Linguistic Opportunities Research Articles

“What are they talking about?” A sociocultural linguistic approach to practical task effectiveness

This case study demonstrates teaching and learning activities in the school laboratory, and employs talk moves for the direct assessment of practical task effectiveness. By adopting a sociocultural linguistic approach (SCLA), learning chemistry is understood to be a discursive process in which knowledge is constructed through social interaction and language. Thus, learning may be identified by attending to the language used in classroom discourse. The multimodal communication that took place during two acid and alkali practical lessons for learners aged 11 and 12 years was filmed and transcribed. Analysis of the transcripts revealed the language learning opportunities afforded by the tasks and demonstrated that school chemistry practical lessons can be understood in terms of three linguistic opportunities: introducing, using, and reflecting upon language. This lesson structure could be employed to plan more inclusive and equitable practical lessons which foreground language and value discussion equally to manipulating equipment. Recasting practical lessons as sites for learning and using the language of chemistry, key words introduced by the teacher are tracked and counted throughout the lesson to identify when they are used and by whom. The novel 3-part practical (3P) framework and multimodal discourse analysis are employed to assign the use of key words to the macroscopic, submicroscopic or symbolic level of thought. This analysis reveals the centrality of a results table to structuring talk and the detrimental effect of introducing novice learners to multiple levels of thought simultaneously. The Talk Identification (ID) Grid has been developed and used here to analyse student group discourses using talk moves to signpost learning in the domain of ideas and the domain of observables. Descriptors are provided to support instructors in identifying talk moves and how these moves relate to practical task effectiveness to target interventions that improve learning procedural and conceptual knowledge in the laboratory.

Migrant churches in The Hague – new religious and linguistic opportunities for churchgoers

ABSTRACT The Hague, the third largest city of The Netherlands, is a multicultural and multi-ethnic urban centre with many migrant churches scattered across the city. This article examines the linguistic presence and identity of a select number of English-speaking churches and their identification through Linguistic Landscaping. Our findings show that, while it is claimed that Dutch society is becoming increasingly secularised, the many migrant and other international churches currently present in The Hague suggest the opposite. In addition, it appeared that English-language churches in The Hague attract large numbers of Dutch congregants for whom English is their second language. Reasons for this are that English is perceived as a lighter language than Dutch for practising their religion, and that it brings fresh perspectives to their faith. The use of English is thus expanding to the religious domain in The Netherlands in a new way (cf. Edwards, A. 2016. English in the Netherlands: Functions, Forms and Attitudes. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins). Applying Linguistic Landscaping as a research tool was found to work only for older heritage-language churches, which have a more established and sometimes even officially recognised position in the city, than newer migrant churches, whose presence is often transient in line with the changing nature of superdiverse cities.

Sociolinguistics of Youth Activism: Implications for The Future of Political Language

From gun control reforms to climate change protests, today’s young activists have been described as ‘louder and more coordinated than [their] predecessors’ (Marris, 2019: 471). This article looks at the linguistic changes at work behind this description: how does their language make youth activists’ voices grow stronger, and how does it help them discuss, mobilise and organise their campaigns. The article begins with a comparison of the language of youth activists today and that of their predecessors, to better assess the extent and nature of these changes. It then analyses the influence of the internet and social media on the political language of contemporary youth. Finally, it considers reactions to youth activist language and reflects upon its implications on the future of political voices. This article aims to bridge the gap between existing literature in the field, which separately contrasts contemporary youth activists with their predecessors, or examines the impact of the internet and social media on their activities. We propose, instead, that focusing on the language of contemporary youth activists, as a legacy and an evolving creative process, on and offline, will provide a better understanding of their impact on the future of political language. We find a nuanced picture, where the linguistic opportunities offered by the internet and social media increase the reach and organisation of contemporary youth activists, but make them look performative and nonchalant, perhaps because they are considered in the terms of traditional politics.

Применение языковых возможностей

This article under discussion analyzes the use of linguistic opportunities, wide and narrow possibilities, the artistic implementation of linguistic units, occlusal constructions and factors that strengthen them, and speaking skills of the writer. The author of the article believes that a number of factors create conditions for the artistic embodiment of any linguistic opportunity, guided by the author. The harmony of these factors, determining the degree of reality realization, provides the aesthetic power of the literary text. Artistic intention, aesthetic purpose, and artistic skill are the leading personal factors that ensure the poetic realization of linguistic possibility.

История собраний рукописей Молдо Нияза

The issue of the existence of Kyrgyz literature and literary language prior the Soviet period has not yet been resolved and still remains an open topic for discussion. There is no nation without a writing system, the history; the past and experience of folk are presented to the next generation through written system. This paper provides information about the formation stages of Kyrgyz literature and literary language, written works, documents and letters written in one of the Turkic languages — Kyrgyz in the pre-Soviet period, especially in the XVIII–XIX centuries. Also, in this paper there are an assessment of ideas, criticism and opinions of Kyrgyz culture researches about Kyrgyz written system such as: A. Kanymetov, S. S. Danyarov, philologists turkologists: I. A. Batmanov, K. K. Yudakhin, S. E. Malov, V. M. Ploskikh, E. Tenishev, A. Nallo, B. M. Yunusaliev, S. K. Kudaibergenov and Kh. K. Karasaev. In this study we attempted to determine the creation dates of some written works found today. The found documents and manuscripts, relating to the middle of the XIX century, create more opportunities for linguistics’ study, for ideas and suggestions on the status of the Kyrgyz language as being Turkic of almost sesquicentennial prescription. We tried to provide the most information on the topics of study and collection of works, characterized as the most significant documents of Moldo Niyaz — one of the first representatives of ‘zhazgych akyn’s’ (reading and chronicling improvising poets). The fact that the turkologists linguists did not carry out the necessary works and did not present documentary evidence of the Kyrgyz written language results to the opinion of non-existence of Kyrgyz written language, thus literary language. However, to the present day the activities of collection of the original manuscript’s copies of ‘zhazgych akyn’s’ important representatives among the public, a compilation of manuscripts, and their linguistic studies are still ignored. This kind of work will be a valuable and useful resource for large text research in the field of hermeneutics.

Film Novelization as Multimodal Translation

Novelization, i.e. a literary adaptation of a film, despite its widespread presence on the book market, was treated as a merely commercial phenomenon, and until the late 1990s, it did not inspire any academics research. The main objective of this paper is to show that the phenomenon of novelization can offer new opportunities for linguistics and to reconsider the place of novelization in adaptation and translation studies. It is claimed that the process of film-to-book transformation can be called a translation process. The term multimodal translation is adopted since transforming a multimodal text film into a monomodal one book involves a change of modalities and their density. What follows is an attempt to propose tools that can be used for the effective analysis of multimodal translation, which involve the classical Aristotelian view of the three-part plot of verbal texts and Elżbieta Tabakowska’s theory of cognitive translation. In order to illustrate the film–book translation process, an Interstellar film segment and its book counterpart are analyzed and the conclusion has been drawn that both the film and the book units use the same orientational image schemata. These findings prove that the extension of Tabakowska’s theory to multimodal texts is an adequate framework for the comparison of a film and its novelization.

ЛИНГВИСТИЧЕСКОЕ ОПИСАНИЕ ПОЛИТИЧЕСКОГО МЕДИАТЕКСТА СОВРЕМЕННОГО КИТАЙСКОГО ЯЗЫКА

This study presents the linguistic analysis of modern Chinese political media texts. The linguistic analysis focuses on the most common features of the lexical and grammatical characteristics of Chinese media texts. The analysis is based on the sampling of the news texts that were covering the events in Ukraine for years 2013–2014. The objective of the research was to identify characteristics that form a political image of the participants of these events. First of all, based on the evidence of immense practical material, the paper classifies and describes lexical characteristics of political media texts. The author distinguishes and describes such peculiarities as wide use of journalistic clichés and stock phrases, terminology, and proper names. All characteristics are shown in the examples from the newspaper articles. A specific function is performed by the expressions of implicit and explicit evaluativity, i.e. use of expressive means and the context to express the author’s attitude towards the subject of the media text. The same function is performed by the use of the vocabulary and phraseology in figurative meaning and stylistic contamination or mix of different styles in one text. The other important peculiarity is a wide use of linguistic opportunities of “wényán”, a written form of Putonghua, based on the linguistic principles of Old Chinese. It is worth mentioning that wényánizms – used both in vocabulary and grammar – have become an inherent part of a correct written text in modern Chinese. The paper also classifies the data regarding syntactic characteristics of Chinese media texts, describes the most frequent syntactic models. The result of the analysis is not only identification and generalization of the distinctive features of news reports in Chinese, but also the understanding of the fact that contents do not largely influence the essential lexical and grammatical characteristics.

Deafness and Dominance: Analyzing The Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s Production of To Kill a Mockingbird

Deafness and Dominance:Analyzing The Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s Production of To Kill a Mockingbird Maureen McDonnell (bio) The Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s 2011 production of To Kill a Mockingbird offers complicated ways to think about characters’ relationships to justice, entitlement, and community. By casting noted Deaf actor Howie Seago as Bob Ewell and reconsidering the character’s language use, the production exploits the gap between the playscript and the audience members’ interpretations.1 The casting allows for both gestural and verbal languages in the courtroom, thereby creating a conspicuous interval in the courtroom scene. This layered language usage allows audience members to witness an “open space lying between…two parts of the same thing; a gap, opening.”2 Any production of To Kill a Mockingbird offers a sinister version of Ewell, certainly. However, Seago uses his character’s hearing status and language usage as “intervening portion[s] of something,” advancing Ewell’s violent agenda in opportunistic ways that expose how marginalization operates in Maycomb.3 Seago’s iteration of Bob Ewell and the performance of Susannah Flood as Mayella Ewell offer additional interpretative possibilities for audience members. The pair’s use of home sign, a shared gestural language, offers another vector for onstage characters to see the abuse within the Ewell home—thereby challenging the Ewells’ respectability within the courtroom. However, their language usage also clarifies Mayella’s resentment of and resistance to her father. Through Seago and Flood’s characters’ spoken and signed dialogue, this production creates a vital new space to understand the damning and restorative power of language and community. [End Page 475] OSF, a much-awarded Shakespeare Festival, had a long-standing tradition of diverse casts prior to Howie Seago’s hiring in 2009.4 Able to perform in spoken English, American Sign Language (ASL), or a modified ASL, Seago offers a number of linguistic opportunities for his characters. Seago’s linguistic flexibility becomes central to the production’s exploration of characters’ perceived respectability and, as a result, of their deemed credibility. Such credibility is at stake in the accusation that Mayella was raped, a claim that dooms Tom Robinson. Director Marion McClinton cast hearing actor Susannah Flood as Mayella Ewell,5 established in this production as a CODA (Child Of Deaf Adults).6 Flood’s performance recuperates Mayella, a character frequently demeaned and discounted within the text and in literary scholarship. This Mayella’s linguistic affiliation with her father undermines her respectability within the court, as her gestures paradoxically reveal both her father’s exploitation and a means of her rebellion. With these casting choices in place, audience members are asked to consider characters that navigate multiple vectors of identity, including those that are racial, gendered, linguistic, or class-based. Susannah Flood speaks to this navigation, reporting that “the director was interested in the idea that two minority groups would have more possibilities for contention because they are both disenfranchised. They’re slightly more resentful of the other rather than making it a clear story between Blacks and Whites.”7 The additional identities performed by Seago and Flood—whose Mayella is confirmed as an incest survivor in this production—unsettle easy notions about how Maycomb citizens understand, implement, and are subject to justice. The dramatically central Maycomb court is ostensibly where citizens voice their narratives and where juries evaluate speakers’ respectability and credibility. The Ewells’ gestural language derails this process, both enabling more complex negotiations between the Ewells and the court and resulting in unexpected leverage for Mayella. This paper focuses on how this production stages these negotiations. Setting the Stage: Bodies and Language The OSF production team’s casting and stage design reinforce the range of perspectives within the play. The decision to cast Seago and to stage the Ewells’ signed communication allows the pair to have both public and [End Page 476] private interactions during the trial. The casting of two actors as Scout highlights the historical perspective of Lee’s adult first-person narrator (as personified by Dee Maaske, who comments on and reminisces about the dramatic action) and Scout as a child (performed by young Kaya Van Dyke).8 Onstage throughout, Maaske’s presence and the occasionally doubled gestures and...

The learner's voice: exploring bilingual children's selective language use and perceptions of minority language competence

Previous studies have demonstrated how primary-school-aged children learning a minority language at school revert to the use of their dominant L1 in peer–peer situations, both within and outside the classroom. Identifying the cause of this pattern is central to language policy strategies and initiatives across many minority language regions, and requires a consideration of the pupil's own perceptions on the issue. This study examined the views of 98 primary-school-aged children attending schools in four counties of Wales. All children were from English-dominant homes and between the ages of 8 and 11. All children attended schools that taught predominantly through the medium of Welsh. Their attitudes towards speaking and using Welsh and English, their beliefs about the linguistic opportunities afforded to them at school, and their perceptions of their own linguistic abilities were collected via questionnaires and focus group interviews. Whilst their attitudes towards Welsh and English were generally positive, their perceptions of the opportunities to use Welsh in a supportive and sympathetic context, and their own perceptions of their linguistic abilities in Welsh, varied across the different counties in Wales. The implications of the findings, particularly in relation to effective language policy strategies in minority language contexts, are discussed.

Reflection under construction: Using the Handbook of Reflection and Reflective Inquiry in practice

In this work in progress piece, we outline our use of the Handbook of Reflection and Reflective Inquiry as together we looked at the problem of determining the viability of a multicultural student for special education services. We highlight the ways in which the reflective processes in the Handbook assisted us as we considered the cognitive, social and linguistic opportunities for a particular child.

Online chatting: An alternative approach to simulations

This article looks at online Internet chatting as a means to resolve simulation tasks in lieu of face-to-face negotiation. It is suggested here that online chatting extends linguistic opportunities for participation in small-group settings in a much more egalitarian manner, while retaining the interactive qualities of spoken conversation. The conclusion is that language learners who are normally reluctant to speak in groups readily participate online. Furthermore, it appears that using online synchronous communication to resolve simulation tasks is viewed positively by language learners, which may in turn stimulate further attempts at language production.

Online Chatting: An Alternative Approach to Simulations

This article looks at online Internet chatting as a means to resolve simulation tasks in lieu of face-to-face negotiation. It is suggested here that online chatting extends linguistic opportunities for participation in small-group settings in a much more egalitarian manner, while retaining the interactive qualities of spoken conversation. The conclusion is that language learners who are normally reluctant to speak in groups readily participate online. Furthermore, it appears that using online synchronous communication to resolve simulation tasks is viewed positively by language learners, which may in turn stimulate further attempts at language production.

Bakhtin in the Classroom: What Constitutes a Dialogic Text? Some Lessons from Small Group Interaction

At a time when powerful agencies in the UK are advocating whole class teaching as an element of successful classroom practice (particularly directed at primary classrooms in relation to the teaching of numeracy and literacy), I seek in this paper to examine the potential of Small Group Interaction (SGI) to provide significant linguistic opportunities which, I argue, whole class teaching is less well placed to deliver. To do this, I shall compare data of two groups of children from the same classroom engaged on the same small group activity. Drawing on the work of Bakhtin (and Wertsch's interpretations of Bakhtin) I shall seek to identify both monologic and dialogic features in the children's discourse, tracing the origins of monologic discourse in the practices of Whole Class Interaction (WCI) - the dominant genre of the classroom. Following Bakhtin's account of addressivity and speech genre, I shall claim a role for dialogic talk in any classroom based on sociocultural principles of learning.

Research-based language intervention strategies adapted for deaf and hard of hearing children.

Strategies found to facilitate the language development of young, hearing children are reviewed in this paper, and adaptations and examples for use with deaf and hard-of-hearing children are provided as alternatives to simply advising professionals and parents to increase the quantity of conversation with these children. It is suggested that adults accelerate the language acquisition of deaf and hard-of-hearing students by capitalizing on the linguistic opportunities provided in particular environments, rearranging environments, being responsive to indications that children have comprehended messages and are open to risk communication, and specifically by intervening on form, content, and use skills. The author challenges professionals to document empirically the usefulness of each language intervention technique presented here.

Using novels in the language-learning classroom

Using a novel with the English language learner provides a rich source of pedagogic activities. At the same time, it gives rise to its own set of difficulties—both practical and literary. In this article, I begin by attempting to identify some features of novels which provide unusual educational and linguistic opportunities for the learner. I then examine some of the difficulties both teachers and students may experience in using novels in the classroom and provide sample materials that I have devised in an attempt to overcome these problems. These activities were produced for one particular novel. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, but I hope the principles underlying them would be applicable to most other novels as well.

Historical Notes on the Embu of Central Kenya

The oral traditions of the acephalous pre-contact Embu are critically summarized. The Shungwaya hypothesis concerning the origin of the Kikuyu and related peoples is examined and rejected. The possibility of using the Embu oral tradition as a source of historical information is discounted and some opportunities for linguistics and archaeology suggested. The paper concludes with a survey of Embu contacts with the coastal traders and early European-led parties.