Volume 3, Issue 1

The paper suggests that among reasons for the difficulties collegiate foreign language (FL) programs in the United States (and most likely elsewhere) encounter in assuring that their students attain the kind of upper-level multiple literacies necessary for engaging in sophisticated work with FL oral and written texts may be the fact that prevailing frameworks for capturing FL performance, development, and assessment are insufficient for envisioning such textually oriented learning goals. The result of this mismatch between dominant frameworks, typically associated with communicative language teaching, and the goals of literary cultural studies programs as humanities programs is that collegiate FL departments and their faculty members face serious obstacles in their efforts to create the kind of coherent, comprehensive, and principled curricula that would be necessary for overcoming what are already extraordinary challenges in an educational environment that provides little support for long-term, sustained efforts at language development toward advanced multiple literacies. The paper traces these links by examining three such frameworks in the United States: the Proficiency framework of the 1980s, based on the ACTFL oral proficiency interview, the Standards framework of the 1990s, part of a more general standards movement in U.S. education, and the most recent document, by the Modern Language Association (MLA), which focuses on the need for new curricular structures in collegiate FL education. Specifically, it provides an overview of the U.S. educational landscape with an eye toward the considerable influence such frameworks can have in the absence of a comprehensive language education policy; lays out key characteristics that would be necessary for a viable approach to collegiate FL education; probes the complex effects the three frameworks have had in collegiate FL programs; and explores how one department sought to counter-act their detrimental influence in order to affirm and realize a humanistically oriented approach to FL education. The paper concludes with overall observations about the increasing power of frameworks to set educational goals and ways to counteract their potentially unwelcome consequences.

This article critically examines the demand that academic research should be assessed by its impact, and universities' compliance with that demand. Although the discussion centres mainly on the UK, it will have relevance to any academic context where government and/or business seek to control academics. The article begins by briefly examining the meaning of impact. It next considers the role of applied linguistics in shaping language-teaching revolutions, and suggests it was commercial and political interests which had the greatest impact. Moving on to the current wider scope of applied linguistics, it suggests that while the discipline has had positive influence in some areas, it has failed to influence government policy, but that this failure is not a measure of its worth. In the second part of the article, the focus changes to a consideration of impacts on applied linguistics by public relations (PR) models of language, and government interference in academic affairs. It notes the growth and power of PR units within British universities, and wonders why applied linguistics fails to challenge the vapid and often incorrect assertions made by these communication ‘experts’ about language use. It links this ‘PR turn’ in universities, and the vague language which surrounds it, to the tightening stranglehold of current and recent UK governments on university activity, comparing this briefly to the more open recruitment of applied linguistics to serve national security interests in the USA. The overall conclusions of the article are that impact is not necessarily a measure of academic worth, and that informed critique of establishment values should remain one of the main roles of academics. While these conclusions are relevant to all academic disciplines they are of particular poignancy for applied linguistics, given the role of language in establishing control and undermining academic freedoms.

Following Blommaert (2005), this paper examines what he calls a ‘forgotten’ context within Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and Conversation Analysis (CA) – that of text trajectories. For Blommaert, a limitation of both CDA and CA is their focus on “the unique, one-time” instance of a given text and, by extension, the (limited) context associated with such an instance of text. Such a focus, according to Blommaert, ignores a salient feature of communication in contemporary societies – the fact that texts and discourses move around, are repeatedly recontextualized in new interpretive spaces, and in the process undergo significant transformations in meaning. The text trajectory investigated in this paper begins in a legal institution, more specifically, with a 2004 American rape trial, Maouloud Baby v. the State of Maryland. This legal case garnered much media attention and, as a result of such exposure, references to the case have appeared in both mainstream and social media outlets. Hence, as a ‘text’ that has displayed considerable movement across different contexts within the legal system and, subsequently, beyond the legal system to mainstream and popular forms of media, the Maouloud Baby trial constitutes fertile ground for the exploration of a text's trajectory. Indeed, in keeping with Blommaert's claims, I show how this trial's ‘text’ undergoes significant transformations in meaning as it is recontextualized in different kinds of interpretive spaces (both within the legal system and outside of it) and how these transformations in meaning reproduce larger patterns of gendered inequalities.

This essay explores the question of relevant scale: which of the many potentially relevant processes – from interactional through local through global, from nearly instantaneous through those emergent over months, years or centuries – in fact contributes to social identification in any given case, and how do these heterogeneous processes interrelate? Contemporary answers to this question have moved beyond the détente of the “micro-macro dialectic,” in which purportedly homogeneous “macro” processes constrain events and actions, while being simultaneously constituted by “micro” events and actions. We review contemporary work on these issues, with particular reference to the use of language in social identification, and we argue that an adequate account must go beyond “micro” and “macro.” We illustrate our argument with data from a seven-year ethnographic project in an American town that has received thousands of Mexican immigrants over the past decade, focusing on two types of narratives that residents tell about immigrants: stories about “payday muggings” in which immigrants are victimized, and stories about the town's historical trajectory and immigrants' role in it. These narratives emerge and move across different scales, and they are an important resource for residents as they socially identify themselves and others.

Multimodal analysis of discourse is a fast-developing area of linguistic research. With this trend in mind, the purpose of the current chapter is twofold: first, to briefly review previous endeavors in the study of linguistic poetics with special attention to parallelism and repetition (cf. Jakobson 1960, 1966), and to seek potential paths to expand it to multimodal analyses of natural discourse by incorporating the ideas from ethnopoetics (Hymes 1981, 1996, 2003) and gesture studies (McNeill 1992, 2005); and second, to present a sample analysis of media discourse in the framework of “multimodal ethnopoetics” by highlighting the interplay between the verbal-nonverbal coordination and the audio-visual representations. With these goals in mind, we confirm that poeticity is not a distinctive quality restricted to constructed poetry but is an endowment to any kind of natural discourse that is co-constructed by language, the body, and the environment. Specifically, I first review some basic and extended concepts of repetition and parallelism, identifying the notion of “lines” as the fundamental criterion for conducting Hymesian ethnopoetics, in which lines are weaved into larger, culture-specific units on the “verse/stanza” levels. In addition, it is proposed that para-linguistic and nonverbal aspects of language use may (un)consciously contribute to the construction of poetic structure, typically in terms of “catchment” (McNeill 2005) and the distributional configuration of gestures (Kataoka 2009, 2010, 2012). In the latter half of the paper, we move on to examine an actual case (a Japanese TV commercial) in which poetic intentions are apparently maximized for greater appeal to the audience and larger profit from the product. The analysis indicates that the aesthetics encoded and shared therein could be an outcome of the repeated practice, accumulated and sedimented by attending to the ongoing – whether actual or virtual – participation, which is generally facilitated by favored manners of conduct, or “habitus” (Bourdieu 1990).

The relatively young field of second language (L2) writing has come a long way in the past few decades but still has far to go if it wishes to broaden its research foci to consider a greater diversity of writing contexts. As a largely pedagogically-motivated area, L2 writing has so far mainly focused on writing in English as a second language, especially that of young adults in English-medium universities. Far less investigated by L2 writing researchers have been the needs of younger L2 writers, at primary and secondary-school levels, and adults outside of universities. Still less examined have been the teaching and learning of writing in foreign language contexts, most notably in languages other than English. These gaps have important implications for knowledge construction in L2 writing.

The current shift from a pen-and-paper environment to a digital one in which multiple electronic tools and resources assist the writer in both generating ideas and transforming them into words and sentences may represent a significant transition in the way we compose. Such a shift has implications for the cognitive processes used by student authors as they set fingers to keyboards. The present study explores the composing behaviors of 30 L2 graduate students who responded to a questionnaire inquiring about the extent of their use of electronic tools and resources as they wrote academic papers for their courses. Findings revealed that the students were heavy users of digital media and software as they composed and that such usage may be having an impact on their cognitive processes. Emerging from this understanding of how students compose in an electronic environment is a clearer picture about a variety of areas including how to best teach students to use the tools and resources and how to avoid plagiarism.

Much of the literature on study abroad outcomes focuses on language proficiency gains or on the influence of identity factors on opportunities for language learning. A smaller number of studies have looked at the influence of study abroad on participants' identities and have highlighted outcomes that might be placed under the heading of second language identity. Based on a review of this literature and a qualitative, narrative-based study of nine Hong Kong students participating in thirteen- and six-week study abroad programmes, this paper examines the construct of second language identity and its susceptibility to development in study abroad. Three main dimensions of second language identity are identified, related to (1) identity-related aspects of second language proficiency, or the ability to function as a person and express desired identities in a second language setting, (2) linguistic self-concept, or sense of self as a learner and user of the second language, and (3) second language-mediated aspects of personal competence. The study found that most of the students reported developments along all three of these dimensions, although there were variations among individuals that were related both to the duration of the programmes and individual goals and purposes.