Everyday Language Use Research Articles

Translingualism, Kenyan Hip-Hop and Emergent Ethnicities: Implications for Language Theory and Pedagogy

ABSTRACTThis article reports on preliminary findings of three prominent Kenyan hip-hop artists, Jua Cali, Abbas Kubaff, and Nazizi Hirji, as they theorize and construct emergent ethnicities vis-à-vis their translingual practices. Using in-depth phenomenological interviews, observations of their everyday language use, and analysis of their language choices in music compositions, I demonstrate how the artists engaged in linguistic activism to resist Kenya’s dominant but deficit model of racial and ethnic categorization. The artists theorized their ethnicities as always emergent and as shaped by their everyday language use and local sociopolitical factors. However, the process of constructing the emergent ethnicities was complicated by the artists’ desire to also maintain a “true” Kenyan cultural identity. As such, reconciling these two seemingly conflicting ethnicities led to contradictions and ambivalence in theorizing their translingual practices. The article concludes by proposing language pedagogies that can lead to more positive linguistic identities and emergent ethnicities not only for Kenyans but also for African youth studying in Africa and in global contexts. It also proposes an emergent theory of translingualism that allows users to move across different types of multilingualism as they construct their linguistic and ethnic identities.

CULTURAL COMMUNICATION:AN ANTHROPOLOGICALVIEWS ON THE USE OF LEFT HAND BY THE SOCIETY AROUND KAMPUS PERAK, SOUTHEAST SULAWESI

The phenomenon of left hand use (which is culturally unusual) by the community around the Campus Perak urges the authors explore its background from the cultural approach in an ethnographic study. There had been some community practices around Campus Perak in Southeast Sulawesi that are considered as anomalies by outsiders' perspectives. Among those anomalies is the use of the left hand in giving something to others, such as serving food, writing, and signing letters. This paper explores the use of the left hand amidst the society around the Perak Campus. In general, several ethnic groups inhabit the area around campus, thus no particular ethnic dominates the use of everyday language. Tribal languages are commonly used among people from the similar ethnicity. In the context offormal ceremonies involving community outside Campus Perak, the use of left hand was seen as a culture shock. Meanwhile, the use of left hand was (intra)culturally acceptable since children were taught using left hands by their parents. 
 KEY WORDS: Left Hand, Cultural Communication, Campus Perak, Society

The perspective of healthcare providers and patients on health literacy: a systematic review of the quantitative and qualitative studies.

Health literacy (HL) is a multifaceted concept, thus understanding the perspective of healthcare providers, patients, and the system is vital. This systematic review examines and synthesises the available studies on HL-related knowledge, attitude, practice, and perceived barriers. CINAHL and Medline (via EBSCOhost), Google Scholar, PubMed, ProQuest, Sage Journals, and Science Direct were searched. Both quantitative and/or qualitative studies in the English language were included. Intervention studies and studies focusing on HL assessment tools and prevalence of low HL were excluded. The risk of biasness reduced with the involvement of two reviewers independently assessing study eligibility and quality. A total of 30 studies were included, which consist of 19 quantitative, 9 qualitative, and 2 mixed-method studies. Out of 17 studies, 13 reported deficiency of HL-related knowledge among healthcare providers and 1 among patients. Three studies showed a positive attitude of healthcare providers towards learning about HL. Another three studies demonstrated patients feel shame exposing their literacy and undergoing HL assessment. Common HL communication techniques reported practiced by healthcare providers were the use of everyday language, teach-back method, and providing patients with reading materials and aids, while time constraint was the most reported HL perceived barriers by both healthcare providers and patients. Significant gaps exists in HL knowledge among healthcare providers and patients that needs immediate intervention. Such as, greater effort placed in creating a health system that provides an opportunity for healthcare providers to learn about HL and patients to access health information with taking consideration of their perceived barriers.

What would Wittgenstein say about social media?

Much of the excitement in social media analytics revolves around, a) capturing large-scale collections of naturally-occurring talk, b) repurposing them as data, and, c) finding ways to speak sociologically about them. Researchers have raised concerns over the use of social media data in research (eg boyd and Crawford, 2012; Housley et al, 2014; Tinati et al, 2014), exploring the ontological and epistemological grounding of the emerging field. We contribute to this debate by drawing on Wittgensteinian philosophy to elucidate hitherto neglected aspects; namely that it is not just social scientists who are in the business of analysing social media, but users themselves. We explore how mainstream social media analytics research (1) overinflates the importance of sociological theories, concepts and methodologies (which do not typically feature in the accounts of social media users), (2) downplays the extent to which social media platforms already exhibit order prior to any sociological accounting of them, and, (3) thereby produces findings which explain social scientific perspectives rather than the phenomena themselves. We reformulate the ontological and epistemological basis of social media analytics research from a Wittgensteinian perspective concerned with what it makes sense to say about social media, as members of society and as researchers studying those members. Such a project aims to explore social media users’ language as a practice embedded within the context of social life and online communication. This reflects the everyday use of language as an evolving toolkit for undertaking social interaction, pointing towards an alternative conception of social media analytics.

That’s how “you” do it: Generic you expresses norms during early childhood

Prior research indicates that children construe norms as general and construe preferences as individual. The current studies tested whether this expectation is built into how children interpret and use language. We focused on the pronoun you, which is ambiguous between a canonical interpretation (referring to the addressee) and a generic interpretation (referring to people in general). In Study 1, children (N=132, ages 3–10years) were asked a series of questions containing “you,” referring to either descriptive norms (e.g., “What do you do with bikes?”) or preferences (e.g., “What do you like to do with bikes?”). In Study 2, parents conversed with their children (N=28, ages 2–4years) about prescriptive norms (e.g., “What should you do with books?”) and preferences (e.g., “What do you like about books?”). In both studies, children’s choice of pronoun in their answer revealed whether they interpreted you in the questions as generic or canonical. Results indicated that children more often interpreted you as generic in the normative contexts (i.e., responded with generic you, e.g., “You read them”) and as canonical in the preference contexts (i.e., responded with I, e.g., “I read them”). This pattern emerged by early preschool, providing the first evidence that the distinction between norms and preferences directs young children’s interpretation and use of everyday language.

The Primacy of Discourse in the Study of Gender in Family Therapy.

Family therapists and scholars increasingly adopt poststructural and postmodern conceptions of social reality, challenging the notion of stable, universal dynamics within family members and families and favoring a view of reality as produced through social interaction. In the study of gender and diversity, many envision differences as social constructed rather than as "residing" in people or groups. There is a growing interest in discourse or people's everyday use of language and how it may reflect and advance interests of dominant groups in a society. Despite this shift from structures to discourse, therapists struggle to locate the dynamics of power in concrete actions and interactions. By leaving undisturbed the social processes through which gendered and other subjectivities and relations of power are produced, therapists may inadvertently become complicit in the very dynamics of power they seek to undermine. In this article, we argue that discourse analysis can help family therapy scholars and practitioners clarify the link between language and power. We present published examples of discourse analytic studies of gender and sexism and examine the relevance of these ideas for family therapy practice and research.

Teaching the distinctive language of science: An integrated and scaffolded approach for pre-service teachers

To learn science and demonstrate science learning, school students must bridge the gap between everyday use of language and image and the specialised use of language and image needed to achieve science curriculum outcomes. Pre-service teachers studying at a regional Australian university were shown how to help their future students bridge this gap. A transdisciplinary model was used to demonstrate the teaching of specialised science literacies integrated with the teaching of science in the middle school years, resulting in high levels of engagement, more effective use of learning time, and valuable opportunities for teacher educator professional learning.

ФЕНОМЕНОЛОГІЧНА КОНЦЕПЦІЯ У СИНХРОННО-ДІАХРОННОМУ ПІДХОДІ ДО АНАЛІЗУ НАЦІОНАЛЬНОЇ КОНЦЕПТОСФЕРИ ІСПАНІЇ

The article is devoted to the relation and time-spatial dynamics research of the development of national conceptual sphere components’ lexical, pragmatic and grammatical meaning from the phenomenological point of view. Its role in the development of the synchronic-diachronic approach to Spanish national conceptual sphere concepts’ analysis is determined. The variability of concepts’ prototype nuclei is reflected in the lexical-pragmatic and grammatical meaning of the linguistic units. Changes in nationally-tagged concepts’ prototype core and the communicative context provoke a violation of the correlation among different types of linguistic units’ meaning, causing a chain reaction in the systems, which fact is confirmed by the postulate of the phenomenological concept that an individual perceives the surrounding world correlating himself/herself with objects of the surrounding reality. Logic-minded human brain operations, based on emotional and sensory experience, largely depend on historical layers of the prototype core of concepts determining the national identity of the individual. The everyday language use forms symbolic combination of semantic cognitive meaning and syntactic structure of the linguistic units representing the nationally-tagged concepts in the Spanish language world view according to the communicative context and is based on the philosophical theory of phenomenology, the provisions of which serve for both concepts’ actual state research and their historical development patterns investigation. The postulate on human thinking volatility and instability reflecting in the language determines the temporal and spatial development of the national conceptual sphere, the analysis of which components requires synchronic-diachronic approach.

Ethical considerations of secondary data use

In this paper we discuss the ethical aspects of secondary use of language data: data that have been created and stored for purposes such as administration, training or quality monitoring. Such recordings provide interesting natural language data that stay clear of the observer’s paradox (Labov, 1972). Additionally, they offer opportunities for the field of applied linguistics that seeks to understand everyday language use and to assist language users. However, obtaining informed consent from interactants can be extremely difficult if gatekeepers shield them from researchers for reasons of professional ethics or because of legislation. In this article, we draw on our conversation analytic research into police interviews with child witnesses to argue a) that conceptualizing pre-recorded data as archival data is more appropriate than applying the ‘human participants’ ethical model; and b) that if sufficient protective measures are taken, secondary use of data without informed consent can be ethically sound.

Resisting the legitimacy of the question: Self-evident answers to questions about sources of knowledge in police interviews with child witnesses

Abstract This paper discusses questions about sources of knowledge in Dutch police interviews with child witnesses. Police officers are instructed to ask these questions in order to allow participants in the criminal procedure to assess the reliability of the testimony. In everyday interaction, asking “how someone knows” implies that what was said earlier is not taken for granted. Therefore, questions about sources of knowledge in police interviews are potentially delicate. This paper aims to show that (a) questions about sources of knowledge are related to a specialized institutional inference system and (b) children sometimes treat those questions as causing a dilemma between the need to provide an answer and the unusual character of the question. Drawing on insights from conversation analysis, the analysis focuses on occasions when children present their answer about the source of their knowledge as self-evident. These responses suggest that the question is not genuine and legitimate. At the same time, children still try to provide a relevant answer. The self-evident answers thus deal with the explicit request for a source of knowledge and, from their perspective, the unnecessary character of the question. Police officers generally ignore the self-evident aspect of the answers in their uptakes. Yet, when they do orient to it, they justify their questions as genuine information seeking questions. Police officers thus treat sources of knowledge as something they did not know, whereas sources of knowledge often can be inferred in everyday language use. We suggest that taking this unknowing stance conveys to the child and to the tape that the police officers are not presuming specific sources of knowledge.

When I need/want to: Normativity, identity, and form in user construals of ‘talk-like’ tweeting

The focus of this study is on how Twitter users construe talk-like tweeting in metalinguistic utterances. In a material of tweets containing or responding to explicit comparisons of tweeting to talking (N=520), a broad range of construals are identified, showing Twitter users associating talk-likeness with, e.g., notions of the textual representation of voice, of grammatical (in-)correctness, of accurately reflecting one׳s ‘real-life’ identity, and of regional or social variation in language use. These associations frequently serve normative functions, enforcing or contesting linguistic and discursive norms in both serious and playful ways. The findings offer a novel perspective on the oft-debated orality of computer-mediated discourse, providing a window on how a process of enregisterment (Agha, 2007) is instantiated and how language norms are actively negotiated by participants in everyday online language use on Twitter.

Un análisis de los usos de las lenguas (indígena y no indígena) entre niños toba/qom y mbýa de Argentina en experiencias lúdicas

In view of their bilingualism, these communities adopt specific strategies to everyday language use. This paper addresses the development of communication skills in less dominant languages in bilingual children from Argentina’s indigenous communities (Toba / Qom and Mbya). In particular, we set out to emphasize how certain recreational practices have impacted on use of less dominant languages among children in these groups (Toba / Qom in the first case, and Spanish in the second). The article is organized into five sections. It begins with a brief contextualization of the sociolinguistic situation of the languages spoken in the empirical referents analysed, to facilitate understanding of the importance and singularity of the case studies presented. We go on to develop the methodology supporting our research and finally consider the selected theoretical framework regarding the anthropology of childhood, while revisiting a number of anthropological contributions to studies on play and language. We also refer to the Toba / Qom and Mbya definitions of childhood and analyse games and language use among children.

A simple generative model of incremental reference resolution for situated dialogue

Referring to visually perceivable objects is a very common occurrence in everyday language use. In order to produce expressions that refer, the speaker needs to be able to pick out visual properties that the referred object has and determine the words that name those properties, such that the expression can direct a listener's attention to the intended object. The speaker can aid the listener by looking in the direction of the object and by providing a pointing gesture to indicate it. In order to resolve the reference, the listener has a difficult job to do: simultaneously use all of the linguistic and non-linguistic information; the words of the referring expression that denote properties of the object, such as its colour or shape, need to already be known, and the non-linguistic gaze direction and pointing gesture of the speaker need to be incorporated. Crucially, the listener does not wait until the end of the referring expression before she begins to resolve it; rather, she is interpreting it as it unfolds. A model that resolves referring expressions as the listener must be able to do all of these things. In this paper, we present such a generative model of reference resolution. We explain our model and show empirically through a series of experiments that the model can work incrementally (i.e., word for word) as referring expressions unfold, can incorporate multimodal information such as gaze and pointing gestures in two ways, can learn a grounded meaning of words in the referring expression, can incorporate contextual (i.e., saliency) information, and is robust to noisy input such as automatic speech recognition transcriptions, as well as uncertainty in the representation of the candidate objects.

Perception of phonological variants by non-native listeners

Recent research has demonstrated that listeners process carefully pronounced words (canonical forms) more quickly and accurately than casually produced words (non-canonical, reduced forms), despite the fact that casually produced word forms are more frequent in everyday language use. To date, research on the perception of phonological variants that are typical of casually produced speech has focused, with a few exceptions, on monolingual listeners. The current research examined non-native English speakers' processing of canonical and non-canonical word-forms in an attempt to more fully understand how non-native speakers of English cope with phonological variants in American English. Monolingual American English speakers and non-native American English speakers completed a cross-modal identity priming task with canonical, non-canonical, and unrelated auditory primes and visual targets. Overall, the non-native speakers were significantly slower than native speakers at recognizing both canonical and non-cano...

Parents’ and psychotherapists’ goals prior to psychodynamic child psychotherapy

In order to explore goals of parents and psychotherapists prior to child psychotherapy, the following questions were asked: (1) How are goals for psychotherapy formulated? (2) How can similarities and differences between parents’ and psychotherapists’ goals be understood? Questionnaires regarding psychodynamic child psychotherapies (n = 33) with parallel parental work were analysed using qualitative methodology. The child psychotherapists’ goals were often connected to the intrapsychic and relational development of the child. The parental therapists formulated goals focused on providing support to parents. The parents’ goals, on the other hand, concerned to a great extent giving the child help and to a lesser degree receiving help for themselves. They expressed their expectations concerning the child’s psychological development with a more everyday use of language, often with an emphasis on general psychological wellbeing. The study also indicated that parents had limited knowledge about the therapy’s implementation and framework. Some clinical conclusions could be made. Negotiating goals prior to parental and child psychotherapy can help create realistic expectations and promote a beneficial therapy situation.

Language shift among the Tonga of Mkoka? Assessing ethnolinguistic vitality in Gokwe South

This paper examines the ethnolinguistic vitality of the Tonga community of Mkoka in Gokwe South, with a focus on the Tonga language. The Tonga in Gokwe South have received little attention from researchers, if any, when compared to the other Tonga communities of Zimbabwe, who like them were displaced from the Zambezi valley when the Kariba dam claimed their homes in the 1950s. The research focuses on the way the Tonga of Mkoka in Gokwe South use their mother-tongue, Tonga and the second language, Shona, in the primary home/family domain and the secondary domains of language. Results show that Tonga vitality is based on social status, demographic and informal support variables, while its economic, socio-historical and formal support vitality is very low. In terms of language preferences, the Tonga mainly use their L1 in the family/home domain with interlocutors who are family, friends and neighbours for everyday language use and in social activities in their environments, while for the secondary language use domains, they shift to Shona, the economically more powerful language in the area. Shona was, however, found to be creeping into some Tonga homes, but reasons for this encroachment could not be concluded in this paper.

Minority youth, mobile phones and language use: Wa migrant workers’ engagements with networked sociality and mobile communication in urban China

This article explains the networked sociality of young Wa migrant workers made possible through the use of mobile phones and social media when these youths are on the move. Troubled by poor economic conditions in their rural homelands in southwest China, many Wa youth seek work in the urban manufacturing districts in southeast China. Most now rely on mobile phones to connect with the social media, QQ. Mobile networks promote a set of networked socialities which are integral to the continuity and development of Wa migrants’ ethnic ties. Their networking practices show both the constraints they face and the potentiality they develop for voicing social inequality and reconfiguring the dominant Chinese language ideology in urban work environments. Their networked sociality is virtual and yet rooted in their real-world activities involving fragmented engagements with mobile devices and everyday language use. The sociality that emerges is partly a matter of free-will and partly structure-constrained.

Reflexivity in Facebook interaction – Enregisterment across written and spoken language practices

The focus of this article is how linguistic reflexivity, the organization of linguistic features and the normative behavior following from these processes takes place across online and offline activities among a group of adolescents who daily interact with one another though several modes of communication. In the paper I argue that written discourse have taken up a much more important role in people׳s everyday discursive practices because of the widespread availability and impact of social media. As a consequence of this I make the claim that spoken and written discourse in combination should be considered when studying everyday language use and processes of enregisterment.In this article I illustrate how young people from a linguistically and culturally diverse area of Copenhagen use linguistic features indexical of speech styles in their linguistic practices on Facebook. I study how the use of such linguistic resources points towards different stereotypes and what sense of rights and sanctions are involved in the reactions to the use of these different types of marked language use. I study this to discuss how spoken language practices and practices associated with writing co-contribute to similar processes of enregisterment.

Language and iconic gesture use in procedural discourse by speakers with aphasia

Background: Conveying instructions is an everyday use of language, and gestures are likely to be a key feature of this. Although co-speech iconic gestures are tightly integrated with language, and people with aphasia (PWA) produce procedural discourses impaired at a linguistic level, no previous studies have investigated how PWA use co-speech iconic gestures in these contexts.Aims: This study investigated how PWA communicated meaning using gesture and language in procedural discourses, compared with neurologically healthy people (NHP). We aimed to identify the relative relationship of gesture and speech, in the context of impaired language, both overall and in individual events.Methods & Procedures: Twenty-nine PWA and 29 NHP produced two procedural discourses. The structure and semantic content of language of the whole discourses were analysed through predicate argument structure and spatial motor terms, and gestures were analysed for frequency and semantic form. Gesture and language were analysed in two key events, to determine the relative information presented in each modality.Outcomes & Results: PWA and NHP used similar frequencies and forms of gestures, although PWA used syntactically simpler language and fewer spatial words. This meant, overall, relatively more information was present in PWA gesture. This finding was also reflected in the key events, where PWA used gestures conveying rich semantic information alongside semantically impoverished language more often than NHP.Conclusions: PWA gestures, containing semantic information omitted from the concurrent speech, may help listeners with meaning when language is impaired. This finding indicates gesture should be included in clinical assessments of meaning-making.

Children Second Language Acquisition Pre-elementary and Elementary Level

This article deals with child’s second language acquisition and learning within the scope of the very early stages of school system. Normally, children learn language through their everyday social environment. In other words, from everyday language use with parents at home and outside home. To teach a foreign language to children, however, takes a little more effort. If one is teaching a child between 4 and 10, one will need to collect kid-friendly materials and get in understanding to how children use languages in appropriate methodology which corresponds to children’s needs. Thus, our proposal takes into account some basic principles that allow the child and get him ready to learning process. We will also focus on the parents’ and teachers’ role for acquiring an efficient background in his preparatory stages. So, how soon can one begin before introducing L2 instruction at school and how can this be reached in the teaching / learning process?