Search results for " Languages"
showing 10 items of 1859 documents
Frozen actions in the Arctic linguistic landscape: a nexus analysis of language processes in visual space
2011
Abstract This article examines the linguistic landscape (LL) of seven villages above the Arctic Circle, in the region called North Calotte. The area forms a complex nexus of contested and changing multilingualism, particularly as regards to endangered indigenous Sami languages and Kven and Meankieli minority languages. Viewing LL as a discursively constructed space and consequently signs as ‘frozed actions’ by various actors, and by adopting a Nexus analytical approach we examine three interrelated aspects of Arctic LLs: (1) the synchronic aspect by addressing the question of how languages are used in the landscapes of northern villages in the year 2008; (2) the historical aspect through id…
Hybrid practices meet nation-state language policies: Transcarpathia in the twentieth century and today
2016
AbstractFrom the early twentieth century to the present day, Transcarpathia has belonged to several states: the Austrian-Hungarian Monarchy, Czechoslovakia, the Hungarian Kingdom, the Soviet Union, and finally to Ukraine. The status of what counts as a minority and a majority language has changed each time the state affiliation has been changed. Based on the long term research by Csernicskó, and on the one-month fieldwork carried out by Laihonen in 2012, our goal is to provide an autonomous critical account and discourse analysis of the linguistic situation in Transcarpathia. We draw examples especially from the linguistic landscape, which documents the hybrid practices difficult to catch w…
Handling knowledge: Using classroom materials to construct and interpret information requests
2015
Abstract This article contributes to the recent conversation analytic interest in exploring the mechanisms of action formation and ascription by investigating how embodied interactional practices involving material objects relate to the organization of social action. Using as data information request sequences in student–student interaction, the study highlights the material nature of an interactional context and examines how students orient in talk and by bodily-visual means to their and their co-conversants’ textual documents during individual task work. Sequential analyses illustrate how the manual handling of such everyday learning materials as handouts and tasks sheets is not only an i…
Keskustelukumppanin kehuminen suomalaisessa keskustelussa
2013
Artikkelissa tarkastellaan suomalaisen arkikeskustelun kehuja kolmen peruskysymyksen kautta: 1) millaisia kehut ovat rakenteeltaan, 2) miten kehut otetaan vastaan ja 3) millaisissa tilanteissa kehuja esitetaan ja mita niilla tehdaan? Tutkimus on metodiltaan keskustelunanalyyttinen: kehuja analysoidaan osana aitojen keskustelujen toiminnallista kudosta. Kehu maaritellaan tutkimuksessa vastaanottajaan tavalla tai toisella kohdistuvaksi myonteiseksi arvioksi. Kehu voi arvioida vastaanottajaa monella tavalla: kehuttavana voi olla esimerkiksi puhekumppanin luonne, hanen toimintansa tietyssa tilanteessa tai vaatetus, hiukset tai asunto. Aineistona on seka nauhoitetuista arkikeskusteluista poimitt…
The environment of a bilingual classroom as an interactional resource
2018
Both schoolscape studies and recent conversation analytic (CA) research on classroom interaction have demonstrated that material artefacts such as images, texts and different kinds of objects found in classrooms have a significant role in educational practice. This article turns the spotlight on social action within a bilingual classroom, exploring how participants visibly orient to the surrounding material environment during instructional interaction. The data consist of video-recorded lessons from secondary-level education. A multimodal conversation analytic investigation focuses on interactions during which participants attend to classroom texts and semiotic objects in ways that foregrou…
Distance crossing and alignment in online humanitarian discourse
2018
Abstract This article analyzes multimodal genres of current online humanitarian discourse such as mission statements, annual reports and photo galleries to find how the construals of beneficiaries and humanitarian organizations align with the motives, values and emotional dispositions of prospective donors. The discursive reduction of distance between the donor and the beneficiary is likely to produce solicitation effects and enable self-legitimization. First, based on extant literature, the article develops a method to account for the pragmatic operations of textual ‘proximization’ and visually simulated ‘co-presence’ in humanitarian communication. Then it applies it to a sample of multimo…
Australian TESOL Teachers’ Cultural Perceptions of Students
2017
ABSTRACTOver the last decade, research in the field of Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) has increasingly focused on the relationship between culture and learning. Researchers such as Kumaravadivelu (2003) have been vocal in their opposition to the practice of cultural stereotyping. In the current study, Holliday’s (2005) model of Culturism was used as a theoretical basis. Six Australian TESOL teachers were interviewed to determine the nature and extent of the cultural stereotypes that they held, particularly as they pertained to specific learning-related behaviours. A qualitative analysis of the data revealed that teachers most often grouped students in terms of natio…
The changing schoolscape in a Szekler village in Romania: signs of diversity in rehungarization
2015
In this paper, we explore the connections between a linguistic landscape and language ideologies in an elementary school in a village within the Hungarian region of Szeklerland in Romania. This ‘schoolscape’ is analysed as a display or materialization of the ‘hidden curriculum’ regarding the construction of linguistic and cultural identities. We draw on fieldwork carried out in 2012 and 2013 and examine two dimensions of change in progress: (1) changes in the use of Hungarian and Romanian as languages of teaching and learning and as languages of written administration; and (2) changes in the display of these languages in the schoolscape. Since 1990, there has been a tendency towards rehunga…
Two languages in the air : a cross-cultural comparison of preschool teachers’ reflections on their flexible bilingual practices
2016
Bilingual preschool education is under researched compared with bilingual school education. There is also a lack of research on bilingual preschool teachers’ agency and how they negotiate between two languages in the classroom. We examined the language practices of five bilingual preschool teachers working within three different socio-linguistic settings, in Finland (Finnish–Swedish and Russian–Finnish contexts) and Israel (an Arabic–Hebrew context) and interviewed the teachers about their use of languages in the classroom. We found that in each context the teachers reported modifications to an initial bilingual education model over time: from a strict separation of languages, to flexible b…
Encapsulació i estructura informativa en el debat parlamentari. Una anàlisi contrastiva (català – espanyol – anglès)
2016
Parliamentary debate (PD) as a specific genre of parliamentary discourse exhibits a hybrid nature: part oral and part written discourse. It is performed orally, but planned ahead and formal. From the point of view of lexical cohesion, encapsulation by means of abstract and unspecific nouns (e.g. factor reason) is an indicator of the informative density and the underlying written natureof PD.With the tools provided by Discourse Analysis and Cognitive Linguistics, this paper aims at describing and characterizing cross-linguistically lexical encapsulation’s potential to define the information struc-ture of PD. In this regard, encapsulation is analyzed in relation to the notions of topic and fo…