Volume 14, Issue 1

The article examines transnational students’ experiences of participation in European higher education by applying the notion of voice that encompasses the capacity to communicate and to be heard (Hymes 1996. Ethnography, linguistics, narrative inequality: Toward an understanding of voice. London: Taylor & Francis). Relating voice to access and participation, the article moves forward debates around incorporating students’ multilingual knowledge resources in diverse writing practices in academia. It takes into account structural and ideological conditions as well as the creative potential of translanguaging in students’ knowledge production. The instrumental case study explores the lived experiences of three multilingual students with highly diverse linguistic and educational backgrounds, who are enrolled in humanities master’s programmes at a Swedish university. It investigates the students’ perceptions of how they can make use of their linguistic and educational repertoires. The data derive from interviews around texts and audio-recorded writing diaries. The results demonstrate how translanguaging is mainly connected to writing for personal use and limited or regulated in assignment writing. They reveal multiple and contrasting ideological views on language use and knowledge, and highlight possibilities and obstacles for appropriating and recontextualising knowledge across languages, educational contexts and disciplines. The article thus connects translanguaging to questions of participation and access more broadly.

The negative effects of stereotyping arising from a victim’s acceptance and internalisation of stereotype identities are well-known. As stereotypes are created and maintained in discourse, understanding how targets of stereotyping employ discursive resources to resist the constraining structures of stereotypic identities imposed upon them can provide insight into the process of stereotyping and contribute to efforts to reduce the threat of stereotyping. We examined the strategies used by targets of stereotyping in contesting stereotypic representations of their social group through the mobilisation of a range of discourse strategies when presented with stereotyping attacks on the group. The findings revealed that stereotypes are subtle in nature and may not be easily recognised and hence, difficult to resist. Participants employed a number of discourse strategies to repair their fragmented self and group identities. However, in their attempt to maintain identity coherence, they ended up using stereotyping discourses themselves to devalue the perceived outgroup as well as subgroups they created within their own social group. The study highlights the complexity of stereotyping and its self-perpetuating character, and sheds light on the difficulty faced by targets of stereotyping discourse in reconciling their identities through intense discursive and identity work.

Using a communication accommodation theory framework, the purpose of the present study was to examine the relationship between perceived French vitality, cognitive and affective motivations for convergence, French skills, and convergence to French speakers among a group of young Italian speakers in the Aosta-Valley, Italy. Questionnaire data were collected among secondary school students in the city of Aosta ( N  = 169). The findings indicated that perceived French vitality resulted in greater cognitive motivation for speaking French, which, in turn, led to an increased use of French with French speakers. Additionally, and contrary to expectations, cognitive motivation had a greater impact on actual language use among those who reported poor French skills than among those reporting good French skills. At the same time, and also contrary to expectations, affective motivation did not predict language choice. Findings and implications are discussed in relation the bilingual accommodation.

The present study investigates the interaction of the higher-order personality trait of Neuroticism and the lower-order personality trait of Emotional Intelligence (trait EI) in the context of foreign language acquisition (FLA). A mediation model was applied to explore the pathway from Neuroticism via trait EI to self-rated L2 skills. The reported results show that the trait EI is not only a significant predictor of the self-reported L2 speaking proficiency, but also a mediator in the relationship between Neuroticism and self-rated L2 speaking proficiency. Consequently, trait EI could be regarded as an important variable in the FLA context because its positive impact on self-perceived L2 speaking skills might diminish the negative influence of Neuroticism.

This paper aspires to make a unique contribution to the field through investigating the high-WTC/low-WTC interactions to explore whether the level of Willingness to Communicate (WTC) positively affects (a) the amount of communication, and (b) the frequency of taking the leadership roles during jury discussions when each member has a firm verdict. Participants in groups of 3–4 had jury discussions, after performing a courtroom drama. Oral performance data, collected during the jury discussions, were transcribed verbatim, and coded for analysis. Then, the amount of L2 output, and the frequency of leadership roles each student took, were counted. The results suggested that, overall, high-WTC learners produced a higher amount of L2 output, and took more leadership roles. However, when only one participant had an opposing verdict within the group, the holder of that opposing verdict in each group showed a tendency to produce the un-proportionately large amount of L2 output, and take the leadership roles frequently, despite his or her low-WTC.

Using a novel combination of visual moving window paradigm and timed grammaticality judgment task, this study examines how third language (L3) learners (beginners and intermediate) with L2 German and different non-verb-second L1s process violated and non-violated main declarative sentences with fronted adverbials in L3 English. It examines the extent to which so far less-explored predictors (language dominance and proficiency) modulate non-facilitative word order transfer from the L2. Our results from experiment 1 corroborate existing (offline data) results (Angelovska, Tanja. 2017. (When) do L3 English learners transfer form L2 German? Evidence from spoken and written data by L1 Russian speakers. In Tanja Angelovska & Angela Hahn (eds.), L3 syntactic transfer: Models, new developments and implications (Bilingual Processing and Acquisition 5), 195–222. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins; Fallah, Nader & Ali Akbar Jabbari. 2018. L3 acquisition of English attributive adjectives dominant language of communication matters for syntactic cross-linguistic influence. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism 8. 193–216) and are in support of a hybrid transfer suggesting that neither proficiency nor dominance plays a role in transfer selection. Results from experiment 2 reveal that L1-dominance was the determining key factor for accuracy performance for low proficiency L3 subjects but higher L3 proficiency tended to neutralize this strong influence - providing evidence for the Scalpel Model (Slabakova, Roumyana. 2017. The scalpel model of third language acquisition. International Journal of Bilingualism 21. 651–665). We explain the contradictory results from the two experiments as a function of task effects.

Effective listening strategy use is crucial for second language (L2) learners as it facilitates listening comprehension. Although strategy use can be boosted from various ways (e.g. explicit instruction), we are uncertain whether L2 listening motivation can affect learners’ listening strategy use. The present study aims at examining the relationship between L2 listening motivation and L2 listening strategy use of learners with and without overseas study experience. We administered a L2 listening motivation questionnaire, measuring expectancy, importance and interest, and an English as a foreign language listening strategy inventory, focusing on top-down and bottom-up strategy use, with 465 Chinese undergraduate students. To supplement the quantitative results, a semi-structured interview was conducted with four participants to explore their L2 listening motivational profiles. The findings suggest that L2 listening motivation was positively correlated with bottom-up and top-down processing, except the relationship between importance and top-down processing. Learners with study abroad experience, who immersed themselves into real-time communication, were more aware of the importance of L2 listening thus employed more top-down strategies, whilst those without overseas experience, though acknowledged the cruciality of L2 listening, adopted fewer top-down strategies and were more examination driven. The findings shed light on L2 listening teaching and learning.

This is a cognitive linguistic study of Shi Jing ( The Book of Poetry ), the first collection of poems in Chinese history dated from the 11th to the 6th century B.C. Adopting the framework of Conceptual Metaphor Theory, we carry out a comprehensive analysis of all the metaphorical expressions in the collection, with the aim of investigating the underlying conceptual metaphors and exploring the interrelationships between metaphor, cognition and culture. The main findings are: 1) Altogether 476 metaphorical expressions have been identified, not only in those poems traditionally associated with bĭ (comparison) or xìng (affective image), but also in those poems traditionally associated with fù (narration). 2) Most of the metaphorical expressions identified belong to the Great Chain of Being Metaphor and can be further divided into downward ones and upward ones, with the former outnumbering the latter. 3) From the underlying conceptual metaphors, it can be observed that the conceptualization pattern of the Zhou Dynasty is rather anthropocentric and anthropomorphic, with a certain tendency towards animism. It is also patriarchal in regarding men as aesthetic subject and women as aesthetic object. 4) The Zhou people also showed remarkable figurative creativity. All the four devices summarized by Lakoff and Turner (1989) for creating novel language from conventional materials (extending, elaborating, questioning and composing) have been skillfully employed by the Zhou people to sing for their love and lament the miseries of life.

This one-year longitudinal case study investigates two 1.5 generation Korean–American students’ Korean language learning and usage before, during, and after their study abroad (SA) trip to Korea. Each came to the U.S. at eight years old for primary education and currently attends a university in the U.S. Their linguistic and cultural backgrounds brought intragroup diversities into their educational communities, including the study abroad program. With detailed documentation of interview data and ethnographic field notes, this study examines how learning Korean influences the construction of the learner’s self. This study also seeks to identify the ways that concepts of language learning, multilingual identities, and cultural belonging can be elucidated using narrative analysis. The participants’ post-sojourn experiences reveal SA creates an opportunity to develop cultural membership and to build multilingual identities with increased accessibility to the Korean communities. This study offers a nuanced understanding of the diversifying study abroad students in higher education in the U.S., and the mobilization of linguistic resources and the construction of identities in the context of study abroad.