Beyza Björkman

‘So where we are?’ Spoken lingua franca English at a technical university in Sweden

This article discusses the use of English as a lingua franca (ELF) by engineering students and its effectiveness in content courses at a technical university, reporting the preliminary results of p ...

Language ideology or language practice? An analysis of language policy documents at Swedish universities

Abstract This article presents an analysis and interpretation of language policy documents from eight Swedish universities with regard to intertextuality, authorship and content analysis of the notions of language practices and English as a lingua franca (ELF). The analysis is then linked to Spolsky’s framework of language policy, namely language practices, language beliefs, values (and ideology), and language planning or management (Spolsky 2004). The results show that the language policy documents refer heavily to official documents that have as their primary aim to protect and promote the Swedish language (e.g., the Language Act 2009), which appears to have been the point of departure for the language policy work in these settings, reflecting their protectionist stance towards the local language, Swedish. Little focus is put on actual language practices in these policy documents. The description of language practices is often limited to the description of the existing situation, based on concerns about Swedish losing ground as a result of the widespread use of English. Similarly, the notion of ELF is used primarily for description of the existing situation without sufficient guidance as to how students and staff in these university settings are to use English in their everyday practices. These results bring to the fore the question of what the purpose of university language policy documents should be with reference to a speech community’s everyday practices. It is suggested here that university language policy documents would benefit from taking research on actual language practices as their starting point and base their work on research on language practices, striving to provide guidance on local choices made for communicative effectiveness.

University Language Policies in Estonia and Sweden: Exploring the Interplay between English and National Languages in Higher Education.

ABSTRACT As universities seek to become more international, their need to engage with a wider range of languages, particularly English, seems more prominent. At the same time, universities are also regarded by many stakeholders as key institutions to preserve a given national language and culture. This apparent tension makes universities a fruitful ground to explore relevant issues of language policymaking. This paper analyses language policies in higher education in two northern European countries, Sweden and Estonia. Applying qualitative content analytical tools, we tackle the following questions: (1) what major themes emerge from the analysis of institutional language policy documents in Estonia and Sweden? and (2) how is English perceived in relation to other languages? Our analysis shows that, despite their different historical and sociopolitical trajectories, universities in the two countries tend to adopt similar stances vis-à-vis their language policy developments. There also exist, however, different nuances in approaching the language question, which we interpret as being the result of the particular cultural backgrounds of each country.

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

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.

Questions in academic ELF interaction

Abstract This article investigates questions in a higher education setting where English is used as a lingua franca. The study originates from a larger piece of work which investigated the communicative effectiveness of spoken English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) among the teachers and students at a technical university in authentic situations (Björkman, 2010a). The focus in the present article is placed on student-student interaction from group-work sessions, but references to lectures have been included for comparison where appropriate. The questions in the study were first categorized syntactically. Syntactic analyses were followed by phonological analyses of question intonation. The results of the pilot study point to three cues the listener can rely on to be able to register an utterance as a question: syntax with specific reference to word order, utterance-final rising question intonation and the interrogative adverb/pronoun (in Wh-questions only). The results of the analyses in the present study, drawing on qualitative and quantitative data, demonstrate that a question is more likely to be registered as such when all available cues are provided for the listener. It seems reasonable to suggest, then, that the speakers in lingua franca settings, with the added complexities at the syntactic level, make use of all available cues to ensure communicative effectiveness. Most importantly, the speakers in this setting appeared to achieve communicative effectiveness by using utterance-final rising question intonation in the absence of the other cues, and not by following unmarked native speaker intonation. The fact that utterance-final question intonation is the most reliable cue among the three shows, yet from another angle in ELF usage, that we cannot assume native speaker usage as the ideal in similar settings.

Linguistic Justice for Europe and for the World

their play could have fit in nicely here. Artificial Life, ‘the recreation of biological life by technological means’ (175), is also introduced, but one can argue whether that is a branch of artificial intelligence as that would imply that all life is intelligent, and one may ponder about whether biological AI brains can be categorized under computation. As Warwick argues, some of the philosophical arguments motivated by strong AI indeed become ‘unstuck’ with modern AI—the bottom–up approaches do not, and do not intend to, come near to trying to mimic human understanding, consciousness, or the mind—but now they have to be analysed differently and we obtain a few new questions. Chapter 6, ‘Sensing the World’, has fifteen pages on computer vision that are too detailed compared to the other sections, and it is short of inquiry into intelligence and philosophy. True, image transformation, analysis, reprocessing, finding edges, and the rest are all relevant to computer vision, but given the tone of the book, image understanding is clearly the most interesting, yet receives a mere half a page (160). The chapter then goes on to list techniques for movement, touch, machine olfaction, and taste, and then goes out with a whimper with X-rays and a concluding remark that ‘[an] issue . . . in terms of intelligence in general, is the limited capabilities of human thought in conceiving of non-human applications such as those that might be useful for a robot’. Thus, although some topics could have been covered in fewer pages and others deserved more or better attention, given the book’s length, overall, this is a fairly good, easily readable, non-technical introductory overview of AI.

English as a lingua franca in spoken genres in the international university: introduction

English has long been the lingua franca of academic settings. As many readers of this journal will know, since World War II, English has established for itself a solid place as the dominant lingua franca of science through which most academic and scientific activity takes place (Crystal 2013). In Europe, its position got even more stabilized after the Bologna Declaration in 1999 when an agreement was made to establish a common European higher education arena (EHEA) by 2010. Now in 2018, we can see that this aim has been reached to a large extent with a very large number of English-medium instruction (EMI) programs (Wächter and Maiworm 2014), allowing students to study in other countries than their home ones through exchange or degree programs, and staff to practice academic mobility in different ways. All these students and staff, often if not always, use English as their lingua franca in their everyday practices, often in high-stakes situations. The literature on EMI has focused heavily on non-English speaking countries with scholars reporting from different parts of Europe (e.g. Hultgren et al. 2015; Hynninen 2016; Smit 2010; Wilkinson 2013). English is of course used as a lingua franca also in universities in English-speaking countries. In Englishspeaking countries, it of course has a different history of being a lingua franca with the local language being the same as the most dominant lingua franca, and there are certainly different dynamics involved for speakers of other first languages who use English as their lingua franca at e.g. a US university. Speakers are also exposed to English in daily settings associated with ordinary people, accounting for a considerable portion of their interactions. I have argued elsewhere that, with regard to studies of English as a lingua franca (ELF), the sociolinguistic realities of each country and region must be considered, making the geographical divide an organizational criterion key (Björkman 2016). Other

“This is not familiar to most people”: navigating peer reviewers’ comments and knowledge construction practices by PhD students in supervision interactions

Abstract This paper focuses on the under-researched genre of PhD supervision meetings (but see Vehviläinen, Sanna. 2009a. Problems in the research problem: Critical feedback and resistance in academic supervision. Scandinavian Journal of Educational Research 53[2]. 185–201; Vehviläinen, Sanna. 2009b. Student-initiated advice in academic supervision. Research on Language and Social Interaction 42[2]. 163–190; Björkman, Beyza. 2015. PhD supervisor–PhD student interactions in an English-medium Higher Education [HE] setting: Expressing disagreement. European Journal of Applied Linguistics 3[2]. 205–229; Björkman, Beyza. 2016. PhD adviser and student interactions as a spoken academic genre. In K. Hyland & P. Shaw [eds.], The Routledge handbook of English for Academic Purposes, 348–361. Oxon: Routledge; Björkman, Beyza. 2017. PhD supervision meetings in an English as a Lingua Franca [ELF] setting: Linguistic competence and content knowledge as neutralizers of institutional and academic power. Journal of English as a Lingua Franca 6[1]. 111–139) and investigates knowledge construction episodes in PhD students’ discussions with their supervisors on their co-authored papers. In these meetings, all supervisors and students use English as their lingua franca (ELF). Such supervision meetings are made up of “social negotiation” and “collaborative sense-making,” providing a good base for learning to take place (Vygotsky, L. S. 1978. Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), which in the present context is the “enculturation” of the PhD student into the research community (Manathunga, Catherine. 2014. Intercultural postgraduate supervision: Reimagining time, place and knowledge. New York: Routledge). It is precisely these negotiation and collaborative sense-making practices that the present paper focuses on, in order to investigate knowledge construction practices. While there is an abundance of research in disciplinary knowledge construction and academic literacy practices from cognitive and behavioral sciences, knowledge about novice scholars’ knowledge construction practices is scant in applied linguistics (but see Li, Yongyan. 2006. Negotiating knowledge contribution to multiple discourse communities: A doctoral student of computer science writing for publication. Journal of Second Language Writing 15[3]. 159–178). Even less is known about how PhD students may negotiate knowledge construction and engage in meaning-making practices in interaction with their supervisors. The material comprises 11 hours of naturally occurring speech by three supervisors and their students where they discuss the reviewers’ comments they have received from the journal. The predominant method employed here is applied conversation analysis (CA) (Richards, Keith & Paul Seedhouse [eds.]. 2005. Applying conversation analysis. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan), which includes both local patterns of interaction as well as “the tensions between [these] local practices and any ‘larger structures’ in which these are embedded, such as conventional membership categories, institutional rules, instructions, accounting obligations, etc.” (Have, Paul ten. 2007. Doing conversation analysis. London: Sage 199). The analyses here aim to show how the PhD supervisors and students discuss the reviewers’ comments with reference to (i) their own disciplinary community of climate science, and (ii) the domestic discourse community of the target journals (see also Li, Yongyan. 2006. Negotiating knowledge contribution to multiple discourse communities: A doctoral student of computer science writing for publication. Journal of Second Language Writing 15[3]. 159–178). The preliminary findings of the analyses show a tendency by the PhD students to focus more heavily on the domestic discourse community of the target journals, especially when justifying their methodological choices. The PhD supervisors, on the other hand, base their meaning-making on the conventions of the disciplinary community of climate science, pointing out broader disciplinary community practices. These findings, highlighting a need to focus on novice scholars’ meaning-making efforts, can be used to inform PhD supervision in general.

Deterding, David: Misunderstandings in English as a Lingua Franca. An Analysis of ELF Interactions in South-East Asia

Review of David Deterding, Misunderstandings in English as a Lingua Franca. An Analysis of ELF Interactions in South-East Asia.

PhD supervisor-PhD student interactions in an English-medium Higher Education (HE) setting : Expressing disagreement

According to the latest figures, the increase in English-taught programs in European Higher Education (HE) has been tremendous at a growth rate of 500% since 2002 (Wachter and Maiworm 2014). In all these HE institutes, English serves as the main lingua franca for students and staff. The present paper reports from such a HE setting in Sweden and focuses on how disagreement is expressed in PhD supervisor-PhD student supervision meetings, a spoken genre largely neglected in the study of spoken academic discourse. The material comprises digitally-recorded, naturally-occurring speech adding up to approximately seven hours, all by PhD supervisors and students from different L1 backgrounds, who all use English as a lingua franca. All recordings have been transcribed, and the instances of disagreement have been analysed by a mixed-methods approach, drawing on Conversation Analysis (CA). The results show, first of all, that the PhD students directly construct disagreement with their supervisors on content-related advice despite the academic and institutional power asymmetry present in these interactions. The supervisors, on the other hand, seem to indirectly construct disagreement with their students. It is suggested here that linguistic competence and content knowledge may be two factors mitigating the power asymmetry. Also, the expression of disagreement does not seem to be perceived as confrontational by either the supervisors or students. On the contrary, disagreement seems to be typical of this spoken genre in this setting, implying that it may even be a “preferred second” turn in this spoken genre with reference to the enculturation of the PhD student into the academic community.