Malcolm MacDonald

Changing values: what use are theories of language learning and teaching?

Abstract This paper is a response to the common perception by student teachers that the research and theory courses on their program are overtheoretical and unrelated to classroom practice. While there is some support for a categorical distinction between theory and practice in language education, it is suggested that the beliefs, assumptions and knowledge of teachers are in fact inextricably bound up with what goes on in the classroom. We investigate two groups of student teachers studying at undergraduate and postgraduate level to become teachers of English to speakers of other languages. We examine the extent to which a research and theory course which both groups took in second language acquisition influenced key beliefs which students held relating to language learning during their period of study.

Authenticity, Culture and Language Learning

In philosophy, authenticity has been used with two meanings: one entails the notion of correspondence; the other entails the notion of genesis (Cooper, 1983: 15). As in certain branches of philosophy, language teaching has perhaps clung too long to the first of these notions of authenticity at the expense of the other. This paper reviews four key conceptualisations of authenticity which have emerged in the field of applied linguistics: text authenticity, authenticity of language competence, learner authenticity and classroom authenticity. If any of these types of authenticity is couched exclusively in terms of one usage or the other, it can lead to an impoverishment and objectification of the experience of language learning. Text authenticity can lead to a poverty of language; authenticity of competence can lead to a poverty of performance; learner authenticity can lead to a poverty of interpretation; classroom authenticity can lead to a poverty of communication. This paper proposes that a pedagogy of intercultural communication be informed by a more hybrid view of authenticity as a process of subjectification, derived from the Heideggerian concept of self-concern.

The Real Thing? Authenticity and Academic Listening.

In this article we explore the usefulness of the criterion of authenticity for the selection and evaluation of EAP materials. These materials were specialised listening texts used on a first year undergraduate programme at a U.K. university. Using a student questionnaire and techniques of discourse analysis based on Hallidays concepts of field, tenor and mode, we investigated the levels of difficulty and relevance of materials using four media: published audio tapes, audio recordings of a live lecture, video materials and a short, simulated lecture by the teacher. We found that the texts which related to the students experience and permitted learner interaction appeared to have more potential for language learning than those which merely replicated the discourse of the target situation.

The Ethics of Intercultural Communication.

Abstract For some time, the role of culture in language education within schools, universities and professional communication has received increasing attention. This article identifies two aporias in the discourse of intercultural communication (IC): first, that it contains an unstated movement towards a universal consciousness; second, that its claims to truth are grounded in an implicit appeal to a transcendental moral signified.These features constitute IC discourse as ‘totality’, or as ‘metaphysics of presence’.The article draws on the work of Levinas (1969/2007, 1998/2009); and Derrida (1976, 1978, 1981, 1993) to propose more considered ethical grounds for intercultural praxis. Contra a Hegelian impetus towards universal consciousness,we posit an irreducible distance and separation between the self and other. In so doing, not only are we able to supersede the field’s implicit appeal to the transcendental as a source of truth but also to counter perceptibly ‘exorbitant’ claims and actions of the intercultural other. In this vein, the article proposes a discourse ethics of responsibility by which it still becomes possible for a critical intercultural praxis to make value judgements and to take potentially transformative action vis-à-vis cultural acts that challenge the limits of intercultural tolerance and hospitality.

Cultural Relativism and the Discourse of Intercultural Communication: Aporias of Praxis in the Intercultural Public Sphere

The premise of much intercultural communication pedagogy and research is to educate people from different cultures towards open and transformative positions of mutual understanding and respect. This discourse in the instance of its articulation realises and sustains Intercultural Communication epistemologically – as an academic field of social enquiry, and judgementally – as one which locates itself on a moral terrain. By adopting an ethical stance towards difference, the discourse of intercultural communication finds itself caught in a series of aporias, or performative contradictions, where interculturalists are projected simultaneously into positions of cultural relativism on the one hand and ideological totalism on the other. Such aporias arise because the theoretical premises upon which the discourse relies are problematic. We trace these thematics to a politics of presence operating within the discourse of intercultural communication and link this to questions of judgement and truth in the intercultural public sphere. We propose that the politics of presence be set aside in favour of an intercultural praxis which is oriented to responsibility rather than to truth.

The discourse of Olympic security: London 2012

This article uses a combination of critical discourse analysis (CDA) and corpus linguistics (CL) to investigate the discursive realization of the security operation for the London 2012 Olympic Games. Drawing on Didier Bigo’s (2008) conceptualization of the ‘ban-opticon’, it addresses two questions: (1) What distinctive linguistic features are used in documents relating to security for London 2012? (2) How is Olympic security realized as a discursive practice in these documents? Findings suggest that the documents indeed realized key features of the ban-opticon: exceptionalism, exclusion and prediction, as well as what we call ‘pedagogization’. Claims were made for the exceptional scale of the Olympic events; predictive technologies were proposed to assess the threat from terrorism; and documentary evidence suggests that access to Olympic venues was being constituted to resemble transit through national boundaries.

LEGITIMIZING CLAIMS FOR ‘CRISIS’ LEADERSHIP IN GLOBAL GOVERNANCE

This paper explores the discursive processes of legitimizing leadership claims in the context of the nuclear proliferation crisis. Three complementary analyses of texts are carried out: discourse analyses of United Nations Security Council (UNSC) resolutions and relevant speeches by members of the US administration, as well as a corpus analysis of news media accounts of nuclear proliferation published in prominent US and UK broadsheets. Findings suggest that leadership claims are legitimized through a range of discursive strategies, which are echoed across the different text types. However, a combination and comparison of the different datasets puts these findings into perspective and reveals that the various contexts and text types in which these leadership claims are made differ remarkably in terms of their use of relevant terms relating to leadership and crisis. We argue that this dynamic is best captured by the notion of an (inter)discursive chain of legitimization.

The development of national occupational standards for intercultural working in the UK

From 2007 to 2008, CILT (Centre for Information for Language Teachers) developed a set of National Occupational Standards for Intercultural Working in the UK. This paper reports on three questions arising from the development project: how these standards are distinctive from others, how they realise intercultural competence and how they meet workplace expectations. Drawing on the directly relevant published evidence‐base, the paper argues that these standards are distinctive in their relationship with other suites, the range of their application, and the ways in which personal attributes are exemplified and embedded within performance outcomes. The standards also reflect a multi‐dimensional approach to competencies which include personal qualities such as reflection, self‐development, critical thinking and ethics; and the standards are described in a way which is credible and achievable in the workplace. For example, one pivotal unit of the standards focuses on self‐exploration and performance improvement around the areas of inclusive working practices, effective communication and challenging stereotypes.

Literature, Culture and Language Learning

In the teaching of modern European languages such as German and English, there has been renewed interest in engaging with foreign language (FL) literature in order to develop knowledge of the culture in which the text is located and to raise awareness of intercultural attitudes, values and beliefs. However, there has been a reluctance to correspondingly reconsider theories of reading and literary interpretation. In pedagogic textbooks, reading is still theorised almost exclusively in terms of cognitive or psycholinguistic approaches, especially »exemplar models« such as schema theory (Barsalou, Cognitive Processes 18: 2003, 517–519). Although less widely promulgated, approaches derived from hermeneutics and phenomenology such as reader response theory (Iser, The Implied Reader. Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett, 1974; The Act Of Reading. A Theory of Aesthetic Response, 1978; Prospecting: From Reader Response to Literary Anthropology, 1989; How to Do Theory, 2006) have also been used to describe the reading of FL literature. While there are similarities between exemplar models and reader response theory – for example, they are modular in their architecture, amodal in their systems of representation and are situated rather than abstract systems (after Barsalou, Cognitive Processes 18: 513–562, 2003), there are also crucial differences. First, exemplar models are taxonomic in their organisational principles since they employ a hierarchical conceptual framework. By contrast, response theory exhibits a synthetic, linear organisation whereby the meaning of the text is produced through an imaginative engagement with the signifiers of the text itself. Second, the structure of textual comprehension in exemplar models is paradigmatic. Higher level schemata search for evidence of fit from lower level schemata and so on, down to the lowest level of sensory data. By contrast, the synthesis of narrative in response theory is syntagmatic. As the reader progresses through the narrative, his/her consciousness flows from one perspective to the next: just as the present ›horizon‹ is made up of ›themes‹ that have preceded the one with which the reader is currently engaged, so the present theme will become subsumed into an emerging horizon. Third, the ontology of exemplar models is dualist. In positing a mental structuration of knowledge which precedes comprehension of the text, exemplar models are predicated on an empirical reality that exists independent of the mind. By contrast, the ontology of response theory is monist in as much as an imaginary object of the literary text does not have an exterior existence, but rather the reader is given over to the text through subsequent phases of reading in a way which transcends the subject/object dichotomy. Fourth, exemplar models are relatively stable. The same set of exemplars is available to the reader to be applied consistently in every instance of comprehension. By contrast, response theory is dynamic, since it suggests that each moment of reading entails a transformation of the readers experience and his/her perceptions of the cultural milieu from which the text has arisen. This paper therefore argues that the two theories are indeed incommensurable and, furthermore, exemplar models appear less adequate for the description of features of FL literary texts. Not only do they fail to distinguish between denotative and connotative texts, but they also fall short of offering an account of the specific aesthetic and affective effects of a literary text. Finally, reader response theory serves to legitimate a diversity of interpretations by readers from heterogeneous cultural and linguistic backgrounds. However, it is Wofgang Isers (The Act Of Reading. A Theory of Aesthetic Response, 1978; Prospecting: From Reader Response to Literary Anthropology, 1989) description of negation, blanks and negativity that is particularly applicable to reading FL literature, particularly with respect to its capacity to describe the generation of (inter)cultural meanings. First, through heightening the readers awareness, negation enables him/her to problemize the normative system of mores encountered in the text. Negation produces a dislocation between the familiar and the unfamiliar through which the reader can generate an emergent transitional space which constitutes the meaning of the text. Second, as the reader progresses through the text, s/he continually switches from a segment which represents one point of view to another which represents a different perspective. During this process, gaps emerge which give rise to an indeterminacy of meaning and necessitate acts of ideation on the part of the reader in order to connect the different segments. Third, blanks suspend the as-yet-unformulated connections between the different perspectives in the text so that the reader transforms them into reciprocal projections. The connections that then emerge between these perspectives enable the reader to produce a determinate relationship between each segment which gives rise to an aesthetic effect. Negation and blanks thus constitute a ›double‹ of the text, or negativity. Negativity problematizes the readers prior assumptions through realizing the failure and deformation of human endeavour, thus impelling the creation of an as-yet-unformulated idea as to their origin; it also generates the unfamiliar elements in the text through the removal of external conditions from their real context. It is this conceptualisation of reading in terms of the aesthetic and potentially transformative experience of negativity that renders a phenomenological description of reading particularly applicable to the ›intercultural reader‹ who engages with FL literary texts.

THE SOCIAL COGNITION OF MEDICAL KNOWLEDGE: WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE TO CHILDHOOD EPILEPSY

This article arose out of an engagement in medical communication courses at a Gulf university. It deploys a theoretical framework derived from a (critical) sociocognitive approach to discourse analysis in order to investigate three aspects of medical discourse relating to childhood epilepsy: the cognitive processes that are entailed in relating different types of medical knowledge to their communicative context; the types of medical knowledge that are constituted in the three different text types analyzed; and the relationship between these different types of medical knowledge and the discursive features of each text type. The article argues that there is a cognitive dimension to the human experience of understanding and talking about one specialized from of medical knowledge. It recommends that texts be studied in medical communication courses not just in terms of their discrete formal features but also critically in terms of the knowledge they produce, transmit, and reproduce.