Norms Of Language Use Research Articles

EMI Teachers in a ‘caught-between’ situation? Insights from a case study of an internationalised Chinese university

ABSTRACT In view of the rapid growth of English-medium instruction (EMI) in higher education institutions (HEIs), we observe the need to account for the educational and linguistic consequences of HEIs’ decision to ‘Englishise’ their curricula. Especially, EMI in Asian countries (e.g. China) are fuelled by state-level initiatives to internationalise the higher education sector and implemented top-down in local universities. Although empirical studies report on the (mis)alignments between policymaking and implementation of EMI, little is known about how the interplay between EMI and internationalisation of HEIs is contextualised and negotiated in local contexts. Using the ROAD-MAPPING framework [Dafouz, E., and U. Smit. 2016. ‘Towards a Dynamic Conceptual Framework for English-Medium Education in Multilingual University Settings.’ Applied Linguistics 37 (3): 397–415], we present a case study of an internationally-oriented Chinese university with five distinctive types of EMI. Triangulated documentary and interview data reveal: (1) contextualised policymaking of EMI, which takes into account the bi-directional internationalisation and the needs of the target student cohort, is crucial at the practitioner-level; (2) norms of language use are shaped both top-down and bottom-up, and the teacher-practitioners exercise their agency in enabling bi/multilingual language use and awareness toward Global Englishes from the bottom-up. We also shed new light on how the integration of language and content in EMI is negotiated and/or realised by presenting three special cases.

Challenging norms of gender and language

In this special issue of Toronto Working Papers in Linguistics, we engage in this productive and growing conversation by bringing together ongoing work on gender-inclusive language as well as the linguistic practices among trans and non-binary communities. Each of these papers offers a unique perspective on the ever-diversifying nuances of language, and together challenge established norms of language use and research practices.

DĖL BŪDVARDŽIO DRAUGIŠKAS REIKŠMIŲ

This article analyzes the proper use of various meanings of the adjective draugiskas ‘friendly’. It discusses the semantic structure of this adjective and its different interpretation in the Dictionary of Modern Lithuanian Language and in the Dictionary of Lithuanian Language. The semantic structure of the adjective draugiskas has been specified based on the data collected from the Corpus of Modern Lithuanian Language and other sources, the problem of its figurative use is discussed, and its validity from the stand point of proper usage of new meanings such as „safe“, „harmless“, „comfortable“ is evaluated. The data was collected from various functional styles and the conducted survey shows the real use of the modern adjective draugiskas. In addition, it shows that some of the phrases used with this word that are indicated as incorrect by users, are not violating the norms of language use. The appropriateness of new phrases, such as draugiskas restoranas, draugiska kuprinė, is discussed. KEY WORDS: adjective, meaning of the word, semantic component, metaphor, metonymy, the norm of language. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.15181/ rh.v0i16.1013

Learning English language through literature: Insights from a survey at university level in Bangladesh

This study intends to focus on the application of English literature in developing four language skills and language areas like vocabulary, grammar and pronunciation of undergraduate English learners in Bangladesh. The study also pays attention to the role of different genres of literature (i.e. poetry, short fiction, drama and novel) in the way of language teaching-learning process. Data were collected from university students and teachers through qualitative approach. The study revealed that respondents enjoyed learning English language through literature which played a significant role in developing four skills. Moreover, by reading literature, they have got interesting resources with authentic context which have provided a strong motivation for language learning. Literature readers can use authentic models for the norms of language use. It helps to enrich vocabulary and develop analytical and interpretive skills of a learner. In addition, reading literature in native languages was helpful to understand the inner meaning for the respondents. Most of them opined that, grammatical competence would be a prevalent factor to understand literature. They agreed that without having basic knowledge on grammar, a learner might face difficulties to learn a particular language thoroughly. Hence, they identified literature as a potential tool for communicative language teaching approach.

Introduction to Special Issue on Transience: Emerging Norms of Language Use

In this introduction to the special issue, the concept of transience is introduced as a theoretical perspective and as an object of research. The perspective of transience foregrounds the temporality of norm formation, located within the practices of people on the move. The introduction suggests that it is beneficial to apply the concept of transience in order to understand processes of norm development, including those pertaining to language choice and language socialization. Working from an understanding that communities form and dissolve, we claim that it is useful to look at these processes, as it is in the process of communities coming into being that norms emerge. Transience, in spite of being ubiquitous, is not always salient for members or analysts, but to identify, fixate and theorize it as an object of study in linguistic anthropology invites new ways of conceptualizing the interdependence of language and social structure.

The Language of Advertising: The Case of Code- Switching and Code-Mixing in the Algerian Advertising Scenery

This article deals with the phenomenon of Code-Switching and Code-Mixing in the language of advertising with a special emphasis on language mixing in the Algeria advertising scenery. The main objective consists to analyze how language mixing is used by advertisers to produce a persuasive effect on the consumer. Advertising designers use language mixing is in such an arty way and violate the norms of language use that the language of advertising appears to be a variety of its own right really serving attraction and memorability purposes that play an important role in the consumers’ purchasing decision. In addition, the article attempts to pinpoint to the hidden purposes which go in an anticlockwise movement regarding the language policy efforts the government is making to promote standard Arabic. The transliteration of the Arabic language in its dialectal and standard form using Latin alphabet together with the use of Arabizi symbols constitute a long term hidden agenda which attempts to revive the long ago attempts to Latinize the Arabic language.

Naturalism and ideological work: how is family language policy renegotiated as both parents and children learn a threatened minority language?

Parents who enroll their children to be educated through a threatened minority language frequently do not speak that language themselves and classes in the language are sometimes offered to parents in the expectation that this will help them to support their children's education and to use the minority language in the home. Providing language-learning opportunities for parents with children in minority-language education is understood as good practice in language revitalization, but there is little research on the efficacy of this practice. I will present data from narrative, life-history interviews with mothers who have learned Scottish Gaelic to some level and who have children who attend Gaelic-medium education, and I will discuss the difficulties they encounter in establishing new norms of language use in the family and the strategies they use to effect a new language policy in the home. I will show how these mothers work to establish a new norm of Gaelic use in the family in opposition to a common background ideology that understands language as a natural object, and therefore, that it is wrong and bad parenting to ‘force’ a language on a child.

Undoing Gender Stereotypes in Hindi

The basic prerequisite for using any language is the willingness of the speaker to follow the rules of the game. Socially defined norms of language use then tend to set the limits within which one can express oneself using this language. Whether these norms set the speaker free or whether they act as constraints in a free expression of Self, is a question that will be raised in this article. Using examples from Hindi, the paper highlights the role of such norms of language use in perpetuating gender stereotypes. Gender stereotypes get constructed as part of a broader process of social differentiation but the site of this construction is to a large extent the normal everyday discourse. A normal classroom discussion amongst university students in New Delhi thus shows how deep rooted such stereotypes are and how effectively they get perpetuated through language and linguistic norms in Indian society. The basic premise in this paper is that meanings are context-specific, they are not fixed and they get created in discourse. But since language use is one thread in social fabric, it serves as an instrument to construct and perpetuate gender stereotypes. The paper is more of an essay on issues that became obvious about gender stereotypes during two classroom discussions. It should not therefore be taken as a study into the deeper aspects of gender representation in Hindi.

Ideologies and norms in language and education policies in Europe and their relationship with everyday language behaviours

Formulations of linguistic rights in European official documents reveal important ideological characteristics of the thinking about language in European societies. These ideologies have important consequences for the language policies and education policies pursued by authorities and for the norms of language use promoted by education systems and gatekeepers. At the bottom of this is the concept of ‘languages’ as separable entities, a concept which cannot be upheld with respect to the real-life behaviours of speakers. As such, languages are sociocultural constructions, and norms of language use which aim at ‘purity’ are in contrast to everyday linguistic behaviours among speakers. Based on examples from ongoing studies of youth language, I suggest that other norms are more relevant, in particular the so-called poly-languaging, a term which covers the use of various features regardless of their ideologically determined association with ‘languages’. This notion is relevant, particularly in superdiverse societies, not only in accounting for behaviours, but also with respect to education and with respect to language rights.

Establishing new norms of language use: the circulation of linguistic ideology in three new Irish-language communities

Ideology can be understood as a guide to action, and therefore, language ideology can be viewed as a link between language ability on the one hand, and language use on the other. In this respect, language ideology plays a central role in the success of language revitalization movements. In an effort to understand how new language ideologies are advanced in language revitalization movements at the micro level, research was conducted on the circulation of language ideology in three new Irish-language communities in Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. I use these three communities as specific examples of a general policy problem in revitalizing lesser-used languages: how does one establish new norms for the use of a threatened language in a given site or domain and how does one defend these new norms against the counter-ideology of an encroaching or dominant language?

Vietnamese immigrants’ shifting patterns of status display at work

This study compared language choices made by Vietnamese speakers in a circuit-board manufacturing company in California with utterances constructed for similar situations by Vietnamese speakers in Hanoi, Vietnam. Particular attention was paid to how both groups of speakers signaled social relationships during talk at work, primarily through their selection or omission of Vietnamese address forms and other honorific markers. The California supervisor and assistant, during high-pressure problem-solving events, bypassed the use of kinship terms and, instead, chose non-honorific terms and other markers of informality, thus invoking a normative frame of teamwork and open debate about courses of action that pervade the contemporary American workplace. Excerpts of videotaped interactions between these California workers were shown to the Hanoi participants, after which they were asked to imagine a context in Hanoi similar to the one that they observed. Their constructed utterances were found to contain a variety of address forms — mostly personal names and kinship terms — along with other honorific and politeness forms. The Hanoi participants tended to incorporate these forms even within the economy of talk found in high-pressure moments. In including these forms, they highlighted the hierarchical relationship between the interlocutors as elder and younger, superior and subordinate. Their inclusion of these expressions reflects a cultural norm: the salience of maintaining interpersonal relationships in the workplace, which are managed elegantly through the Vietnamese person-reference system. The findings in this study suggest evidence of a shift in the norms of language use by Vietnamese immigrants living and working in the United States.

Plurilingual conversations among bilingual adolescents

Turkish–Danish grade school students use not only their L1 and their L2 in group conversation. A number of additional varieties are represented by token one-word loans or by whole utterances. Among these varieties are English, French, and German at the high-prestige school-subject end of the range, and a stylized, stereotypical immigrant Danish reflecting the accented Danish of Middle East immigrants at the low-prestige end of the range. In their conversations, the adolescents not only use these varieties in keeping with the evaluations ascribed to them in school and in society in general, but also to signal ironic distance to certain varieties and, by implication, to adult norms of language use. The present paper uses group conversations from the Køge Project to illustrate how the young Turkish–Danish bilinguals draw on shared knowledge of societal evaluations in their plurilingual practice and also how they distance themselves from these evaluations. Such activity involves not only ‘crossing’ in Rampton's terms and ‘double voicing’ in Bakhtin's, but also explicit references and discussions. The paper concludes that it makes little sense to distinguish between ‘monolinguals’ and ‘bilinguals’ or, for that matter, ‘multilinguals’ in this context, as the patterns of language use with reference to general norms and evaluations are the same for all language users.

Improving EFL learners' pragmatic awareness

This paper overviews the ways in which EFL learners' pragmatic awareness can be developed in language classrooms through focused instruction and practice. It argues that effective communication requires awareness of the conventions governing language use and attention to the characteristics of the context and the interlocutors, besides linguistic resources. The main claim is that even though some pragmatics data that is based on native speaker norms might not provide relevant models for learners of English as a foreign or international language, these learners still need to become aware of crosscultural variation in norms of language use and learn how to consider social and contextual factors surrounding effective communication. After defining pragmatic competence and transfer, the paper discusses possible ways for integrating pragmatic consciousness-raising into language teaching and the problems involved in this endeavour. It then describes a course designed to raise pragmatic awareness in advanced level EFL learners as part of their TEFL training program. The underlying principles, materials and sample activities of the course are presented and learners' reaction to the course is discussed.

Response and the social construction of error

Although the subject of error has been the focus of considerable scholarly inquiry, little is known about the effects of error on teachers' responses to students' writing. This article offers a prolegomenon to further research on response to error from a social constructivist perspective. Three areas for investigation are suggested and illustrated with more specific focuses: the effects of error on teachers' processing of student writing; the relationship between error and the and the teachers' construction of the writer's persona; and the relationship between the changing status of socially constructed norms of language use and response to error. Acknowledging the general disjunction between scholarship and teaching practices, the second half of the article turns to another kind of needed inquiry within the “scholarship of teaching.” Greater focus on reflective practice allows teachers to develop more sophisticated approaches to error in the classroom, especially in the relationship between instruction and response to students' writing.

Protean Communication: The Language of Computer-Mediated Communication

Computer-mediated communication (CMC), which began in proprietary companies two decades ago, has developed into a worldwide medium of communication that ESOL learners encounter inside and outside the classroom. Because learners' participation in CMC is likely to increase in the coming years, it is important for TESOL professionals to understand the norms of language use developed by CMC-based speech communities. Research has found that CMC exhibits features of simplified registers associated with both oral and written language. It also exhibits its own norms for organizing conversation and accommodating threads of discourse. CMC, however, cannot be studied as a neutral linguistic phenomenon; instead, researchers and educators need to examine how CMC influences the dominance of English, access to knowledge and power, and equity in discourse. Distance learning, an application of CMC that has begun and will continue to serve a role in English language teaching and in ESOL teacher education, is an area in which these issues are relevant. CMC should be viewed not in terms of its functionality but in terms of the ways in which users shape a new medium of communication to fit the needs of their speech community.

Interactional routines and the socialization of interactional style in adult learners of Japanese

Interactional routines are powerful in first language acquisition contexts, socializing children into appropriate norms of language use. This paper investigates the role of interactional routines in the socialization of L2 interactional competence via analysis of 15 hours of foreign language classroom data. Results reveal that active and peripheral participation in the routines of the classroom shapes learner ability to use the follow-up turn of the IRF routine to perform assessments and other expressions responsive to their interlocutor's utterances. Instances in which teachers explicitly guide learners in the expression of alignment are rare. In teacher-fronted contexts, learners are guided to be responsive to teacher questions, and have little opportunity for expression of alignment, including assessments. Learner assessments, when they occur in teacher-fronted contexts, have particular sequential consequences, triggering extended assessment activity by the teacher. The teachers' language incorporates various follow-up turn expressions during interaction with students. Longitudinal analysis of learner language during pair-work reveals an increase in learner use of follow-up expressions, including assessments, evidencing the socializing power of both active and peripheral participation in the interactional routines of the classroom.

Code-Switching in the Primary Classroom: One Response to the Planned and the Unplanned Language Environment in Brunei

This study looks at the phenomenon of code-switching in the primary school in Brunei Darussalam. Instruction in the first three years of the primary school is in Bahasa Melayu. From Primary 4 onwards English takes over as the language medium for a number of the content subjects. Using data from a small number of classrooms at the Primary 4 and 5 levels, the paper looks at how the teacher incorporates elements of both Bahasa Melayu and Brunei Malay into content lessons. In providing the background to this study, some emphasis is given to the sociolinguistic situation in Brunei and, in particular, the important role played by Brunei Malay, the de facto national dialect, in the community. Code-switching in the classroom is seen within the wider framework of the norms of language use in the community, and the considerable linguistic pressures on students and teachers alike in the transition from Bahasa Melayu to English at Primary 4 level.

Code-Switching in the Primary Classroom: One Response to the Planned and the Unplanned Language Environment in Brunei A Response

This study looks at the phenomenon of code-switching in the primary school in Brunei Darussalam. Instruction in the first three years of the primary school is in Bahasa Melayu. From Primary 4 onwards English takes over as the language medium for a number of the content subjects. Using data from a small number of classrooms at the Primary 4 and 5 levels, the paper looks at how the teacher incorporates elements of both Bahasa Melayu and Brunei Malay into content lessons. In providing the background to this study, some emphasis is given to the sociolinguistic situation in Brunei and, in particular, the important role played by Brunei Malay, the de facto national dialect, in the community. Code-switching in the classroom is seen within the wider framework of the norms of language use in the community, and the considerable linguistic pressures on students and teachers alike in the transition from Bahasa Melayu to English at Primary 4 level.