higher education (HE) is urgently required, we briefly situate the rapidly growing EMI phenomenon in the broader field of research in which content and language have been considered and compare HE research outputs with those from other phases of education. An in-depth review of 83 studies in HE documents the growth of EMI in different geographical areas. We describe studies which have investigated university teachers’ beliefs and those of students before attempting to synthesise the evidence on whether teaching academic subjects through the medium of English as a second language (L2) is of benefit to developing English proficiency without a detrimental effect on content learning. We conclude that key stakeholders have serious concerns regarding the introduction and implementation of EMI despite sometimes recognising its inevitability. We also conclude that the research evidence to date is insufficient to assert that EMI benefits language learning nor that it is clearly detrimental to content learning. There are also insufficient studies demonstrating, through the classroom discourse, the kind of practice which may lead to beneficial outcomes. This insufficiency, we argue, is partly due to research methodology problems both at the micro and macro level.
This volume draws together the viewpoints and research findings of leading scholars and informed local practitioner-researchers throughout Asia-Pacific about the issues and challenges of English as a medium of instruction (EMI) at higher education institutions in that region. Specifically, it addresses four key themes: Macro-level EMI policy and practice; institutional implications for pedagogy; stakeholder perceptions of EMI; and challenges of interpersonal interaction in EMI contexts. The book is among the first to critically examine the emerging global phenomenon of English as a medium of instruction, and the first title to exclusively explore Asia-Pacific tertiary contexts. It will be of particular interest to policy-makers in international education and tertiary educators seeking blueprints for practice, as well as scholars and postgraduate students of English as a lingua franca, English for academic purposes, academic language and learning, and language education in Asia-Pacific.
Some people ascribe successful language learning to an innate aptitude that cannot be further developed, at least after a certain young age (i.e., an entity mindset), while other people believe that language learning ability can be improved (i.e., an incremental mindset). The purpose of this research is to (a) introduce the Language Mindsets Inventory (LMI), and (b) test the mindsets–goals–responses model, which maintains that learners’ mindsets predict the goals that they set for language learning, and that these goals in turn affect how they respond to difficult academic and communication episodes. Correlational and factor analyses provided evidence of the LMI's valid and reliable use in research with university-level language students. Path analyses showed that regardless of their competence level, greater endorsement of an incremental mindset was associated with the goal of learning more about the language, and this learning goal in turn predicted greater mastery and less helpless responses in failure situations. Greater endorsement of an entity mindset predicted the goal of demonstrating competence (i.e., performance approach goals) when students believed that they had stronger language skills. The use of the LMI in future research and the importance of supporting incremental mindsets for language education are discussed.
This volume provides a focused account of English Medium Instruction (EMI) in European higher education, considering issues of ideologies, policies, and practices. This is an essential book for academics, students, policy makers, and educators directly or indirectly implicated in the internationalization of European higher education.
Nonnative English speakers (NNESs) who teach at English-medium institutions in the United States (US) have frequently been the subject of student complaints. Research into language ideologies concerning NNESs in the US suggests that such complaints can be understood as manifestations of a broader project of social exclusion operating, in part, through the ideological construction of the NNES as incomprehensible Other. The present study explores the extent to which such ideological presuppositions and exaggerative performances are observable in students' evaluations of ‘Asian’ mathematics instructors on the website RateMyProfessors.com (RMP). A mixed methodological approach combining statistical analysis of numeric RMP ratings, quantitative corpus linguistic techniques, and critical discourse analysis was employed. Findings confirm the presence of disadvantages related to ‘Asian’ instructors' race and language. However, RMP users' discourse is shown to be less overtly discriminatory and instead to reproduce dominant language ideology in subtle, previously undescribed ways.(Student evaluations, higher education, university teaching, nonnative speakers, second language users, ethnicity, critical discourse analysis, corpus linguistics, formulaic language)*
International teaching assistants (ITAs) are criticized for having ‘unintelligible’ accents for professional communication in Global North English-medium universities. Furthermore, this criticism takes a racist form as it is frequently directed at racially minoritized ITAs. This article complicates this narrative by considering how the disciplinary cultures in which ITAs work influence racist perceptions of and expectations about their accents. Drawing on interviews with engineering ITAs in Ontario, Canada, the article details how the communication conventions and gendered racism of engineering made the ITAs’ accents professionally inadequate and outlined what they should sound like. This was done through microaggression learning, the informal learning that the ITAs underwent through experiencing microaggressions based on raciolinguistic ideologies and engineering norms. The article concludes by suggesting reforms within engineering to combat the linguistic and gendered racism of the field.
The Douglas Fir Group (2016) argued that applied linguistics needed new interdisciplinary perspectives, and I suggest here that the concepts provided by new materialism might aid in gaining such perspectives. New materialism foregrounds the material nature of humans, discourses, machines, other objects, other species, and the natural environment, as well as constant change, non-binary thinking, and the porosity of boundaries; it also asks for the posing of new problems and new concepts to ‘bring forth a world distinct from what we already are’ (Colebrook and Weinstein 2017: 4). Refusing the central binaries and hierarchies of Cartesian thinking, new materialism’s relational ontology stresses becoming; people, discourses, practices, and things are continually in relation and becoming different from what they were before. New materialist conceptions of knowledge/knowing and language/languaging are also relational, processual, and entangled. I review recent new materialist educational research and present two descriptions of events in my own research to show what pedagogical and research-oriented questions might be stimulated from this perspective.
Various examinations are administered at universities across the US as a means of assessing bilingual/multilingual international teaching assistants’ (ITAs’) proficiency in spoken English before they are permitted to teach. While such exams are taken by students in a range of academic disciplines, recent research suggests that communicative success in academic disciplines such as STEM is more accurately understood through a materialist, as opposed to structuralist, orientation to competence. According to this orientation, communication is not contingent on autonomous competence in standardized English but instead on transcultural dispositions along with the strategic use of semiotic resources and spatial repertoires. In this paper, we provide a focused analysis of one university’s Test of Oral English Proficiency (TOEP), which was recently redesigned in alignment with a materialist orientation to competence (e.g. through greater consideration for materiality, embodiment, and performativity). Through an analysis of audio and video recordings from the TOEP, this article demonstrates that a materialist orientation to competence can be actualized through a paradigm of assessment that accounts for the mutual negotiation of proficiency between speaking and listening subjects, or what we refer to as materializing assessment.
This paper examines the chronotopic nature of physics discourse and instructional practices that are mediated through the integration of disciplinary spatial repertoires and mathematical symbolic systems. The paper addresses how meanings are constructed during instruction between bilingual international teaching assistants (ITAs) and undergraduate physics students through the chronotopic (re)contextualization of prior physics reasoning and future applications in present discussions about a physics event. Instructional activities mediated by spatial repertoires and mathematical symbolic systems between ITAs and undergraduates were video recorded. Data were analyzed using a joint method of multimodal conversation analysis and the Bakhtinian concept of chronotope. Findings illustrate that the simultaneous chronotopes of physics discursive practices engaged student participation in ITA-led activities and maintained the sequential chronotopes in instructional practices, demonstrating joint attention between ITAs and undergraduates as co-contributors to meaning making. The chronotopic link creates a dialogic space in which multidiscursive practices of knowledge construction can be achieved through an integration of disciplinary spatial repertoires and mathematical symbolism and images. The present study suggests a spatial repertoire-informed chronotopic turn in analyzing the dynamic multiplicity of physics instructional practices by ITAs in academic contexts.
This article responds to a call for applied linguistics and bilingualism research from a spatial repertoires perspective informed by new materialism. It focuses on the ways international faculty members carry out instructional interactions in STEM using English as an additional language. Using video data, the analysis demonstrates how visual technology, material space and human bodies collectively shape instructional interactions in a structural engineering class in a university setting. The communication shows a complex entanglement of language with technology, visual representations of concrete designs and embodiment. The study details the characteristics of repertoires that are expected in the given instructional space for an effective practice, and it sheds light on what new members can learn and do in order to be competent in their profession. Additionally, the data corpus can be used as an authentic resource for the disciplinary socialization of bi-/multilingual STEM students and scholars for whom English is an additional language.
This article sets out to investigate the discourses, ideologies, and identities of international teaching assistants (ITAs) as they engage in hegemonic diversity discourses concerning inequality within the space of American higher education. In order to explore the effects of the hegemonic discourse of diversity on identity construction, this study is framed around critical discourse studies on text, discourse practice, and social practice with a focus on the power relations of language ideologies and identity politics. The research explores how discourses on ITA’ diversity have been constructed and reproduced through recontextualization at different social levels, particularly by tracing the intertextual chains of talk and text over the past three decades. The detailed analyses of these discursive texts, gleaned from classroom interactions and readings as well as from documents from institutional-level language policies and practices, illustrate the genesis, reproduction, and persistence of the dominant diversity discourse charged with ideological significance in its relation to how ITAs are positioned. This article sheds light on the relations between the hegemonic discourse on diversity and the identity politics that contribute in the broader social level, as well as the local level, to sociolinguistic differences.
Although a significant body of research exists on Nonnative English Speaking Teachers (NNESTs) of composition, research on International Teaching Assistants (ITAs) of composition is rather limited. Few studies explore the training of composition ITAs or their experiences and professional identities, leaving open the question of how ITAs are influenced by discourses that frame native speakers as ideal English teachers and by alternative discourses that intend to empower NNESTs. Through focus groups, interviews, and short questionnaires, this study investigates the experiences of ITAs who teach composition at a large Midwestern university. The participants discuss their linguistic insecurities, their strengths and successes, and the role of World Englishes in shaping their professional identities and practice. The results of the study are discussed in the broader context of internationalization of higher education and in reference to translingualism and other alternative approaches to composition. Also discussed are implications for ITA training and preparation.
The rapid increase of English‐medium instruction (EMI) programs across Europe has raised concerns regarding the oral competencies of nonnative English speaking lecturers and the implications for the quality of teaching. Consequently, lecturers’ English proficiency is under scrutiny and universities are implementing internal assessment procedures. Given the complexity of the local teaching and learning contexts in which these assessments are administered and used, answering the questions about whether and how to address the interface between language, disciplinary content, and pedagogy in the assessment procedure has been a struggle. This study is based on an oral English certification test for university EMI lecturers. Holistic scores and formative feedback reports (N = 400) from six raters, and interviews with lecturers (N = 10) were used to analyze questions related to (1) rater bias, (2) references to pedagogy, (3) reported lexical content, and (4) EMI lecturers’ perceptions about their disciplinary knowledge and vocabulary use. Rating data were examined using multifacet Rasch measurement (MFRM), while formative feedback reports and interview data were analyzed in NVivo10. MFRM results suggested no significant bias, or interaction, between raters and departments. In the written formative feedback, raters referred to linguistic aspects of pedagogy (e.g., “utilization of stress and intonation to convey pragmatic meaning”) rather than to lecturers’ classroom behavior. As for vocabulary references, results suggest that the identified problems align with general rather than domain‐specific vocabulary. Interview findings suggest that, despite awareness of their lack of nuanced vocabulary, lecturers’ content knowledge and teaching experience facilitate their language performance.
The 'trans-' turn in language studies illuminates human communication as the coordination and interpretation of a vast array of semiotic resources that are entangled with language in fluid and unpredictable ways. It also highlights the current era of globalization in which communication occurs with ever-increasing rapidity among ever-expanding audiences, through rapidly changing semiotic means and modes. It transcends the local, to become translocal and transnational, indexing the diversity of actors engaged in new configurations of communicative engagements. Framed by notions of repertoires and modalities, in this article I offer a rationale for and close articulation of transmodalities, to more fully consider processes of semiosis across place, space, and time. Because meanings matter - especially relational aspects of communication - I propose critical cosmopolitanism to account for humane, ethical approaches to human engagements and their outcomes. I provide data from a project that connects youth across the globe through technology-mediated communications to demonstrate how these dual frames - transmodalities and critical cosmopolitanism - can serve as guideposts and heuristic lenses for transnational interactions, relations, and learning in a globalized, technologized world.
This article reflects on recent challenges emerging from the study of language and the body in social interaction. There is a general interest in language and the body across disciplines that has invited a reconceptualization of the broader issues relative to action, cognition, culture, knowledge, social relations and identities, spatiality and temporality. The study of social interaction focuses on how multimodal resources – including language and bodily movements – are holistically and situatedly used in building human action. This article discusses some consequences and challenges of putting the body at the center of attention: it repositions language as one among other modalities, and invites us to consider the involvement of entire bodies in social interaction, overcoming a logo-centric vision of communication, as well as a visuo-centric vision of embodiment. These issues are developed through a series of conversation analytic studies, firstly of classic topics in linguistics like deixis, then of more recent topics, such as mobility and sensoriality.
Making connections between language policy texts and discourses and language practices is characterized by Hult as the perennial challenge for the field of language planning and policy (LPP). Language policies are linked to past policy documents, such as earlier policies and earlier versions of same policy and current policies, and they may be connected to a variety of past and present discourses. The nature of recontextualization relies both on intertextual connections to past texts and discourses as well as relationships, beliefs, ideologies, and power relationships in the new context. Language policy texts are not necessarily some homogenous documentation of unitary authorial intentions but, instead, heteroglossic and often filled with diverse (even contradictory) ideas about language and/or language education. Intertextual analysis is a tool that can be leveraged to analyze a particular phenomenon meaning production in spoken and written texts within a larger research project that makes use of other methods.
This chapter draws on empirical research carried out in a primary school located in a multilingual neighbourhood in Vienna where learning has been taking place in pilot multigrade classrooms for more than 10 years. The multigrade approach follows an open learning strategy inspired by Freinet pedagogics understanding heterogeneity as a resource and not as a drawback. The chapter will present examples from a research project which focusses on how learners perceive their heteroglossic linguistic repertoires and how they draw on multiple resources—modes, codes, discourses—to produce creative and meaningful texts. These texts, a multimodal classroom diary and a classroom library consisting of single as well as co-authored printed ‘mini-books’, form a core element in the open learning environment of the school.
The instructional performance of international teaching assistants (ITA) in U.S. universities is generally considered as problematic due to linguistic and cultural differences in existing studies. Drawing on interactional sociolinguistics, conversation analysis, and positioning theory, this study aims to find out how ITAs are juxtaposed between content expert and language novice in the actual instructional interactions with U.S. college students. The data under study consist of a number of dyadic office hour interactions. The matter of analytic interest is the type of sentence completion that U.S. college students use to assist or improve on ITAs’ instructional discourse. While interactionally accommodating, sentence completion may position the ITA instructors as language novices, and furthermore cast doubt on their situated identity as instructors. The findings here may shed some light on our understanding of how ITAs are negatively perceived and even stereotyped in their instructional discourse.
What is ethnicity? Is there a 'white' way of speaking? Why do people sometimes borrow features of another ethnic group's language? Why do we sometimes hear an accent that isn't there? This lively overview, first published in 2006, reveals the fascinating relationship between language and ethnic identity, exploring the crucial role it plays in both revealing a speaker's ethnicity and helping to construct it. Drawing on research from a range of ethnic groups around the world, it shows how language contributes to the social and psychological processes involved in the formation of ethnic identity, exploring both the linguistic features of ethnic language varieties and also the ways in which language is used by different ethnic groups. Complete with discussion questions and a glossary, Language and Ethnicity will be welcomed by students and researchers in sociolinguistics, as well as anybody interested in ethnic issues, language and education, inter-ethnic communication, and the relationship between language and identity.
This book explores alternative ways to consider the relationship between mathematics and the material world. Drawing on the philosophy of Gilles Châtelet and the post-humanist materialism of Karen Barad, the authors present an 'inclusive materialist' approach to studying mathematics education. This approach offers a fresh perspective on human and nonhuman bodies, challenging current assumptions about the role of the senses, language, and ability in teaching and learning mathematics. Each chapter provides empirical examples from the classroom that demonstrate how inclusive materialism can be applied to a wide range of concerns in the field. The authors analyze recent studies on students' gestures, expressions, and drawings in order to establish a link between mathematical activity and mathematical concepts. Mathematics and the Body expands the landscape of research in mathematics education and will be an essential resource for teachers, students, and researchers alike.
The United States must improve its students' educational achievement. Race, gender, and social class gaps persist, and, overall, U.S. students rank poorly among peers globally. Scientific research shows that students' psychology-their "academic mindsets"-have a critical role in educational achievement. Yet policymakers have not taken full advantage of cost-effective and well-validated mindset interventions. In this article, we present two key academic mindsets. The first, a growth mindset, refers to the belief that intelligence can be developed over time. The second, a belonging mindset, refers to the belief that people like you belong in your school or in a given academic field. Extensive research shows that fostering these mindsets can improve students' motivation; raise grades; and reduce racial, gender, and social class gaps. Of course, mindsets are not a panacea, but with proper implementation they can be an excellent point of entry. We show how policy at all levels (federal, state, and local) can leverage mindsets to lift the nation's educational outcomes.
Trans-contextual analysis focuses on the distribution of meanings over space and time and the variable resources which come into play to configure this distribution. This article traces two lines of inquiry: first, it outlines a unit of trans-contextual analysis which involves the tracing of recontextualizing and resemiotising moves within meaning-making trajectories. This proposed unit of analysis takes mobility as its premise and provisionality as its condition, and it asks what do we learn about meaning-making and about society from the examination of this distribution and these resources? I compare two different sequences of events, one from a visit to a remote village in Tanzania; the other from an ethnography in a house-building project in South Africa. I detail the recontextualizing and resemiotising moves and the resources that come into play in each. The second line of inquiry focuses on the “joins” that link meaning-making across contexts, enabling its projection beyond the local. The article seeks to understand the role of objects together with language in contributing to meaning-making across space and time, and to problematize the different ontologies and theoretical accounts that have been offered for interpreting the relation between language and objects. I argue that the unit of trans-contextual analysis and a return to objects together can contribute more precise lines of inquiry to the development of a sociolinguistics of mobility and complexity.
The emergence of empirical approaches to L2 pronunciation research and teaching is a powerful fourth wave in the history of the field. Authored by two leading proponents of evidence-based instruction, this volume surveys both foundational and cutting-edge empirical work and pinpoints its ramifications for pedagogy. The authors begin by tracing the history of pronunciation instruction and explicating L2 phonetic learning processes. Subsequent chapters explore the themes, strengths, and ethical problems of the field through the lens of the intelligibility principle. The importance of error gravity, and the need for assessment and individualized instruction are highlighted, and the role of L2 accents in social contexts is probed. Material readily available elsewhere has been omitted in favour of an emphasis on the how, why, and when of pronunciation instruction. Anyone with an interest in L2 pronunciation–especially graduate students, language teachers, and experienced researchers–will find much value in this indispensible resource.
In this article, Nelson Flores and Jonathan Rosa critique appropriateness-based approaches to language diversity in education. Those who subscribe to these approaches conceptualize standardized linguistic practices as an objective set of linguistic forms that are appropriate for an academic setting. In contrast, Flores and Rosa highlight the raciolinguistic ideologies through which racialized bodies come to be constructed as engaging in appropriately academic linguistic practices. Drawing on theories of language ideologies and racialization, they offer a perspective from which students classified as long-term English learners, heritage language learners, and Standard English learners can be understood to inhabit a shared racial positioning that frames their linguistic practices as deficient regardless of how closely they follow supposed rules of appropriateness. The authors illustrate how appropriatenessbased approaches to language education are implicated in the reproduction of racial normativity by expecting language-minoritized students to model their linguistic practices after the white speaking subject despite the fact that the white listening subject continues to perceive their language use in racialized ways. They conclude with a call for reframing language diversity in education away from a discourse of appropriateness toward one that seeks to denaturalize standardized linguistic categories.
I use the term the embodied turn to mean the point when interest in the body became established among researchers on language and social interaction, exploiting the greater ease of video recording. This review article tracks the growth of “embodiment” in over 400 articles published in Research on Language and Social Interaction from 1987 to 2013. I consider closely two areas where analysts have confronted challenges and how they have responded: settling on precise and analytically helpful terminology for the body, and transcribing and representing the body, particularly its temporality and manner.
Acknowledgements 1. Introductions 2. Second language performance assessment 3. Modelling performance: opening Pandora's Box 4. Designing a performance test: the Occupational English Test 5. Raters and ratings: introduction to multi-faceted measurement 6. Concepts and procedures in Rasch measurement 7. Mapping and reporting abilities and skill levels 8. Using Rasch analysis in research on second language performance assessment 9. Data, models and dimensions References Index
Research on the learning and teaching of mathematics in contexts of language diversity has highlighted a number of common tensions that arise in a variety of contexts. These tensions can be explained by Bakhtin’s characterization of two sets of forces that are present in any utterance: centripetal forces represent the drive for unitary language, standardisation and linguistic hegemony; centrifugal forces represent the presence of heteroglossia, stratification and decentralisation. In this paper, I use this theoretical perspective to examine ethnographic data from a study of a second language mathematics classroom in Canada, in which the students are almost all speakers of Cree, one of the original languages of Canada. My analysis highlights three situations in which the tension between centripetal and centrifugal forces is particularly salient: the students’ use of Cree; working on mathematical word problems; and producing mathematical explanations.
Discourse analysis is the study of language in use (Fairclough, 1992; Gee, 1999). When we use language to communicate we must signal to our listeners who we are (in the sense of what socially meaningful identity or role we are speaking out of) and what we are doing (what action or activity we are attempting to carry out). People talk and act not just as individuals, but as members of various sorts of social and cultural groups associated with different identities. For example, if a policeman says “You should move your car” we need to know if he is speaking in his role as a policeman and ordering us to move the car, or speaking as a helpful fellow citizen giving us advice.
Keywords:
discourse analysis;
language and social interaction;
identity
Valerie Serrin still remembers vividly her anger and the feeling of helplessness. After getting a C on a lab report in an introductory chemistry course, she went to her teaching assistant to ask what she should have done for a better grade. Ms. Serrin's experience is hardly unique. With a steep rise in the number of foreign graduate students in the last two decades, undergraduates at large research universities often find themselves in classes and laboratories run by graduate teaching assistants whose mastery of English is less than complete. The issue is particularly acute in subjects like engineering, where 50 percent of graduate students are foreign born, and math and the physical sciences, where 41 percent of graduate students are, according to a survey by the Council of Graduate Schools, an association of 450 schools. This is despite a modest decline in the number of international students enrolling in American graduate programs since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. The encounters have prompted legislation in at least 22 states requiring universities to make sure that teachers are proficient in spoken English. In January, Bette B. Grande, a Republican state representative from Fargo, N.D., tried to go even further after her son Alec complained of his experiences at North Dakota State University. Mrs. Grande introduced legislation that would allow students in state universities to drop courses without penalty and be reimbursed if they could not understand the English of a teaching assistant or a professor.
This article describes an approach for dealing with the pronunciation of advanced ESL learners who may be relatively fluent but who remain quite inaccurate. Their pronunciation is often thought of as being “fossilized” (Selinker 1972), highly resistant to change. The specific group for which this approach was designed is somewhat unique: foreign professionals, many of whom have been in English- speaking environments for years. Nonetheless, the general framework and the method involved are applicable in many contexts. For such fossilized learners, traditional pronunciation methods are often ineffective. A successful, somewhat unorthodox teaching program that draws on research from several disciplines is outlined.