Juliana de Nooy

Learning Language and Culture Via Public Internet Discussion Forums

Public Internet discussion forums offer opportunities for intercultural interaction in many languages on a vast range of topics, butare often overlooked by language educators in favour of purpose-built exchanges between learners. The book investigates this untapped pedagogical potential.

Twins in Contemporary Literature and Culture: Look Twice

Stories of twins are told with astonishing frequency in contemporary culture. Films and novels from recent decades repeatedly tell of the stranglehold of brotherly love, the evil twin who steals her sisters lover, the homicidal mutant twin, the reunion of twins separated at birth, warring twins, and confusion between look-alikes. Twins in Contemporary Literature and Culture asks why we keep telling twin tales and how these have been transformed in recent retellings to reflect the preoccupations of the times.

Cross-gender communication in a Saudi Arabian internet discussion forum: opportunities, attitudes, and reactions

The possibility of relatively anonymous communication involving no physical proximity means that Internet discussion forums offer opportunities for cross-gender communication that do not necessarily violate Saudi Arabian rules for behavior. This article studies participation in a public discussion forum for expatriate Saudi students. Building on a previous article that established the extent to which participants disclose their gender in the forum, it investigates the extent to which participants take advantage of the opportunity for mixed communication online, their attitudes towards it, and their reactions when it occurs. It analyzes in detail the cross-gender exchanges that occur in the corpus, together with remarks made by participants about this issue, in order to determine the circumstances under which mixed communication is seen as appropriate in this forum.

Encountering Language Difference in Australian Memoirs of Living in France

Travel memoirs tend to be premised on the transformation of the self through spatial translation. This paper explores the roles language might play in this transformation, and the possibilities of a linguistic translation of the self among memoirs of Australians in France. Among the recent rush of memoirs by Australians of their sojourns in France, the encounter with French language is invariably evoked. Its depiction, however, differs from that identified in ‘language memoirs’ by migrants and other language learners, which have been seen to emphasize the renegotiation of identity through inhabiting a new language. More often, in the Australian memoirs, either language difference is portrayed as having a limiting effect, diminishing the author to a shy shadow of the familiar self, or the authors proficiency in French smooths over language difference, concealing it. Only in rare instances is language represented as the very means of transformation of the self, reforging the authors experience. One such instance is Ellie Nielsens memoir Buying a Piece of Paris, which paradoxically details the process of language learning while at the same time deflecting attention from it and attributing the transformation of the self to an altogether more tangible operation. The article analyses this double game and its implications for identity and belonging.Travel memoirs tend to be premised on the transformation of the self through spatial translation. This paper explores the roles language might play in this transformation, and the possibilities of a linguistic translation of the self among memoirs of Australians in France. Among the recent rush of memoirs by Australians of their sojourns in France, the encounter with French language is invariably evoked. Its depiction, however, differs from that identified in ‘language memoirs’ by migrants and other language learners, which have been seen to emphasize the renegotiation of identity through inhabiting a new language. More often, in the Australian memoirs, either language difference is portrayed as having a limiting effect, diminishing the author to a shy shadow of the familiar self, or the authors proficiency in French smooths over language difference, concealing it. Only in rare instances is language represented as the very means of transformation of the self, reforging the authors experience. One such i...

Disclosure of Gender Identity in Internet Forums: A Case Study of Saudi Arabian Forum Communication

Abstract Internet discussion forums provide opportunities for largely anonymous communication among participants. The extent to which these opportunities are taken up is of particular interest in cultures where gender relations are highly regulated and cross-gender communication is strictly limited, such as in Saudi Arabian society. This article studies participation in a public discussion forum of expatriate Saudi students. It focuses on the nature of information (whether accurate or not) that participants choose to reveal about themselves, and its effect on the forum participation. Particular attention is paid to whether and how the gender of the participants is revealed. The analysis demonstrates that few participants take advantage of the possibility of not revealing gender. Rather, gender is emphasized in most usernames and can usually be deduced from the message content. Although there is no pressure to reveal name, age, marital status, etc., reactions to the rare messages where the gender of the writer is not indicated show that clues to gender are considered essential to all but the briefest exchanges. This encourages participants to limit contact with participants of the opposite sex, as a result of which the forum communication remains largely gender segregated.

Postfeminist worldmaking in Australian memoirs of life in France

Abstract While only one book-length memoir recounting the sojourn of an Australian in France was published in the 1990s, thirty-seven have been published since 2000, overwhelmingly written by women. In the majority of these accounts, France serves as a backdrop to a project of refashioning the self. This article traces the ways in which France is configured in the memoirs to assist in the makeover of life, love, and self. In many cases, France becomes the ideal space in which to construct a hyper-aestheticized life of luxury domesticity. But even those authors who challenge the postfeminist fantasy position themselves in relation to this discourse, which refuses to fade into the background, so that France becomes a site of tension between competing kinds of worldmaking among Australian women.

Towards Intercultural Discussion: Getting Off on the Right Foot(ing)

With the proliferation of discussion facilitated by Internet forums, one might imagine that, notwithstanding the problems encountered by some learners, intercultural communication now has fertile ground within which to flourish. Closer inspection, however, reveals that cordial intercultural exchanges are far from widespread in this genre. This suggests that, despite the apparent ease of contact, there remain significant obstacles to such exchanges.

Forums for Learning: Language, Culture and Identity

The course described in Chapter 9 is one example of the integration of Internet discussion forums into the teaching of language and culture. In this case, a pre-existing course on argumentation in French was renovated to include what is, for many forum users, an everyday genre of argumentation. Participation in public discussion forums was used as a means to work towards the course objectives (linguistic and intercultural). The media websites chosen aligned themselves not only with the aims of the course, but also with the linguistic competence of the majority of the students. And while the conventions of forum participation had to be the subject of preparatory work, the students were able to comply with them. In this way, performing the genre posed an achievable challenge.

Public Discussion Forums as a Tool for Language Learning

The communicative possibilities of the Internet have been eagerly seized upon by those who deal in the teaching of communication, including language teachers. As a result, there are currently vast numbers of language learners engaged in email exchanges with learners in other countries, while teachers from around the world organize discussion activities between their geographically distanced classes. As yet, however, comparatively little pedagogical use has been made of the learning opportunities offered by public Internet discussion.

Face Off: Identity in Online Debate

Our preceding discussion of genre raises the question of the identities that language learners are able to assert in online discussion. For some learners, adopting a speaking position appropriate to the genre may involve investing oneself in an L2 identity — an identity in the second/foreign language — that is unfamiliar, uncomfortable, or indeed unimaginable.