Joan Turner

Language as academic purpose

Abstract In this article, I argue for an understanding of EAP to be mobilised more around language, its materiality, especially in written form, and the intellectual challenge of learning it. Concomitantly, I argue against the increasing technicisation of language, as it is embodied in the regulatory framework of institutions and its emaciation as an intellectual challenge, partly as a result of the language/content dichotomy which positions language in the subordinate role, and partly because of the self-understanding of EAP practice itself. I argue for a shift in conceptualisation from language as instrument to language as constitutive, and that language proficiency in the academic context is as important as content. With such a re-conceptualisation comes a need for EAP to re-think its practices and to seek to enhance the value of language work in the market of intellectual labour.

Differing Perceptions of Face in British and Japanese Academic Settings

This paper looks at the presentation of and response to face threatening acts (FTA) in tutor-student interaction in British and Japanese academic contexts. The specific FTAs looked at were criticism, suggestion and request. Their location in a specific genre, i.e., the one-to-one tutorial, is an important determinant, both for their occurrence and for their interpretation. We investigated five recurring situations in the authentic data: three which were tutor-initiated with the illocutionary force of criticism, suggestion and request for clarification, and two which were student-initiated requests. These situations were incorporated into a discourse completion test, which was administered to native speakers of English and Japanese. The results revealed that while the British students primarily dealt with their own face wants, both positive and negative face wants, the Japanese students showed more concern for the positive face of the tutor. There was an obvious attendance to negative face in the British context, where both the tutor and the student attended each others negative face and the students attended their own, whereas there was an effacement of negative face in the Japanese context, where neither the tutors nor the students tended to attend each others or their own negative face. This study, therefore, moves ‘face’ out of the specific realm of politeness, and attempts to demonstrate its wider applicability in contrastive and cross-cultural pragmatics.

Rewriting writing in higher education: the contested spaces of proofreading

This article reports on a research project on proofreading, prompted by its proliferation in contemporary higher education. The article is framed by an academic literacies perspective and develops the concept of ‘writtenness’, which draws attention to both the underlying culturally and socially constructed values relating to the production and reception of written work, and the tendency to under‐acknowledge the academic achievement of writing well in the relevant discipline, especially in the case of students who do not already possess the requisite ‘cultural capital’. This includes international students whose first language is not English, as well as ‘non‐traditional’ students. The use of the term ‘proofreading’ is seen as masking the complexity of academic writing, on the one hand, and maintaining its status as relatively unimportant, on the other. Particularly in the latter case, this is seen as emblematic of a culturally deeply embedded predisposition to privilege knowledge or content over language.

Researching Intercultural Communication in a UK Higher Education Context

In this chapter, we undertake four different kinds of analysis towards an understanding of intercultural communication in action. The action is situated in a context where intercultural encounters are common, namely contemporary higher education. Furthermore, the intercultural encounters are discipline specific. They take place in one-to-one tutorials in fine art, in a UK institution. The lecturers are British and the students are Japanese. In the first place, the tutorial interactions are analysed in terms of the tutorial as genre; second, certain recurring exchange types within the tutorial are isolated as examples of what we call epistemic principles, namely those underlying principles which motivate teaching and learning in the discipline. Third, and following on from the discourse analytic perspective of the students behaviour, students’ own accounts of why they were behaving as they were, and how they understood the tutorial interactions, are explored in a number of retrospective, semi-structured interviews. The stimulus for those interviews were video-recordings of the students tutorials, which had taken place one year earlier, and they were carried out in Japanese. This afforded a fourth kind of analysis, namely the extent to which the students had adapted to or resisted not only the interactional norms of the tutorial, that is behaving like students in a UK context, but also the disciplinary norms which lay behind those interactions.

The Student Experience as Transculturation: Examples from One-to-One Tutorials

International higher education is a contemporary social space or ‘contact zone’ (Pratt, 1991, 1992) in which students and staff from different linguistic and cultural backgrounds interact, and in which assumptions and expectations accrued from differing pedagogical cultures and practices play out. The sociolinguistic and pedagogic consequences of this interaction in multifarious sites globally are therefore often characterized by unpredictability. This creates a dynamic of the ‘always unexpected’, of contingency and improvization, rather than regularity in pedagogic interaction. The landscape is fluid rather than neatly bounded and the flow of interaction often choppy, disrupting interlocutor expectations. As a result, it makes sense to align the analysis and interpretation of such practices theoretically with explorations of contemporary cultural and social processes more broadly. In analyses and argumentation around broad topics such as globalization or late modernity, it is notable that conceptual metaphors of fluidity and flux dominate such theorizing. Examples include Bauman’s (2007) notion of ‘liquid life’, Clifford’s (1997) use of ‘travel’ as a theoretical metaphor and Appadurai’s widely influential uses of ‘mobility’, ‘flows’, and ‘scapes’ (Appadurai, 1996).