Search results for "Discourse Analysis"

‘I don’t know the answer to that question’: a corpus-assisted discourse analysis of White House Press Briefings

2013

White House Press Briefings, daily meetings with the press held by the White House Press Secretary, are the main information conduit for the White House (Kumar 2007). They are considered a “political chess game” where the Press Secretary and the press face a “wrestling match” (Partington 2006: 16). Our analysis is carried out on a corpus comprising all the Press Briefings across three presidencies from Clinton to Obama. The additional mark-up includes information about individual speakers and their role, allowing us to compare different discourse strategies adopted by the participants in the briefings at different points in time. This leads us to determine the extent of the differences in t…

Research Practices and Operations in Studying Debates and Documents

2017

The chapter presents research practices and operations (or methods and techniques) that are useful in studying debates and documents as part, and as arenas and reflections, of political activity, political processes, strategies and actions. It contains first general considerations that are valid and helpful for most interpretative and textual analyses, with additional emphasis set on how to analyse political activity linked to texts: the research interest and research question target the moves, strategies, interests and actors involved in the political processes in question, rather than simply the contents of the text, and this in return crucially determines material selection, research que…

The integration of content and language in students’ task answer production in the bilingual classroom

2016

The notion of content and language integration has recently become a key topic of inquiry in research on content and language integrated learning and other kinds of bilingual educational programmes. Understanding what integration is and how it happens is of fundamental importance not only for researchers interested in gauging the possibilities and limitations of bilingual programmes, but also for practitioners seeking optimal ways to support student development. This study investigates integration as it takes place in the context of collaborative writing in the classroom. Drawing on conversation analytic methodology, text production is investigated as a social and sequentially evolving phen…

Sad, lonely and looking for love? : representations of singleness on Cosmopolitan.com

2016

Yhdysvaltalaisessa yhteiskunnassa arvostetaan suuresti avioliittoa ja parisuhdetta, jonka ajatellaan olevan elämän tärkein ihmissuhde. Vaikka yksineläjien määrä on viimeisten vuosikymmenien aikana ollut kasvussa, asenteet yksineläjiä ja yksineläjyyttä kohtaan ovat silti usein negatiivisia ja kyseenalaistamattomia. Niihin liittyvät negatiiviset stereotypiat heijastuvat mediarepresentaatioissa. Se, miten media puhuu yksineläjyydestä ja parisuhteista vaikuttaa ihmisten ajatusmaailmoihin sekä olemassa oleviin diskursiivisiin resursseihin, joiden avulla yksineläjät voivat käsitellä elämäänsä ja rakentaa identiteettiään. Tämä tutkielma tarkastelee yksineläjyyden representaatioita nuorille naisill…

Learning English Through Social Interaction: The Case ofBig Brother 2006,Finland

2013

In line with recent Conversation Analytic work on language learning as situated practice, this article investigates how interactants can create language learning opportunities for themselves and others in and through social interaction. The study shows how the participants of BigBrother Finland, a reality TV show, whose main communication is in Finnish, take up resources provided by English and use them for learning in their interaction. This interaction is characterized by an orientation to both the local context and the television audience, a mixture of activity types and translanguaging. It focuses on one of the participants who explicitly evaluates his own proficiency in English as limi…

Authenticity, normativity and social media

2015

‘Full power despite stress’: A discourse analytical examination of the interconnectedness of postfeminism and neoliberalism in the domain of work in …

2013

Stories and images of successful career women and support for women’s advancement in working life have become hallmarks of contemporary postfeminist media culture, and especially of women’s magazines such as Cosmopolitan. While in previous research these features have been seen as signs for a new, popular feminism, more recently they have also been connected to the growing hegemony of neoliberal governance, a mode of power that ultimately aims at the economization of the social and is fundamentally exercised in and through discourse. The aim of this article is to investigate further the interconnectedness of these two phenomena, postfeminism and neoliberalism, in the domain of work, using …

Teachers' embodied allocations in instructional interaction

2012

This paper describes how teachers employ gaze, head nods and pointing gestures in allocating response turns to students in whole-class instructional interaction. Specifically, it focuses on examining teachers’ embodied allocations – that is, turn-allocations produced (mostly) by embodied means – and the sequential positions in which they are performed within the tripartite instructional sequence of IRE. While prior studies have noted their use in classroom interaction, the way in which they are drawn on by teachers has not been examined in detail. By using conversation analysis in conjunction with the study of embodied interaction, this article aims to show how these ephemeral embodied reso…

Connecting the Language Classroom and the Wild : Re-enactments of Language Use Experiences

2018

AbstractUsing multimodal conversation analysis, this article analyses language learning as an in situ process during a teacher-assigned, experientially based pedagogical activity. The activity involved a three-part pedagogical structure, where learners first prepared for and then participated in real-life service encounters, and later reflected on their experiences back in the classroom. The analysis details how the co-constructed telling sequences through which novice second language users re-enact their experiences create an occasion for language-focused activity. We argue that the actions through which the participants display and sustain an orientation to an interactional practice as an…

Managing Relations: a study of positioning strategies in British international discourse

2008

This work deals with corpus-assisted research into speaker ideological positioning in the language of diplomacy. It concentrates on the resources used by the foreign minister Margaret Beckett to construe the speaker “orientation” (Lemke 1992) through the analysis of the main participant in the discourse that is international community and the subject matter being debated namely terrorism. The findings have shown assertiveness and determination from the speaker by the use of contractive mechanisms. The image of the international community is based on cooperation and unity just like a family and it is appraised mainly through judgements of tenacity. These are the resources required to fight t…