Emilee Moore

Constructing content and language knowledge in plurilingual student teamwork: situated and longitudinal perspectives

This paper explores how students in an Educational Psychology subject in a university L2 immersion context accomplish learning, mobilise their plurilingual repertoires and restructure their participation in carrying out a teamwork task over the course of approximately one week. The study is novel in several ways. First, it aims to fill a gap in the literature by exploring dynamics of knowledge construction in a multilingual, ‘internationalised’ university classroom, a context that is currently underrepresented in research, although increasingly common in practice. Second, the theoretical-analytical framework, inspired by socio-constructivism and conversation analysis, lends support to both situated and longitudinal arguments for learning; perspectives that are often examined separately in interactionist literature. Finally, the framework is used to seek evidence of knowledge construction not only in terms of the second language but also in terms of disciplinary content and by paying particular attention to how students participate and use their available languages in managing the different task stages. The results not only demonstrate the utility of the proposed framework but also highlight how the mobilisation of plurilingual repertoires may be advantageous for learning and participation in similar higher education classroom settings and, ultimately, for doing internationalisation.

Plurilingual teaching and learning practices in ‘internationalised’ university lectures

Abstract This article explores how participants in ‘internationalised’ university lectures draw on the different plurilingual (and multimodal) resources available to them in accomplishing teaching and learning activities. The data are from lectures that took place in four different technology subjects at two Catalan universities. Two aspects of the corpus are focused on in the analysis. On the one hand, what is referred to as a plurilingual multimodal design of the lectures studied is presented. On the other, some ways in which the recurrent emergence of code-switching in the corpus may be considered a resource for the construction of disciplinary knowledge are sketched out. In this regard, the analysis focuses on three features: the management of participation, the management of comprehension and attention and the management of complexity. The practices studied in the article offer empirical insights into how internationalisation of universities in Catalonia and elsewhere – and in particular the teaching of subjects in a second language – can be achieved in harmony with existing plurilingualism and ensuring complexity of disciplinary content teaching and learning.

Conceptualising multilingual higher education in policies, pedagogical designs and classroom practices

ABSTRACT In striving for internationalisation, government and university policies in Catalonia promote the use of English in classrooms in two ways that often overlap: (1) as a lingua franca aiding the participation of international students and (2) through immersion approaches targeting local students. However, as the findings presented in this article suggest, many of these policies, and resulting higher education curricula and pedagogies, are materialisations of monolingual ideologies that implicitly promote a single language in classrooms. This article begins by contrasting how multilingualism is regulated in legislation, developed in degree programmes and subject plans and enacted in classroom practice at the institutions studied in our research. It then conceptualises plurilingualism and learning to later analyse interactional practices in one subject, involving both local and international students, planned around English only. The analysis centres on the process followed by one student with difficulties in accomplishing a learning task. The aim is to explore the ‘nitty-gritty’ of students’ everyday learning realities to offer alternatives to monolingually conceived multilingual education. The data reveal how the student observed engages her plurilingual repertoire in overcoming obstacles and developing unilingual subject expertise, despite the use of languages other than English not being officially sanctioned. Through this case study of learning-oriented practices, the article is interested in demonstrating how ad hoc, plurilingual language policies enacted in classroom interaction may be more beneficial to learning processes than those officially sanctioned by higher education institutions. The article also offers insights for practical plurilingual pedagogies for universities in linguistically complex regions such as Catalonia and elsewhere.

Plurilingual Resources in Lingua Franca Talk: An Interactionist Perspective

This chapter deals with data from classroom and service interactions involving local and international actors at two Catalan universities. An interactionist perspective is adopted, drawing above all on work in plurilingual talk-in-interaction. The analysis explores how speakers agree to use a lingua franca and how other plurilingual resources, such as code-switching, emerge in such interaction. The results suggest: (1) That the lingua franca is not an a priori choice, but one that emerges locally and fluidly in talk, related to the communicative possibilities of speakers’ shared plurilingual repertoires and to the local organisation of the interaction; (2) That other forms of plurilingual talk (e.g. code-switching) support communication, the accomplishment of socio-institutional goals and the situated construction of knowledge in lingua franca interactions.

Plurilingual resources for ‘welcoming’ at a university service for international students

This paper studies the situated meaning given to a so-called ‘welcome’ service for international students at a Catalan university. The official business of the service is to offer support with bureaucratic procedures and information about available services, including those for learning Catalan. However, the complex range of overlapping activities emerging in interactions at the service leads us to question how participants themselves (i.e. service providers and student users) understand the business of ‘welcoming’. Furthermore, the use of different languages in the interactions brings us to ask what role participants assign to their plurilingual resources in accomplishing this business. The results allow us to describe the ‘welcome’ service as a complex and significant place for the language socialisation of newcomers to the university, as well as the central role of plurilingual resources in achieving this aim, in constucting the multilingual order and in accomplishing internationalisation. These results provide insights for policies aiming at the management of linguistic diversity in scenarios of internationalisation.

Translanguaging Space and Creative Activity: Theorising Collaborative Arts-Based Learning.

ABSTRACT This paper focuses on an innovative transdisciplinary educational arts-based learning project, LangScape Curators, which links to and leads from research conducted for the AHRC-funded ‘Translation and Translanguaging’ project. Here, we describe how we work collaboratively with creative practitioners to use a variety of creative arts methods with young people to explore the linguistic landscapes of Leeds. We propose a theoretical framework for collaborative research activity of this nature, and we use one of the creative arts activities – collage – to exemplify visual understandings of how communicative repertoires and linguistic landscapes are explored through co-produced pedagogical workshops. The programme and its associated research make an original contribution to linguistic landscape-based collaborative ethnographic research. We conclude by setting out directions for the future of these activities and their application in applied linguistics research and practice.

Coordinated action, communication, and creativity in basketball in superdiversity

ABSTRACT This paper examines the complex social space of basketball training sessions at a sports centre in superdiverse inner-city Leeds, contextualising the site in relation to stigmatising discourses that suggest disorderliness and a lack of social cohesion. The microanalysis of video data from the training sessions counteracts these discourses by showing how social orderliness, cooperation, and creativity unfold in the details of interaction. The significance of its contribution lies in its analysis of communication that bridges across semiotic modes, extending the concept of translanguaging to encompass embodied practice. This practice contributes to constituting a small culture within the basketball club.

11. Comment les étudiants montrent leurs connaissances dans des interactions internationales

Ce chapitre porte sur les moyens mis en œuvre par les etudiants, dans un contexte d’internationalisation de l’enseignement superieur, pour discuter des connaissances et les reconstruire lors de la resolution d’une tâche academique en anglais lingua franca (English as a Lingua Franca, ELF), dans une situation interculturelle. Une attention particuliere est accordee a la facon dont les participants utilisent leurs ressources plurilingues et multimodales pour interroger les connaissances des partenaires ainsi que pour etablir et modifier leur position face aux savoirs en question. L’analyse interactionnelle d’enregistrements video revele que, malgre des competences linguistiques et disciplinaires asymetriques, les etudiants travaillant en groupe forgent des moyens creatifs pour atteindre le consensus.