Search results for "languages"
showing 10 items of 2101 documents
Migrant women, work, and investment in language learning : Two success stories
2019
Abstract In the media, migrant mothers are often portrayed as uneducated, having trouble learning a new language, and preferring to stay at home rather than entering paid employment. This article offers a contrasting point of view as a result of examining how two migrant women narrativize their experiences of language learning and working-life-related integration during a three-year period. Specific attention is paid to how the women make sense of their language use over time, and how this may have contributed to their integration into working life and the wellbeing of their families. Interview data was analyzed using the short story analytical approach, focusing on both the content and the…
Hope and equilibrium in the dystopian world of The Hunger Games
2021
This paper provides evidence of the fruitfulness of combining analytical categories from Cognitive Linguistics and Critical Discourse Analysis for the analysis of complex literary characterizations. It does so through a detailed study of the “tributes”, i.e. the randomly selected children who have to fight to death in a nationally televised show, in The Hunger Games. The study proves the effectiveness of such categories to provide an analytically accurate picture of the dystopian world depicted in the novel, which is revealed to include a paradoxical element of hope. The type of dehumanization that characterizes the dystopian society of Panem is portrayed through an internally consistent se…
ELF and migrant categorization at family clinics in Finland
2019
Artikkelin tavoite on selvittää, miten neuvolan terveydenhoitajat käyttävät puheessaan kieltä, erityisesti englannin kieltä, ei-suomea-puhuvien asiakkaidensa kategorisointiin. Tutkimuksessa hyödynnetään jäsenkategoria-analyysiä (Schegloff, Emanuel A. 2007. A tutorial on membership categorization. Journal of Pragmatics 39(3). 462–482) osoittamaan, miten englannin kielen osaaminen maahanmuuttostatuksen ja syntyperäisen englannin puhujan normin ohella näytti olevan määräävin tekijä siinä, miten terveydenhoitajat kategorisoivat siirtolaistaustaisia asiakkaitaan. Tutkimustulokset osoittavat kuinka vahvasti jäsenkategoriapohjainen luokittelu näkyy institutionaalisessa päätöksenteossa, ja ne koros…
Towards understanding nonmanuality : A semiotic treatment of signers’ head movements
2019
This article discusses a certain type of nonmanual action, signers’ head movements, from a semiotic perspective. It presents a typology of head movements and their iconic, indexical and symbolic features based on Peircean and post-Peircean semiotics. The paper argues for the view that (i) indexical strategies are very prominent in head movements, (ii) iconic features are most evident in enacting, while non-enacting description is less common, (iii) symbolic types for tokens are infrequent, although some movements—such as nodding and shaking the head—may become more conventional or schematized, and (iv) different types of head movements involve different proportions of iconicity, indexicalit…
Teacher agency within the Finnish CLIL context : tensions and resources
2017
Recent discussion indicates that the initial enthusiasm of Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) teachers can be undermined by the demands of foreign-language mediated education. However, there is a lack of research on the resources and tensions that respectively support or limit the professional agency of CLIL teachers. By means of semi-structured interviews with fourteen participants, this study seeks to better understand how teacher agency is experienced by CLIL teachers working in Finnish primary schools. To examine tensions and resources in CLIL teachers’ work lives, a holistic and dynamic theoretical conceptualization of teacher agency is suggested, paying particular attenti…
Recycling a genre for news automation: The production of Valtteri the Election Bot
2020
Abstract The amount of available digital data is increasing at a tremendous rate. These data, however, are of limited use unless converted into a user-friendly form. We took on this task and built a natural language generation (NLG) driven system that generates journalistic news stories about elections without human intervention. In this paper, after presenting an overview of state-of-the-art technologies in NLG, we explain systematically how we identified and then recontextualized the determinant aspects of the genre of an online news story in the algorithm of our NLG software. In the discussion, we introduce the key results of a user test we carried out and some improvements that these re…
Professional Embodiment: Walking, Re-engagement of Desk Interactions, and Provision of Instruction during Classroom Rounds
2018
Abstract Unlike continuous whole-class (plenary) interaction, independent task work involves incipient teacher–student talk, as the teacher typically ‘makes rounds’ to engage in brief desk interactions with students. This article draws on multimodal conversation analysis to investigate how teacher movement during tasks offers resources for re-engaging in desk interactions and offering task-related guidance. The focus is on teachers’ walking trajectories and ways of positioning the body, and students’ orientation to them, in (i) (pre-)opening moments of a desk interaction, and (ii) during a subsequent instructional turn that guides students with the ongoing task. The analysis shows how the p…
Policing language in the world of new work : the commodification of workplace communication in organizational consulting
2021
Abstract This paper examines how the shift to knowledge and innovation economy has created new sites for the commodification of language and communication in the context of organizational consulting. The data come from a consultant-led development and training program of the management teams of a Finnish educational organization. In the study, the year-long training was videotaped (45 h) and followed ethnographically. By using rhetorical discourse analysis as a method, we examine how the consultant-led training activities present the role of language and communication in changing working life. The results show how the activities factualize the transformation of work and the centrality of la…
“Do you understand (me)?” negotiating mutual understanding by using gaze and environmentally coupled gestures between two deaf signing participants
2020
Abstract In this paper we explore the use of multimodal and multilingual semiotic resources in interactions between two deaf signing participants, a researcher and an asylum seeker. The focus is on the use of gaze and environmentally coupled gestures. Drawing on multimodal analysis and linguistic ethnography, we demonstrate how gaze and environmentally coupled gestures are effective semiotic resources for reaching mutual understanding. The study provides insight into the challenges and opportunities (deaf) asylum seekers, researchers, and employees of reception centres or the state may encounter because of the asymmetrical language competencies. Our concern is that such asymmetrical situati…
Generating incremental type services
2019
In this vision paper, we propose a method for generating fully functional incremental type services from declarations of type rules. Our general strategy is to translate type rules into Datalog, for which efficient incremental solvers are already available. However, many aspects of type rules don't naturally translate to Datalog and need non-trivial translation. We demonstrate that such translation may be feasible by outlining the translation rules needed for a language with typing contexts (name binding) and bidirectional type rules (local type inference). We envision that even rich type systems of DSLs can be incrementalized by translation to Datalog in the future.