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PhD supervision meetings in an English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) setting: linguistic competence and content knowledge as neutralizers of institutional and academic power

  • Beyza Björkman

    Beyza Björkman is Associate Professor of English at the Department of English at Stockholm University. Her general research interests include spoken academic discourse and the use of English as an academic lingua franca in English-medium higher education, language change, linguistic equality and language policy. She is currently doing research on the spoken genre of PhD supervisor–PhD student interactions in supervision meetings.

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Published/Copyright: March 14, 2017

Abstract

The present paper investigates PhD supervision meetings, using material from naturally occurring speech of ten hours by PhD supervisors and students who all use English as a lingua franca (ELF) for research purposes. The recordings have been transcribed in their entirety, with conversation analytical procedures and additional ethnographic interviews with the PhD supervisors. The present paper is a follow-up to the two previous studies by the author (in European Journal for Applied Linguistics 3[2], 2015, and The Routledge Handbook of English for Academic Purposes, 2016) and focuses on linguistic competence and content knowledge as factors possibly mitigating the power asymmetry present in the interactions. The findings show no observable power asymmetries manifested in the interactions or in the interview responses by the supervisors. The analyses showed that the supervisors’ and the students’ level of linguistic competence seemed very similar, which was further supported by the supervisors’ self-reports of their own English and their informal evaluations of their students’ levels of proficiency. When it comes to content knowledge, the students overall showed very good command of their subjects, disciplinary conventions and their projects in general, further supported by their supervisors’ evaluations in the interview data. Based on these findings, it is suggested here that in ELF interactions of this particular type where the speakers have similar levels of linguistic competence and content knowledge, power asymmetries become less visible.

Abstrakt

Den här artikeln handlar om doktorandhandledningsmöten och är baserad på inspelningar av 10 timmars interaktion mellan handledare och doktorander som alla använder engelska som lingua franca (ELF). Alla inspelningar har transkriberats i sin helhet och analyserats genom att använda metodprocedurer tagna från samtalsanalys. Etnografiska intervjuer har genomförts med handledarna i anslutning till inspelningarna för att få ytterligare information om dessa samtals natur. Denna artikel är en uppföljare till författarens två tidigare studier (Björkman 2015. PhD supervisor–PhD student interactions in an English-medium Higher Education (HE) setting: Expressing disagreement. European Journal for Applied Linguistics (EUJAL) 3(2). 205–229; och 2016. PhD adviser and student interactions as a spoken academic genre. In Ken Hyland & Philip Shaw (eds), The Routledge Handbook of English for Academic Purposes, 348–361. Routledge.) och fokuserar specifikt på språkfärdighet och maktobalans i handledningsmöten. Studiens resultat visar att handledarnas och doktorandernas språkfärdigheter är lika. Detta resultat bekräftas av handledarnas bedömningar av sina egna och av doktorandernas språkfärdighetsnivåer. Av inspelningarna framgår även att doktoranderna i studien har mycket goda ämnes- och disciplinkunskaper, vilket bekräftas av handledarna i intervjuerna. Baserat på dessa resultat kan man konstatera att maktobalanser blir mindre synbara när talare har liknande språkfärdigheter och ämneskunskaper.

About the author

Beyza Björkman

Beyza Björkman is Associate Professor of English at the Department of English at Stockholm University. Her general research interests include spoken academic discourse and the use of English as an academic lingua franca in English-medium higher education, language change, linguistic equality and language policy. She is currently doing research on the spoken genre of PhD supervisor–PhD student interactions in supervision meetings.

Appendix: transcription conventions

The transcription conventions used have been taken from the ELFA corpus conventions and modified moderately (see http://eng.helsinki.fi/elfa). The symbols that have been used are given below:

,pause 2–3 s
.pause 3–4 s
(text)uncertain transcription
(xx)unidentifiable word/utterance
((…))omitted speech
[overlapping speech begins
]overlapping speech ends
<text>transcriber’s comments
@@laughter

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Published Online: 2017-3-14
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