Grit Liebscher

Conversational Repair as a Role-Defining Mechanism in Classroom Interaction

This article is concerned with the ways in which the students and the teacher in a content-based German as a foreign language class used repair in order to negotiate meaning and form in their classroom. Through a combination of qualitative and quantitative approaches, we discuss how repair in this institutional setting differed from repair in mundane conversation and how repair was used differently by the students and the teacher. Given that students and the teacher were all competent speakers of both the first language (L1) and the second language (L2), we found that these differences were not merely indications of incomplete L2 usage. Instead, they manifested how the students and the teacher enacted and perceived their respective roles within the classroom and, based on role concepts, demonstrated different access to repair as a resource. The analysis shows that repair is a resource for modified output as well as modified input in classroom settings.

Language, space, and identity in migration

Acknowledgments List of Tables List of Figures 1. Introduction 2. Theorizing Language, Space, and Identity 3. Perceptions of the Linguascape 4. Multiple Languages as Resources 5. Forms of Address 6. Non-Languages Resources 7. The Role of Historicity 8. Language, Space, and Identity in Migration: From the Local to the Global

Dialect Use and Discursive Identities of Migrants from the West in Eastern Germany

This chapter1 investigates the connection between dialect use, identity and migration in the German context. In particular, we are concerned with the ways in which individuals from western Germany2 who moved to the eastern German region of Saxony after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 use the Saxon dialect — which they hear on a daily basis in their everyday surroundings — to make various aspects of their selves and others relevant in the interaction. The process of doing this is also one of relating their individual identities to social categories that are present in their environment. In our analysis, we look specifically at the ways in which these people use the local dialect of their new surroundings -often with other linguistic material — in order to draw attention to the relationship between existing social categories and identities. In contrast with many of the other chapters in this volume, this approach can be characterized as a focus on the ‘lower-case d discourse’ analysis of the German language in interaction, rather than an analysis of the ‘capital D discourses’ which are concerned with the social and political processes that shape the production of German texts (Gee [1999] 2005; see also Cerna, Carl and Stevenson, Horner, this volume).

Contextualizing language attitudes: An interactional perspective

Language attitudes research has had a history spanning several decades largely influenced by quantitative approaches. More recently, interactional perspectives have added new impetus to the field. This article provides an overview of interactional approaches to language attitudes, which are divided into three main groups: (a) discursive psychology, (b) approaches that draw on conversational analysis and interactional sociolinguistics, and (c) approaches based in the theory of motivated information management. The authors argue that these approaches can instigate new questions and yield new insights into our understanding of language attitudes. In positioning qualitative, largely interactional, approaches with respect to one another (and, briefly, to language attitude study more broadly), this article also re-evaluates some terminological inconsistencies across the field and touches on areas that ought to be considered in future research addressing language attitudes.

Perceptions of the Linguascape

While the two chapters that follow this one will focus on the role of particular linguistic features in the construction of identity and space (Chapter 4 will look at the alternating use of German and English, and Chapter 5 will look at the use of forms of address), we will begin the analysis section of the book in this chapter with a look at the role played by perceptions of language use in constructing identity and space. Here, we will analyze participants’ ideas and opinions about the important languages and varieties that make up what we will refer to as their linguascape, or the repertoire of languages that are available to our participants in their daily lives and which exist as a part of their current surroundings and/or in the memories of their past. By that definition, a linguascape is not itself a space, but it encompasses all of the various codes that are of communicative and cultural relevance within a space. The spatial metaphor is deliberate, and by using it we mean to underscore the way the languages of a space form part of that space’s environment, and are as ever-present a part of that space as its physical landscape.

Language, Space, and Identity in Migration: from the Local to the Global

We started this book with two portraits of our immigrant participants, Frauke and Claudia, who are representative of the diversity of our participants. Frauke’s migration path started in a German settlement in Hungary, and brought her to Germany before she eventually moved to Canada as a teenager. She now lives in Kitchener-Waterloo and is constructing a space in which this migration path is still present, consciously or not, and in which she actively reconstructs and transplants elements of it. In doing so, she makes use of local resources such as German cafes, German ethnic clubs, and other German speakers, though they may not all speak the same German variety that she does. Now near retirement age, her adjustment to Canada can be seen in the ways she creates spaces through a mixed code, the local references she makes, and the ways in which her language attitudes and ideologies correspond to those of German speakers living in Canada rather than European Germans. She has made a choice for Canadian citizenship but ‘my heart is German,’ she says, which indicates the deep emotional traces connected to the languages she has encountered in her life.

Non-Language Resources

This chapter focuses on the role of non-language resources in the construction of identities and spaces. More specifically, the analysis discussed in this chapter relies on Sacks’ (1972, 1992) membership categorization device (MCD) to demonstrate how the participants draw on activities such as going to local German clubs, German schools, and eating and preparing certain kinds of food in the construction of a particular German-Canadian space and for positioning themselves in relation to it (cf. Chapter 2). In our analysis, we then focus on the ways in which participants use language to index and negotiate these activities.

Multiple Languages as Resources

It would be surprising if a book about the language use of Canadian Germans did not include a chapter on the use of multiple languages as resources in the construction of identities and spaces. For most of our participants, both English and German varieties are important resources in their daily lives. These languages are also resources for them in the conversational interviews, on which a large part of the analysis for this book is based. Almost none of these conversational interviews are in English only, and even in the cases of the few which are, all of the participants nonetheless have experience with German or one of its varieties, and this is nearly always expressed in the interviews in some way or another. Even in the cases of those participants who do not themselves speak a German variety, the impact can be seen through the link between language and culture (cf. Chapter 6 on non-language resources) and are alluded to in other ways in this book and in this chapter.

The Role of Historicity

In this final analysis chapter, we focus on the way recent German and European history still has repercussions that serve on the one hand to distinguish German spaces from non-German spaces in Canada, and on the other hand to distinguish hierarchies within German-Canadian spaces. To this end, we draw on the concept of historicity as defined by Blommaert (2005) as a crucial element of the interactional methods of analysis we have used in preceding chapters. Focusing on ‘what history means when it enters in one text or one communicative event’ (Blommaert 2005: 126), we examine how ‘people speak from a particular point in history, and they always speak on history’ (ibid.). Such an analysis allows us to reveal the ways in which meaning evolves by (not always consciously) creating simultaneous layers of meaning through references to different and conflict-laden historical contexts and ideologies. As we have alluded to in several of the analyses in previous chapters, this creation of simultaneous layers of meaning can be referred to as layered simultaneity, which Blommaert (2005: 126) defines as ‘meanings simultaneously produced, but not all of them consciously or similarly accessible to agency.’

Theorizing Language, Space, and Identity

In this chapter, we will outline the previous research that makes up our underlying theoretical framework and informs our method of analysis in the chapters that follow. Throughout this book, we will make extensive use of a theoretical concept that we will refer to as sociolinguistic space. This term derives from the term social space, often contrasted with place, which is a concept that has been debated over the past several decades in other social sciences like human geography and sociology (e.g. Soja 1989, Lefebvre 1991, Harvey 1990, 1993, Gieryn 2000). In this chapter, we will argue that a stronger theoretical understanding of the place/space distinction in sociolinguistic analysis can provide sociolinguists with an essential tool for the analysis of language and identity in migration. This tool also addresses many of the problems that have been identified with other analytical concepts that start from a community of people (whether a speech community or a community of practice) rather than a space, i.e. the location, literal or figurative, in which those people interact.