Search results for "Discourse Analysis"
showing 10 items of 451 documents
Asymmetries of Knowledge and Epistemic Change in Social Gaming Interaction
2014
While a growing number of studies investigate the role of knowledge and interactional management of knowledge asymmetries in conversation analysis, the epistemic organization of multilingual and second language interactions is still largely unexplored. This article addresses this issue by investigating how knowledge asymmetries and changing positions with regard to knowledge impact social interaction in multilingual gaming activities. Drawing on a collection of video recordings of social gaming sessions collected over a two year period and involving the same two participants, we examine how the participants orient to knowledge and deal with knowledge asymmetries while solving game-related p…
Software as ideology
2016
Software has become ubiquitous in higher education, especially often taken-for-granted Microsoft Word. Educational writing involves more than horizontal lines of text, but also multimodal representations. When students write in Word, the affordances of the program constrain what multimodal representations of knowledge they can and cannot make. Software such as Word is not neutral tool-kits, but also historical and semiotic constructs loaded with social values and ideologies. By taking a social semiotic approach to Word and SmartArt, this article shows how this software is pre-loaded with values and styles from office management. These values are then infused into education, in the case this…
Discourse analysis as immanent critique: Possibilities and limits of normative critique in empirical discourse studies
2016
Although discourse analysts often conceive of their work as critical, there is little theoretical discussion regarding the possibility of normative critique in the scientific community of discourse analysis. Rarely are the normative grounds and normative scope of such a critique clear. Thus, this article attempts to find theoretically robust and practical answers to the following question: ‘How is a normative critique possible?’ In seeking my answer, I first provide a short overview of the possibilities of normative critique in critical discourse analysis. Second, I offer an argument in favour of immanent critique while explaining both its advantages and its theoretical and practical probl…
Violent women in Spanish TV ads: Stereotype reversal or the same old same old?
2016
Why did different agencies, promoting diverse products, create three ads featuring violence perpetrated by women on their rather immature and submissive male partners in order to sell their products? I posit that the female viewers connect subconsciously with the image of the proactive female protagonists through the psychological mechanism in which we identify with ‘our like’ on the screen. This, in turn, allows for the projection of ‘common ground’, a positive politeness strategy, to favourably dispose the female audience towards the protagonists and, by extension, the products advertised. The success of these ads depends on women viewers identifying with the apparently dominant female pr…
Knowledge ecology for conceptual growth:Teachers as active agents in developing a PluriLiteracies approach to Teaching for Learning (PTL)
2017
This article explores how a group of educators and researchers enacted an inclusive process of conceptual growth involving teachers and teacher educators as active agents, knowledge builders and meaning-makers in the development of a Pluriliteracies approach to Teaching for Learning (PTL). The evolution of a working model based on five emergent principles, foregrounded the need for stakeholders across different languages, cultures and disciplines, to work together from the start so that learning spaces were created where teacher development went alongside researcher development, and theorizing was not only inclusive of praxis but validated by it. A growth cycle emerged using theories of pra…
Discursive construction of a high-stakes test: the many faces of a test-taker
2006
As part of a larger project, we studied how a foreign language test got discursively constructed in the talk of upper-secondary-school leavers. A group of students were asked to keep an oral diary to record their ideas, feelings and experiences of preparing for and taking the test over the last spring term of school, as part of a high-stakes national examination. In addition, they took part in discussions either in pairs or groups of three after having learned about the final test results. After transcribing the data, drawing on a form of discourse analysis originally launched by a group of social psychologists, we identified (at least) four interpretative repertoires in the students’ acco…
“Languaging the worker : Globalized governmentalities in/of language in peripheral spaces”
2016
In the introduction to the special issue “Languaging the worker: globalized governmentalities in/of language in peripheral spaces”, we take up the notion of governmentality as a means to interrogate the complex relationship between language, labor, power and subjectivity in peripheral multilingual spaces. Our aim here is to argue for the study of governmentality as a viable and growing approach in critical sociolinguistic research. As such, in this introduction, we first discuss key concepts germane to our interrogations, including the notions of governmentality, languaging, peripherality and language worker. We proceed to map out five ethnographically and discourse-analytically informed ca…
Marx's critique of ideology for discourse analysis: from analysis of ideologies to social critique
2018
The notion of ideology is related to social and material reality and especially to the processes of social reproduction. Therefore, the analysis of ideology seems to fall into the domain of discourse analysis. The analysis of language and practices of signification in social contexts constitutes the basic triangle of discourse analysis. However, the Marxist concept of ideology always refers to some kind of falsity, that ultimately enables the researcher to not only analyse but also to criticize ideologies. Ideologies are always in some way false, injust or inadequate. It is at this point that discourse analysts usually raise the most serious objections as they understand truth itself as a d…
Hyvinvointivaltiokansalaisuusdiskurssit neljän suurimman puolueen eduskuntavaaliohjelmissa 1991–2019
2020
Tutkimuksen tavoitteena on tehdä näkyväksi millaisia ideologisia valintoja Suomen neljä suurinta puoluetta ovat tehneet eduskuntavaaliohjelmissaan suhteessa hyvinvointivaltiokansalaisuusdiskursseihin 1991 vuodesta alkaen. Tarkastelemme erityisesti vaaliohjelmissa tuotettuja kansalaisen poliittisia ja sosiaalisia oikeuksia ja velvollisuuksia sekä kansalaisen ja valtion välistä oikeudellinen sidettä ja sen legitimointia. Tarkastelemme puolueiden hyvinvointivaltiokansalaisuusdiskursseja pohjoismaisesta hyvinvointivaltiomallista käytävän kamppailun viitekehyksessä. Kansalaisuustulkinnat ohjaavat yhteiskuntapolitiikkaa ja esimerkiksi määritelmät kansalaisten tarpeista vaikuttavat palvelurakentee…
The role of customer online reviews in the discourse-dialogic construction of hotel websites
2015
Esta comunicación da cuenta de una investigación que intenta desvelar si las webs hoteleras incluyen una comunicación hotel-cliente (autor-lector), partiendo de las reseñas de los viajeros y transformando estas críticas en estrategias discursivas para implicar al cliente. Para ello, se han analizado las reseñas de cuatro hoteles, de forma cuantitativa y cualitativa. Los resultados muestran así un mejor conocimiento del rol de las reseñas en línea en la construcción discursiva de las webs hoteleras. This research attempts to assess whether hotel websites include writer-reader interplay using stance markers from customer reviews and transforming them into engagement strategies, which are nece…