Results in BLC Posts
Posted by Victoria Williams on November 2, 2016
Swahili History, Culture and Identity Reconsidered I attended the Baraza conference that was held at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London, UK on October 29, 2016. I was scheduled to present a paper titled, “Integrating Chat in the writing of African Languages.” Papers of interesting topics were presented by…
Results in L2 Journal Articles
Lawton, Dominick
Volume 13 Issue 1
These comments make a case for the value of careful philological work with literary texts in the language classroom. I propose that grammatically sensitive close reading of literature is a valuable way to introduce students to the generative relationship between rules and originality in language use, the way that each utterance draws on the available resources of a language to intervene into a concrete situation. In support of this claim, I offer an example from my own Russian teaching, in which the alternating grammatical gender in Zinaida Gippius' 1905 poem "Ты" ("You") opens up linguistic strategies used by present-day non-binary and gender non-conforming Russian speakers.
Kim, Soo Hyon and Tanita Saenkhum
Volume 11 Issue 2
Little research has been conducted on the professional identities of L2 writing scholars despite the increasing number of researchers, teachers, and graduate students identifying themselves as L2 writing specialists. While the (re)construction of L2 writing scholars’ professional identities have real consequences for their career, the challenges and opportunities resulting from their work, situated in several related disciplines, have neither been explicitly nor adequately discussed. Through an analytic autoethnography (Anderson, 2006), this study examines the cases of two L2 writing faculty as they (re)construct their professional identities within their institutions and broader academic communities. Using identity in practice as its theoretical framework, the study provides a rich, in-depth account of how the focal L2 writing scholars continue to negotiate and reconcile their professional identities among adjacent fields such as applied linguistics, TESOL, composition, and education. Results reveal that L2 writing scholars (re)construct their professional identities by negotiating their identity positions within their institutional and disciplinary contexts, by defining the boundaries of their professional identities through community membership, and by participating in multiple academic communities. Drawing on these results, the study considers how L2 writing scholars’ professional identity (re)construction reflects the development of L2 writing as a field/profession.
Quan, Tracy
Volume 11 Issue 1
Why learners return from study abroad (SA) with varying degrees of second language (L2) gains or differing attitudes towards the target language and culture remains an open question. This study employs theories of identity (Kinginger, 2013) and investment (Darvin & Norton, 2015; Norton Peirce, 1995) to examine the case of three learners of Spanish as they studied abroad in Spain. Interviews, journals, and language-use surveys were analyzed to understand how and why these learners’ investment in Spanish and in language learning opportunities shifted throughout their program. Pre- and post-SA speaking abilities tests in Spanish were used to measure how participants’ investments related to their L2 speaking development. The three case studies suggest that participants negotiate competing and fluctuating desires, identities, and investments that often lead to contradictory behaviors regarding their language learning and use while abroad. These opposing investments and identities stem from participants’ expectations of an idealized SA experience and their belief in the capital (Bourdieu, 1986) that Spanish may offer them back home and abroad. This study further finds that participants’ ongoing investment in learning and using Spanish relates to their L2 speaking gains post-SA.
Liu, Haiqin; Dervin, Fred
Volume 08 Issue 4
With the current rise of China as a political, cultural, and economic superpower, Chinese as a foreign and second language has gained popularity worldwide. Finland is also responding to this global wave, as is reflected by the increasing number of Chinese courses in formal and informal settings in the Nordic country. Yet not all actors involved in the promotion of Chinese seem to experience instruction in the language in the same way. This study investigates how Chinese teachers of the Chinese language, who represent the majority of the ‘workforce’ for instruction in this language in Finland, perceive Chinese language education and their role in it...
Kramsch, Claire
Volume 07 Issue 1
It is my great pleasure to introduce the two guest editors of this fourth Special Issue of L2 Journal Steven G. Kellman and Natasha Lvovich...
Lvovich, Natasha & Steven G. Kellman
Volume 07 Issue 1
The guest editors introduce L2Journal readers to an emerging field of translingual literature--texts by authors using more than one language or a language other than their primary one. The diverse contributions by scholars of literary translingualism presented here contribute to multilingualism studies a unique lens of literary texts infused by multilingual creativity.
Wolcott, Timothy & Matthew J. Motyka
Volume 05 Issue 2
In this paper, we examine the case of Veronica, an American undergraduate studying abroad in Paris, whose struggles to negotiate linguistic and cultural differences highlight a deeply personal and emotional attempt to reconcile the symbolic values she assigns to her national, ethnic and imagined identities...
Kim, Sujin & Lisa M. Dorner
Volume 05 Issue 2
This article examines the relationship between language and emotion, especially drawing attention to the experiences and perspectives of second language (SL) learners. Informed by the sociocultural perspective on the construction of emotion and its representation, this study highlights the intertwined relationship among emotions, cultural contexts, perceived identities, and languages...
Li, Houxiang
Volume 05 Issue 2
Most conversation analysis (CA) studies of the initiation-response-feedback (IRF; Sinclair & Coulthard, 1975) sequence have focused on teacher actions in the feedback move. In this article, I use CA to analyze student initiatives (Waring, 2011) within an IRF sequence in one excerpt from a Chinese as a foreign language class...