Language Across Boundaries (British Studies In Applied Linguistics)

253 Pages·2005·11.13 MB·English

by  Janet Cotterill

Language across
Boundaries
Selected papers from the
Annual Meeting of the British Association for Applied Linguistics
held at Anglia Polytechnic University, Cambridge
September 2000
Edited by
Janet Cotterill
Anne Ife
Advisory Board: Srikant Sarangi and Celia Roberts
BRITISH ASSOCIATION FOR APPLIED LINGUISTICS
in association with
CONTINUUM
London and New York
Continuum
The Tower Building, 11 York Road, London SE1 7NX
370 Lexington Avenue, New York, NY 10017-6503
First published 2001
Janet Cotterill, Anne Ife and contributors 2001
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any
form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or
any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the
publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 0-8264-5525-5 (paperback)
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
British Association for Applied Linguistics. Meeting (33rd: 2000:
Anglia Polytechnic University)
Language across boundaries: selected papers from the Annual Meeting
of the British Association for Applied Linguistics held at Anglia
Polytechnic University, Cambridge, September 2000 / edited by Janet
Cotterill and Anne Ife.
p. cm. — (British studies in applied linguistics; 16)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8264-5525-5 (pbk. )
1. Sociolinguistics—Congresses. 2. Language and
culture—Congresses. 3. Intercultural communication—Congresses. 4.
Translating and interpreting—Congresses. I. Cotterill, Janet,
1968-. II. Ife, Anne E. III. British Association for Applied
Linguistics. IV. Title. V. Series.
P40. B75 2000
306. 44-dc21
2001037297
Typeset by Chris Heffer
Printed and bound in Great Britain by
TJ International Ltd, Padstow, Cornwall
Contents
Introduction
Anne Ife, Anglia Polytechnic University
Janet Cotterill, Cardiff University V
1 Pushing at the boundaries: the expression of alternative
masculinities
Jennifer Coates, University of Surrey, Roehampton 1
2 The effect of social class and ethnicity on the discursive
negotiation of femininities in the talk of British Bangladeshi girls
Pia Pichler, University of Surrey, Roehampton 25
3 'I'm glad you're not a knitting gran': non-normative family and
locale discourses
Joanne Winter, Monash University 47
4 Exploring language, culture and identity: insights from sign
language
Bencie Woll, City University 65
5 Global politics and the Englishes of the world
T. Ruanni Tupas, National University of Singapore 81
6 Panjabi/Urdu in Sheffield: a case study of language maintenance
and language loss
Mike Reynolds, University of Sheffield 99
7 Cross-language metaphors: parents and children, love, marriage
and divorce in the European family
Andreas Musolff University of Durham 119
8 Making sense across cultures: the establishment of coherence in
translated texts
Martina Ozbot, University of Ljubljana 135
9 Cultural resonance in English and Malay figurative phrases
Jonathan Charteris-Black, University of Surrey 151
iv LANGUAGE ACROSS BOUNDARIES
10 Translating sociolects: a paradigm of ideological issues in
translation?
Ineke Wallaert, University of Edinburgh 171
1 1 Mother culture impact on foreign language reading comprehension
Denise Cloonan Cortez, Northeastern Illinois University 185
12 A corpus-based analysis of academic lectures across disciplines
Hilary Nesi, University of Warwick 201
1 3 Learning discourse
Rob Batstone, Institute of Education 219
Contributors 233
Errata
Table of Contents
The following are the correct titles of the chapters:
2 The construction of bicultural femininities in the talk of British Bangladeshi girls
4 Exploring language, culture and identity: insights from sign language and the deaf
community
7 Cross-language metaphors: the European family in British and German public
discourse
9 Cultural resonance in English and Malay figurative phrases: the case of 'hand'
10 The translation of sociolects: a paradigm of ideological issues in translation?
Page 200, last line
The missing email address is: D-Cloonan@neiu. edu
This page intentionally left blank
Introduction
ANNE IFE
Anglia Polytechnic University
JANET COTTERILL
Cardiff University
Language across Boundaries
The work reported in this volume is a selection of papers from those
presented at the BAAL 33rd annual meeting, hosted in Cambridge by
Anglia Polytechnic University in September 2000. The conference theme of
'Language across Boundaries' was intended to appeal in part to the 'broad
church' of Applied Linguistics acknowledged in Edinburgh a year earlier
by Gillian Brown (Brown 2000: 11). It was also an appeal to the wider
international constituency of applied linguists who, it was hoped, would be
attracted to one of Britain's most beautiful international cities in millen-
nium year. That the world itself had just crossed a significant time bound-
ary in the year of BAAL 2000 seemed an appropriate reflection of the
conference theme, although interestingly it was not one that saw itself
much reflected in the papers offered.
In the event, the theme proved popular and a large offer of papers had to
be severely trimmed to a programme that, even so, was packed and varied,
with three plenary sessions and six parallel strands covering second
language acquisition, language across genres, language and social identity,
language across disciplines, language in the classroom, language across
cultures, and translation. It did indeed appeal to participants from across the
globe and attracted representatives from all continents. This international
diversity is reflected in the papers included here.
The 'boundaries' of the conference title were open to wide interpretation
and papers dealt, under this umbrella, with many of the major themes of
modern Applied Linguistics: 'boundaries' were variously interpreted as
identity boundaries, social boundaries, discipline boundaries, national and
vi LANGUAGE ACROSS BOUNDARIES
international boundaries, or cultural boundaries - all of which influence or
are influenced by language. The repercussions may affect the precise form
language takes within a particular social context; or they may involve the
acquisition of a second or foreign language in order to be able to communi-
cate with people across national borders; or they may require one code to
be translated into another to aid cross-cultural communication.
The present volume contains a representative sample of the papers given
at BAAL 2000. They fall into four broad categories although some sub-
themes, such as issues of identity or communication across boundaries, lurk
close to the surface in many of them.
Language and social identity
The first group of papers confronts issues of social identity. Three of the
papers treat the theme of language and gender boundaries. There is a long
and well-established tradition now of work on cross-gender differences in
language which plenary speaker Jennifer Coates has herself done much to
develop (Coates 1986; Coates and Cameron 1989 inter alia}. In her plenary
paper Coates focuses her attention on masculine forms of expression. She
notes that hegemonic masculinity is created and maintained through the
denial of femininity, the denial of the feminine being central to the con-
struction of masculine gender identity. She draws on a corpus of naturally-
occurring all-male conversation, and particularly on the narratives told by
male speakers to each other in the course of friendly talk. She argues that
while many stories construct a masculinity where achievement and success
are central ingredients, the evidence from her corpus suggests that other
masculinities are also expressed. She aims to show that male speakers
struggle with issues of vulnerability, at the same time as struggling to come
to terms with more 'feminine' aspects of themselves.
In contrast, Pia Pichler deals with femininities in talk, this time among
British Bangladeshi girls from a working class background, thus arguably
encompassing two other boundaries of social identity as well as gender:
ethnic background and social class. Pichler notes that previous research on
the construction of femininities in the talk of adolescent girls has revealed a
high level of conversational cooperativeness amongst older teenage girls as
well as a lack of resistance to dominant (patriarchal) discourses. However,
she points out that this research has tended to focus on women from white,
middle-class backgrounds and frequently does not use naturally-occurring
data. Pichler's paper seeks to provide a closer analysis of the correlation
INTRODUCTION vii
between language, gender, class and ethnicity on the basis of naturally-
occurring conversations between adolescent girls. She reviews the notion of
cooperativeness in girl's talk and examines the conflicting femininities con-
structed by the girls in this group with regard to their social and ethnic
background, exploring their compliance with and resistance to dominant
culture-specific ideologies.
Joanne Winter (whose paper could well qualify for nomination for 'most
intriguing title') also deals with female discourse within a particular social
context. The paper reports on the discourses of three generations of women
from one family living in an Irish-settlement enclave in Australia. The
women's talk, collected in fieldwork interviews as part of a larger Austra-
lian English research project, includes phonetic, prosodic and discursive
features that construct meanings of appropriation, stereotyping as well as
rejection of conventionalised, normative understandings of women, rurality
and identity. Constellations of pronunciation, and discourse assessment
sequences about localisation and family group memberships, construct
meanings of belonging to and exclusion from (non-)localised time and
space for these women. The analysis and interpretation of these discourses
prove somewhat problematic for the sociolinguistic speech community and
confound assumptions about homogeneity in close-knit social groups (i. e.
the family). This investigation demonstrates that the consideration of
group-membership, historicity and conventionalised stereotypes are con-
stitutively performed and contested through the talk. The findings suggest
scrutiny and revision of socio-spatial boundaries and relationships of inclu-
sion/exclusion in the documentation of a sociolinguistic account of Austra-
lian English.
The final paper in this section, by Bencie Woll, was, like that of Coates,
a plenary paper. It deals with a quite different social group, the Deaf. Woll,
the holder of the first Chair of Sign Language and Deaf Studies in the UK,
has done much to raise the profile of this language group and indeed to
establish the credentials of Sign as a language in its own right (see inter
alia Kyle, Pullen and Woll 1988; Sutton-Spence and Woll 1999). This is a
topic still likely to be unfamiliar to many in Applied Linguistics since, as
Woll indicates, it is only in the past 30 years that even members of the Deaf
community have begun to consider and define themselves in terms of lan-
guage, culture and identity. Her paper to BAAL 2000 provided a succinct
and detailed history of the origins of sign language in Britain before explor-
ing three themes: the nature of sign language itself, the existence and vary-
ing manifestations of Deaf culture, and the notion of an international Deaf