ABSTRACT. Languaging (Jørgensen 2008) and translanguaging (García 2009) are useful analytical concepts to account for fluid language practices in a global, postmodern world characterized by mobility and transcultural flows (Pennycook, 2007). This presentation focuses on how children and adolescents communicate – in speech and in writing – by drawing on multifaceted and complex linguistic repertoires (Busch 2012) including ‘languages’, varieties, and multimodal resources. In this discussion, the languaging/translanguaging practices of multilingual children and adolescents will be linked to language ideologies, language policies and language norms (Spindler Møller and Jørgensen 2009) in school and in broader society.

The presentation also draws attention to the possible links between the children’s and adolescents’ languaging/translanguaging practices and their construction and negotiation of identities. Such links between languaging and identities do not need to be straightforward, since one language does not necessarily index one certain identity.

This presentation reports findings from two ethnographic research projects about multilingualism in schools: the transnational research project ’Investigating discourses of inheritance and identity in four multilingual European settings’ (European Science Foundation via HERA - Humanities in the European Research Area, 2010-2012) and ‘Intercultural pedagogy and intercultural learning in language education’ (The Swedish Research Council, 2007-//-2011), as well as from the pilot study ‘Language use, multilingual literacies and the construction of identities among Sami adolescents in Sweden’ (The Swedish Academy, Fonden för forskning i modern svenska och för svensk språkvård, 2013).

References:

Busch, Brigitta. (2012). The Linguistic Repertoire Revisited. Applied Linguistics 33, 503-523.

García, Ofelia. (2009). Bilingual Education in the 21st Century: A Global Perspective. West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell.

Jørgensen, Jens Normann. (2008). Polylingual Languaging around and among Children and Adolescents. International Journal of Multilingualism 5 (3), 161-176.

Pennycook, Alastair. (2007). Global Englishes and Transcultural Flows. New York: Routledge.

Spindler Møller, Janus & Jens Normann Jørgensen. (2009). ‘From Language to Languaging: Changing relations between humans and linguistic features’. Acta Linguistica Hafniensia, International Journal of Linguistics 41(1). 143–166.

ABSTRACT. How do migration and integration researchers relate to journalists and to participation in mass media generated discourse about their research themes? Based on 31 qualitative interviews with researchers from 10 Norwegian research and university departments, this paper analyses how different ideas about researcher roles and different epistemological ideals inform researcher participation in mass media as sources, op-ed writers and debate participants. The analysis is informed by science studies, the debate on public sociology and theories on the public sphere.

ABSTRACT. The main idea in this article is that historically, the Norwegian approach towards immigration is marked by the ideology of welfare state. Accordingly, migrations as a sociocultural phenomenon, and the migrant subject, as a member the migrant subject, have often stood as source of unease in the Norwegian political and sociocultural landscape. Based on data from Norwegian public sphere, media and the political scene since 1970s, the study presents different stages in recent Norwegian history in which through various mechanisms migrants are identified and placed as the outsider and source of challenge to the society. Furthermore the study argues that the migration flew to Europe we have been witnessing during the recent time challenges the welfare ideology, and reveals the need for a different and new approach towards immigration and migrants. The extend of migration in our time makes the need for going into direction inevitable; while in the past marked by the spirit of nation state and welfare state, we aimed to build bridges, today there is need to emphasize that we all live in a same island meaning the need for searching for global solutions in our struggle towards formation of a we.

ABSTRACT. Abstract for the NORDISCO Conference at Oslo and Akershus University College, November 2016. By Sindre Bangstad, Researcher II, KIFO (Institute For Church, Religion and Worldview Research, Oslo, Norway. Sindre.bangstad@kifo.no. A seminal recent title on populist right-wing discourses in Europe is Prof Ruth Wodak’s The Politics of Fear (2015). In December 2015, the newly appointed Norwegian Minister of Immigration and Integration, Mrs Sylvi Listhaug of the Norwegian populist-right wing Progress Party (PP), in government in Norway since October 2013, proposed 40 new asylum restrictions which she declared would make Norway’s policies in this field “toughest in Europe.” These proposed restrictions followed in the wake of the arrival of some 30, 000 new asylum seekers in Norway in the autumn of 2015 and in the wake of the unprecedented global refugee crisis unleashed by the war in Syria since 2011. Listhaug’s 40 new asylum restrictions have been condemned as violating both international refugee conventions as well as basic human rights standards from a wide range of actors, including the UNHCR, Amnesty Norway, the Norwegian Red Cross, the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC), leading experts on international law and human rights in Norway, the Lutheran State Church in Norway and Norwegian People’s Aid. Using the Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) framework developed by Wodak and others, I will here argue that Listhaug’s attempt to expand the boundaries of what violations of basic human rights and international legal standards will be considered tolerable from the state of Norway by the population at large crucially depends on re-casting ‘refugees’ as ‘migrants’, so that ‘refugee rights’ are no longer existent nor applicable, playing on popular and populist fears concerning Muslims as immigrants, linking migration to terrorism, and invoking both the ‘values’ of anti-intellectualism and anti-elitism, and the notion of a blond white nativist ‘motherly figure’ who ‘fears for her children’s future.’

ABSTRACT. The closed Facebook page “Refugees Welcome to Norway” has more than 80 000 members and seven moderators. It is a media institution created by volunteers, and might be labelled a “Web-NGO” with a large degree of organizational capital. Besides, it shares media content and generates debates. In previous research (Eide 2002, Eide & Simonsen 2004, 2007) a variety of discourses linked to refugees and migrants have been identified; some emphasizing the “newcomers” as problems (for society-at-large, for ‘themselves’) and communicating discourses of fear (Altheide, Beck), while others underline the resources they represent, as groups or individuals. The mentioned webpage seems to focus – if not equally – on both refugees and refugee-friendly citizens in Norway as resources. This paper explores dominant discourses on the webpage, with particular emphasis on how discourses of the “good helpers” occur, and to what extent differing positions on refugee politics are present on the page/in debate threads generated by certain entries. In other words; these research questions will be explored: Do we see a Norwegian “dugnad” discourse as a dominant trend, read as “the practical solidarity” discourse? Which other discourses do occur, and how are they presented, debated? Do the moderators have to exclude certain members who do not act and write according to the ethos and guidelines of the page? Methodology: Thorough reading of the page for a limited time period (May 2016), first a rough content analysis of the entries (genres, themes), then a critical discourse analysis of items seen as typical for the page, much shared and commented. In addition, interviews with at least two-three of the seven moderators. A gender component is included. A majority (6 out of 7) of the moderators are women. Is this “practical solidarity” a web phenomenon dominated by women? The analysis will be supplemented by other studies of Facebook pages, such as for example Seddighi (2016, forthcoming), and theories of Critical Discourse Analysis (Fairclough, Wodak etc.)

ABSTRACT. Emotional competencies, such as an ability to listen to the other actively and calm down strong emotional outbursts, play a major part in successful management practice (Salminen et al. 2011). Performance appraisal interviews (PAIs) – as managerial tools for reviewing and developing employer motivation and performance – are encounters where such emotional competencies come into play. This presentation of work-in-progress examines the way in which affective micro-practices observable in conducting PAIs, such as displays of affective stance and complaining, play a part in shaping the macro task of building manager—subordinate relationship. Through these affective micro-practices the manager and the subordinate manage the aspects of symmetry—asymmetry and closeness—distance between them, and this way maintain or transcend their respective institutional roles. This may be consequential with regard to successful management of employer motivation and development. The focus of the presentation is on complaint sequences, particularly on the ways in which emotions are displayed and dealt with in the context of complaining about a third party or about the present participant. I will analyze the discursive means by which the complainers are building the affective stance in the complaint, what sort of responses the shown stance makes relevant, and what sort of responses it gets. The data consist of 20 complaints in performance appraisal interviews in five different organizations.

ABSTRACT. A recurrent theme in work on organizational learning is knowledge management (KM, see e.g. Argyris, 1993; Firestone & McElroy, 2005). One arena for institutional KM is performance appraisal interviews (PAIs), often argued to be “critical to the effective use of human capital” in an organization (Clifton, 2012, p. 283). However, micro-level studies on situated KM in such encounters are sparse. Building on a conversation analytic framework, the present paper examines PAI sequences where knowledge is made relevant in annual PAIs in a Swedish bank. An explorative examination across eight recordings identified sequences in which participants draw upon formulations of individual and institutional knowledge in interactional projects negotiating knowledge ownership, knowledge boundaries and expertise, and the distribution of work tasks. Participants negotiate the ‘right’ amount of shared knowledge in the workforce in relation specialist knowledge, and collaboratively transform talk about knowledge boundaries into opportunities for negotiating the organization of work; for example, as a resource for resisting or taking on new responsibilities. Orientations to an identity as knowledgeable were also displayed in complaints about a heavy workload. We discuss how the appraisal component of PAIs may impact how competence (or incompetence) is displayed and formulated, and argue that even though pre-set questions in PAIs seek information about problem areas and development needs, expressing a lack of competence clashes with social needs for coming across as knowledgeable, which in turn may compromise organizational learning. As such, the study offers a micro-analytic perspective on the ‘macro’ issue of knowledge management in organizational studies.

ABSTRACT. In this presentation we focus on the use of written documents during organizational face-to-face encounters. Compared to talk, written documents have a certain kind of fixedness (Karlsson, 2009), which makes it possible for them to create connections between different contexts and practices. Our data consist of 12 video-recorded performance appraisal interviews in two Finnish public organizations and the appraisal forms the participants use in the encounters. Such forms have two kinds of text in them: the institutional text of the form, and the text written by the superiors and/or subordinates that have filled in the form. In our presentation, we will discuss two interactional contexts where the texts written by the participants are discussed. First, we will look at sequences where the participants discuss texts the subordinate has written while pre-filling the form. We show how the subordinates, when discussing the text, present themselves as experts and ideal workers through displaying their capability to understand the relationship between the concepts of the strategy and the everyday work in their units. Thus, they orient to strategy practices. Secondly, we will look at sequences where the superior reads out evaluations and goals he has written in the forms of earlier years. We will show how the participants in this context display their orientation to long-term appraisal practices in the organization. Our contention is that during the moments we examine the participants transcend the micro-macro divide in that they simultaneously perform local interactional practices and wider organizational practices.

ABSTRACT. In this paper, we are interested in exploring members’ practice as a larger organizational and contextual phenomenon. Varying perspectives on context exist within the EM/CA paradigm, of which one school of thought is that ‘context should have demonstrable relevance to participants’ (Schegloff 1992: 215; McHoul et al. 2008: 825) and it is only that which the observed members of a practice themselves display as demonstrably relevant that is of concern. Another school of thought argues that to fully understand and become a ‘vulgary competent member’ (Day 2008; Garfinkel 2002) of the practice you are investigating, as an analyst, you need to draw on observations from fieldwork or knowledge derived from ethnographic material from within that practice. Further, Streeck (1996) argues that sense-making is not just contextualized by the material environment, but that the environment becomes a component of interaction through the way the participants engage in their situated activities.

Our data stems from a department meeting in which the so-called Lean principles are employed as a standardised tool for cooperation, and we aim to demonstrate that the Lean management principles as defined at the strategic management level, and manifested by a written manual and a physical Lean whiteboard, are rendered relevant in interaction, in that the participants aptly and continuously demonstrate a sensibility and orientation to Lean as part of their meeting activity. This sensibility and orientation is not necessarily demonstrably obvious for the analyst, but requires distinct background knowledge on the particular professional practice, which goes beyond the purely micro-analytical lens.

References: Day, D. (2008). In a bigger, messo, context. In Journal of Pragmatics, 40: 979-996. Garfinkel, H. (2002). Ethnomethodology’s Program: Working Out Durkheim’s Aphorism. Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham, MD. Schegloff, E. A. (1992). Introduction, in: Sacks, Lectures on conversation (2 Vols), edited by Gail Jefferson. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

ABSTRACT. In this paper we present a multimodal take on the concept of Plain Language. We define multimodality as the combination of semiotic resources to form utterances with complex meaning (Jewitt, 2014; Kress, 2003; Kress & Van Leeuwen, 2001). By conducting a discourse analysis of multimodal texts from public authorities, we show how clarity and comprehension can be achieved through a focus on the complexity of multimodal meaning making. The Language Council of Norway (Det norske Språkrådet) defines Plain Language (klarspråk) as «correct, clear and user-adapted language in texts from public authorities». The term correct is an indication that the Plain Language norm is based largely on a proof-reading approach, where the aim is to eliminate syntactic and orthographic mistakes. Wanting language to be clear has connotations to transparency and decluttering. User-adaption indicates a focus on users of various public services. The definition’s mention of “language in texts” lets us know that Plain Language is mainly about verbal language – not texts. The Litmus test of Plain Language is whether the users “find what they need, understand what they find [and] are able to use what they find to do what they need to do” (The Language Council of Norway). Our findings show that verbal language is not always the most effective way to achieve this. Yet the advice given in courses and public guidelines are often limited to decontextualized general tips. This paper demonstrates how clarity and comprehension in texts depend on factors such as situation, content, genre and participants. We base our analysis on findings from Scandinavian research on Plain Language (Wengelin, 2015; Palicki, 2014; Nord, 2011; Kjærgaard, 2015).

ABSTRACT. Since 2006, writing is defined as a key-competence in Norwegian schools in all school subjects. The Wheel of Writing is used as a so-called construct (Kane 206) defining writing and assessment and writing as a key-competence in Norwegian schools. As a result, the Wheel of Writing is used as a construct in the National Sample-Based Writing Test in Norwegian schools. It has also been used as a tool for developing tasks, pupils’ writing according to tasks, and assessment of pupils’ texts in the project “Developing national standards for the assessment of writing.  A tool for teaching and learning”. The Wheel of Writing is also used in the Swedish national developmental program ”Läslyftet”. The Wheel of Writing is intended to help teachers, test developers and Norwegian schools to understand and define what writing as a key-competence is meant to be.

In my presentation I will present to the linguistic and semiotic sources of the Wheel of Writing. The Wheel of Writing as it is presented in Berge, Evensen, and Thygesen 2016, is founded in a combination of theories: phenomenological semiotics (Mukarovsky), rhetorical genre theory (Miller), social semiotics (Halliday), pragmatics (Habermas), activity theory (Vygotsky), literacy (Goody), and sociotextology (Berge). I my presentation I will discuss the pro and cons of using such a complex theoretical background a basis of a writing construct to be used in everyday teaching of writing of Norwegians schools at all levels.

Reference

Berge, Evensen & Thygesen. The Wheel of Writing: a model of the writing domain for the teaching and assessing of writing as a key competency. In: The Curriculum Journal, Volume 27, 2016 – Issue 2.

ABSTRACT. The starting point of this paper is a crucial and well-known problem in primary school, the 4th grade slump. The 4th grade slump is a severe decline in reading skills. When children extend learning to read and write to use reading and writing to learn about any subject, they face particular challenges. These are related to problems of transformation of demands in reading and writing in the 4th grade, understood as “the 4th grade slump” (Chall, Jacobs & Baldwin 1990, Sanacore & Palumbo 2009).

The data for this study was collected from a case study carried out in a multicultural school in a suburban area in Oslo, in springtime 2013. The school class was divided in groups of children. Every group of students was expected to work out its own paper, using the Book Creator app on an iPad to gather information and compose a text to be presented on an interactive white board in front of the whole class a few weeks later. One group was selected for analysis, two boys and two girls, aged 9-10, all multicultural, and closely followed for three days, until their text about the migrant bird was finished and presented to the whole class on an interactive white board. All activities were videotaped and transcribed.

The research questions addressed in the paper are: • What role can tablets play in promoting required reading and writing skills to avoid the challenges inherent in the 4th grade slump? • How can children’s talk be a relevant indicator for their engagement and understanding of the discursive activities involved in the assignment?

References Chall, Jeanne Sternlicht, Jacobs, Vicki A, & Baldwin, Luke E. (1990). The reading crisis: Why poor children fall behind. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

ABSTRACT. The main driving force for any corporation operating within a capitalist system is to be successful in terms of profit and a good prognosis for the future. Some corporations, however, face a much more complex – and indeed scizofrenic – set of demands. The Swedish alcohol retailer Systembolaget and the gambling corporation Svenska Spel are two cases in point. Both organizations are financially successful, delivering profits (2014) of 251 respectively 4 763 millions SEK to the owner, the Swedish state. However, the instructions from the owner are ambivalent. Not only should Systembolaget and Svenska Spel provide revenues to the state; they are also required to work actively to reduce the risks of overconsumption of alcohol and gambling. In other words: The care for the citizens is as important as the profit for the owner, the Swedish state.

The aim of this paper is to explore the ways in which this conflict of aims is dealt with discursively in the annual reports published by Systembolaget and Svenska Spel. The data of the study include the CEO letter, the statutory management report, the corporate governance report, as well as descriptions of business, operations and responsibility for the years of 2013 and 2014. Questions we ask to the material are: What text structures and layouts are chosen? What labels of phenomena are chosen? How does the annual (responsibility) report interplay with the sustainability report? What perspectives are chosen? Which key words occur? Which metaphors are used?

ABSTRACT. The paper examines the activity of waiting for the client in Finnish and Finland Swedish service encounters recorded in bakeries. The data were analyzed using conversation analysis (Sidnell & Stivers 2013) and multimodal conversation analysis (Mondada 2014).

In service encounters, studies typically focus on the client having to wait. This paper concentrates on the seller waiting for the client to choose a product or to pay using a credit card. In these cases, waiting is a form of availability, though maintaining some kind of discreteness. It is a professional posture, which relies on an unfocused monitoring of the client.

Waiting is sometimes described as inaction (Auyero 2011) or as idleness (Ehn & Löfgren 2010), a sort of a non-action that continues until the primary activity can be initiated or continued. Multimodal analysis of waiting shows that, in reality, waiting involves systematic employment of embodied resources, such as standing and holding the arms in a particular way and withdrawing the gaze. By this, the seller carefully demonstrates being available to the client while simultaneously avoiding initiating action or rushing the client.

References

Auyero, J. (2011). Patients of the state: An ethnographic account of poor people's waiting. Latin American Research Review, 46, 5-29. Ehn, B., & Löfgren, O. (2010). The secret world of doing nothing. University of California Press. Mondada, L. (2014). The local constitution of multimodal resources for social interaction. Journal of Pragmatics, 65, 137-156. Sidnell, J., & Stivers, T. (Eds.). (2012). The handbook of conversation analysis. Wiley.

ABSTRACT. Blind and visually impaired people do not navigate in public places the same way seeing people do. They use many different tactics and aids in order to travel from A to B. One of these tools is the white cane which they use for fine navigation, i.e. for path finding and obstacle detection. However, the white cane is also a symbolic sign with indexical meaning, which other people usually interpret as part of the membership category “blind-person-walking”. Based on fieldwork, observations, interviews and video recordings, this paper focuses on how other people orient towards the walking and navigating blind subject. Hall’s (1966) notion of proxemics and distance between people in social settings is reconceptualized as we take the perspective of the blind people. Based on EM/CA multimodality and video ethnography as theory and method (e.g. Streeck, Goodwin, & LeBaron, 2011; Hindmarsh, Heath, & Luff, 2010), we show how blind people’s social space is both wider and also more profoundly constructed by others as they bodily reorganize their activity, e.g. changing the trajectory of their walking path.

ABSTRACT. The paper examines participants’ coordinated, flexible and situated use of different semiotic resources (including talk, the body and features of the material world) for managing activity transitions in everyday co-present interactions in English and Finnish. More specifically, it focuses on such potentially problematic situations where an ongoing activity (e.g. conversational storytelling) becomes temporarily suspended because of an intervening course of action but is later resumed once the intervening activity has been dealt with.

The analysis will address 1) how the intervening sequence is initiated, 2) how it is collaboratively brought to a close, and 3) how the suspended course of action is resumed. The data examined so far shows the systematic occurrence of certain linguistic and embodied practices for resuming a suspended course of action, such as the use of utterance/turn-initial resumption markers but and anyway in the English data or mut(ta) and nii(n) in the Finnish data. These are often followed by recycled lexical elements from pre-suspension talk. Other practices include various bodily movements and postural changes, gaze shifts and gestures produced either before the verbal resumption or in conjunction with it. These linguistic and embodied resources are packaged together into complex, multimodal constructions (complex, multimodal Gestalt, Mondada 2014), which exhibit many systematic linguistic and embodied features but are, nevertheless, situated compositions adapted to the local contingencies of ongoing interaction.

References

Mondada, L. (2014). The local constitution of multimodal resources for social interaction. Journal of Pragmatics, 65, 137-156.

ABSTRACT. In driver training, instructors occasionally make claims about how drivers of other cars understand the driving actions of their trainee driver. Unlike experimental studies of other’s thinking and states of knowledge – perhaps most famously addressed in terms of “Theory of Mind” – the current study takes an ethnomethodological and conversation analytic approach to explore naturally occurring formulations of others’ reasoning. As a professional practice, “telling the other’s side” is assumed to address some practical institutional problem, in this case related to driver training.

The study is empirically based on cases drawn from a corpus of video recorded driving lessons (180 hours, recorded using three cameras) at a driving school in Sweden. Instructor descriptions of others’ understanding are generally offered after a just previous and problematic “coordination event” in live traffic. The cases studied involve examples of interactive events where the trainee driver should coordinate, in a variety of situations, with a car behind their own.

Multimodal transcription and sequential analysis of talk and driving actions show how instructor descriptions of others’ understanding account for the instruction of proper driving practice in terms of its communicative effects. They thereby contribute to socialising the trainee driver into the interactional logic of traffic. Further, using language and gesture to indexically refer to manifest, and ongoing or just past traffic events, instructors build a causal, self-evident and uncontested relationship between the driving actions of the trainee driver and those of the car behind.

ABSTRACT. Teachers in Norway are obliged to inform the students in public schools about instruction aims and assessment criteria, and during the learning process the teacher is by law obliged to give satisfying (formative) feedback that expresses the student’s competence (Opplæringsloven § 3.1 and 3.2). Norwegian policy studies (c.f. Sandvik & Buland, 2014) have examined the quality of Norwegian teacher assessment competences, but little is known about what teachers actually do linguistically when giving oral feedback. In order to discuss what role the teacher’s actions may have for the student’s outcome and learning processes in supervision, it is necessary to examine feedback as it is played out in authentic teacher-student conversations. In this study, we examine one supervision encounter in the school subject Norwegian in secondary school by using Conversation Analysis (CA). The aim is to identify the interactional resources that the teacher uses. Our analysis shows that the teacher opens the encounter with report eliciting questions (“What do you think yourself?”) and history taking questions, which are built towards an affirmative, “no problem-response”. Feedback is delivered indirectly and in a dispreferred format, something which indicates that the teacher orients to the negative assessment as a socially problematic activity (c.f. Asmuß, 2008). Requests for future action are performed with low degree of deontic authority. We conclude that the teacher’s interactional resources work to create a symmetric relation with the student, and that it seems unclear to which extent the encounter commits the student to a future action.

References Asmuß, B. (2008). Performance appraisal interviews. Preference Organization in Assessment Sequences. Journal of Business Communication, 45(4), 408-429.

Kunnskapsdepartementet. (2009). Forskrift til opplæringslova nr. 964. Kapittel 3. Individuell vurdering i grunnskolen og i vidaregåande opplæring.

Sandvik, L. V., & Buland, T. (2014). Vurdering i skolen. Utvikling av kompetanse og fellesskap. Sluttrapport fra prosjektet Forskning på individuell vurdering i skolen (FIVIS). NTNU Program for lærerutdanning i samarbeid med SINTEF Teknologi og samfunn.

ABSTRACT. Instructions are inherently underspecified plans (Markee, 2015; Suchman, 2007), yet students are supposed to understand them and to implement tasks accordingly. But what happens when students do not understand the instructions given by the teacher? This conversation analytic paper focuses on how a student orients to the accountability of the teacher for her own non-understanding, by launching a sequence in which she challenges the whole activity the teacher has instructed the students to do. In her response, the teacher reformulates the instructions in a substantive way. The data are excerpted from a college-level class of Italian as a foreign language and are part of a research project that investigates how teachers at different levels of expertise implement the institutional goal of teaching interactional competence (IC). At the time of the recording, the teacher had just started her training in IC, as demonstrated by the type of lesson plans she had produced till then. Moreover, the targeted class was totally unplanned. In this case, through the substantial reformulation of the instructions, the teacher re-conceptualizes her interpretation of IC-based tasks and achieves task planning in situ, as a locally contingent and collaborative activity (Markee & Kunitz, 2013). The challenging sequence initiated by the student, in fact, becomes the locus for the co-constructed definition of what an IC-based task should involve. Overall, this study contributes to the literature on task-based instruction by focusing on the issue of accountability in the face of non-understanding and on how it is locally managed by the coparticipants.

ABSTRACT. Drawing on Goodwin’s (2013) notion of epistemic ecology, this paper examines how grammatical knowledge is managed to correct errors in computer-assisted collaborative writing in a foreign language. Goodwin’s notion provides a means to conceptualise “the public distribution and organization of knowledge and the dynamic relationship between different participant positions” (Melander 2012: 233). Here the analyses of the correction process also draw on the CA literature on repair and correction (e.g. Seedhouse 2004, 2007; Musk 2015), to show how epistemic access to grammatical knowledge is negotiated across trajectories of potential learning (cf. Stivers et al 2011: 9), whereby such knowledge is (re)constituted, laminated and mobilised from the available (semiotic) resources to meet the purposes of the embedding communicative project (Musk & Cekaite forthcoming).

More specifically, this study uses the finely tuned tools of conversation analysis to examine how grammar correction trajectories operate through different modalities and configure the epistemic ecology within a potentially triadic participation framework (student-student-computer). Unlike the trajectories of correcting spellings, where errors do not tend to emerge until the words are typed (Musk 2015), grammar errors can emerge orally first and therefore be subject to correction before the typing commences. When grammar troubles do arise in the typing process, errors (and non-errors) can activate the affordances of the software’s grammar checker and/or intervention by the other student.

The collection of grammar corrections comes from 13 hours of video-recorded data from a collaborative computer-assisted writing project in the English as a foreign language classroom of a Swedish upper secondary school.

References

Goodwin, C. (2013) The co-operative, transformative organization of human action and knowledge. Journal of Pragmatics, 46, 8-23. Melander, H. (2012). Transformations of knowledge within a peer group. Knowing and learning in interaction. Learning, Culture and Social Interaction, 1, 232-248. Musk, N. (2015) Correcting spellings in second language learners’ computer-assisted collaborative writing. Classroom Discourse. Musk, N. & Cekaite, A. (forthcoming) Mobilising distributed memory resources to solve language problems in English project work. In Säljö, R. (ed.). Memory practices and learning – interactional, institutional and sociocultural perspectives. Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing. Seedhouse, P. (2004) The Interactional Architecture of the Language Classroom. A Conversation Analysis Perspective. Oxford: Blackwell. Seedhouse, P. (2007) “On Ethnomethodological CA and ‘Linguistic CA’: A Reply to Hall.” The Modern Language Journal 91 (4): 527-533. Stivers, T., Mondada, L., & Steensig, J. (2011) Knowledge, morality and affiliation in social interaction. In The morality of knowledge in conversation. ed. by Stivers, T., Mondada, L.& Steensig, J., 3-24. Cambridge & NY: Cambridge University Press.

ABSTRACT. There are few national and international studies on what experience children in Early Childhood Education have with texts. The studies that have been carried out on Norwegian children and their literary experience have had older children as their subject-matter, e.g Kulbrandstad (2003), Buch-Iversen (2010), Skaret (2011), Seip-Tønnesen (2014). In our presentation we will analyse the book selections in kindergartens and focus on the critical and multimodal discourses that apply (Fairclough, Norman et al 2001, Gunter & T. van Leewuen 2001, Van Dijk 2011), in books read for children aged 2-5 in Early Childhood Education. Based on interviews with teachers in Early Childhood Education, we will present some of the main findings on how they conduct their text practice. Several studies, Victor Val Daal (2009) og Aukrust (2005:36) confirm that substantial reading in kindergarden is of great consequence to the latter reading ability at school. Due to the effect of early and informal education, the text experience offered in Early Childhood Education, is of interest.

The following questions pertain to the issue: How can we describe the textual experience children acquire from the books they read in Early Childhood Education? In regards to the book selection in the institutions: What characterize the themes, topics, narrative structure and the complexity of the texts? Are they to be regarded as complex or do they transgress the traditional picture book? The main issue in the presentation is whether children expand their scope and type of reading and moreover which discourses we can find in their exposal to literature? An aspect is also to view how the reading practice is adapted to multilingual children, and to analyze the text variety offered.

Literature:

Aukrust, Vibeke G. 2005. Tidlig språkstimulering og livslang læring – en kunnskapsoversikt. Rapport utarbeidet for utdannings- og forskningsdepartementet. Oslo: UiO. Buch-Iversen, Ida 2010. Betydningen av inferens for leseforståelse. Effekter av inferenstrening. Ph.d.-avhandling. Stavanger: Nasjonalt senter for leseopplæring og leseforskning, Universitetet i Stavanger. Kress, Gunther and T. van Leewuen 2001. Multimodal Discourse. London: Routledge Kulbrandstad, Lise Iversen. 2003. Lesing i utvikling. Teoretiske og didaktiske perspektiver. Bergen: Fagbokforlaget. Tønnesen, Elise Seip 2014. Estetiske erfaringer i bok og ved skjerm. i Elisa Seip Tønnesen (red.) Jakten på fortellingen. Barne- og ungdomslitteratur på tvers av medier. Oslo: Universitetsforlaget. Skaret, Anne 2011. Litterære kulturmøter – En studie av bildebøker og barns resepsjon. Ph.d.-avhandling. Oslo: Institutt for lingvistikk og nordisk: Universitetet i Oslo Van Daal, Victor 2009. Publiseringsdato: 12.06.2009. lesedato: 02.03.2014. http://lesesenteret.uis.no/forskning/article15557-514.html Van Dijk, Teun A. 2011. Discourse studies. A multidisciplinary introduction. L.A./London: Sage

ABSTRACT. This study explores preschool children’s learning of mathematics in everyday activities. The importance of interaction in children’s mathematical activities is often underlined (Björklund, 2008; Carruthers & Worthington, 2006), however, there are as yet few studies focusing on the relationship between social interaction and the development of young children’s mathematical knowledge. Building on an ethnomethodological and conversation analytical framework, the present paper explores how mathematical contents emerge in and through children’s verbal and embodied interaction with their peers, teachers, and material environment. The selected data are drawn from a video ethnographic study on mathematics in a Swedish preschool, and constitutes a case study of an activity in which two children (5-years old) play with a magnetic construction toy, Geomag®, in the block play area. The results of the study show how different mathematical concepts are actualized in the children’s interaction. When using the magnetic toy to first individually (side-by-side) and then collaboratively construct a building, the children use different spatial concepts and orient toward proportionality, direction, perspective, and geometrical shapes (two and three-dimensional), thus displaying a perception of space. Moreover, aspects such as symmetry and balance are made relevant, in particular when the children collaboratively work to combine two buildings into one. In sum, the study contributes with knowledge on preschool children’s mathematical understanding in general and space perception in particular as it emerges and develops in interaction.

ABSTRACT. This paper explores how numbers are played with and counted in school preparing activities in kindergarten and in Mathematics in 1st Grade. Using an ethnomethodological perspective, I investigate how and where children participate in number activities, and the resources used in these activities. In the empirical part four video captures exemplify how children engage with numbers in kindergarten and in school, and Goffman’s notions of activity frames is found useful to discuss how the children organize, make sense of, and act in number activities. The analysis indicates that the way children do numbers in kindergarten and school is quite different. In kindergarten the children more often choose the activity, they lead the activity, they perform the activity together with their peers, they use their whole body in the activity, and numbers over ten are seldom present. In school the teacher often presents a specific task, the teacher also leads the activity, the pupils perform the activity individually, the pupils seldom use their whole body when counting, and the string of numbers can go very high. The empirical data was video and field notes from an ethnographic study in which a group of twelve children were followed on a regular basis in their last eight months in kindergarten and their first four months in school.

ABSTRACT. Social roles, defined as characteristic behavior patterns that participants take in certain settings, are believed to represent institutional order at the individual level. Such social roles are typically thought to remain relatively fixed during social interaction. However, certain settings may present ambiguous social expectations that challenge how participants should occupy their social role. This might be especially true in liminal settings where individuals find themselves ‘betwixt and between’, at the limits of existing social structures.

One such context is sales meetings, where salespeople are required to represent their own organization but also closely follow customers’ expectations regarding the nature of their personal relationship. In this presentation, we investigate how the social roles of a salesperson and a customer are accomplished in the real-time interaction. The study is based on a dataset of six naturally occurring, video-recorded business-to-business sales meetings that originate from three seller companies, and on conversation analysis as a method. Special attention is paid to how salespeople shift between various situational roles when representing the organization and the service, representing themselves as experts capable of advising customers about the service, and in building rapport with the customer on a personal level. Based on this analysis we discuss how macro-level social roles are not so much fixed or prescribed, but something that is accomplished through and constantly negotiated between individuals in micro-level social interaction.

ABSTRACT. The micro-macro matter is not only the researcher’s interest, but it is an affair that social members encounter, handle and even manipulate. One such example is identity negotiation, where members’ local practices inform and are informed by larger categories (Antaki and Widdicombe 1998). Correspondingly, the approach to understanding organization (macro) by way of identity work (micro) has become prominent (e.g. Fasulo and Zucchermaglio 2002, Alvesson, Lee Ashcraft et al. 2008, Vöge 2010). The current paper aims to further uncover this mechanism by looking at an organizational lunchroom gathering. Our data come from a U.S. design company that has just gone through a merger with another company, and in the data recorded over 10 days, the employees frequently complain about the many changes that have taken place. Our focus lies in a unique occasion where one of the managers makes an unusual appearance at the lunchroom. In this situation, he is the only one that is on the business side of the company, and all members know (and display) that he holds some information that the rest don’t have access to. Our analysis shows that the participants evoke various identities of the manager, sometimes orienting to the structure of the organization, and other times orienting to wider social categories belonging outside the organization. By taking a close look at this single case, we aim to reveal the members’ practices for orienting to and accomplishing the micro-macro divide (or not) in situ, and how the practices are worked around the affordances and restrictions of the eating-lunch activity. Ultimately, such analysis opens the way for discussing the organizational value of facilitating informal meeting places.   References:

Alvesson, M., et al. (2008). "Identity Matters: Reflections on the Construction of Identity Scholarship in Organization Studies." Organization 15(1): 5-28.

Antaki, C. and S. Widdicombe (1998). Identity as an achievement and as a tool. Identities in Talk. C. Antaki and S. Widdicombe. London, Sage Publications: 1-14.

Fasulo, A. and C. Zucchermaglio (2002). "My selves and I: identity markers in work meeting talk." Journal of Pragmatics 34(9): 1119-1144.

Vöge, M. (2010). "Local identity processes in business meetings displayed through laughter in complaint sequences." Journal of Pragmatics 42(6): 1556-1576.

ABSTRACT. There is a long tradition for exploring the moral underpinnings of the organization of work time in Western capitalist societies. Building on the tradition from Weber (2005), social theorists have identified the traces of persistent (if somewhat perverted) ethics in the organization of work time (e.g. Boltanski & Chiapello, 2005). However, studies of the morality of work time have primarily been concerned with overarching systems of thought (i.e. "Discourses"), and relatively few studies have explored the morality of work time in naturally occurring interaction (i.e. "discourses") (see Alvesson & Kärreman, 2011 for a discussion of the distinction between "Discourses" and "discourses" within studies of organization). What is missing is, in other words, the actual moral ordering (Jayyusi, 1984) of work time.

The paper reports on a study of the moral ordering of work time in naturally occurring workplace interaction. Specifically, the paper draws on ethnomethodological conversation analysis (EM/CA) to investigate how the participants in a horizontally organized, team-based setting accomplish an ad hoc work schedule, e.g. when to have lunch and when to go home. The study’s preliminary findings show that the participants invoke categorial incumbencies (e.g. the socially organized rights and responsibilities of 'fathers', 'close friends', and 'team-members') to project, and resist, the normatively ‘right’ time for work and non-work activities. A major contribution of the study is, then, to show how Discourses of the morality of work time unfold as members' problems in naturally occurring workplace discourses.

ABSTRACT. The increase in migration flows through the Balkans during the second half of 2015 caused internal and external political crises in the region, reflected in closing and opening borders, erecting walls, and mutual accusations. One of these political crises concerns relations between Croatia and Serbia. This analysis investigates the discursive constructions of migrants by Croatian and Serbian politicians in power in on-line media sources at the beginning of the migration flows from Macedonia via Serbia and Croatia towards western Europe. The methodology used includes micro- and macro linguistic analysis (including topoi, discourse strategies, metaphors, and historical analogies) within the theoretical framework of critical discourse analysis (Wodak, Fairclough) and multimodal analysis (van Leuween). The data consist of articles from Serbian and Croatian on-line media sources (online newspapers, news portals, and TV news; c. 150,000 words) published from August to October 2015. The macro-structural context of migrants “merely passing through” Serbia and Croatia influences how migrants are constructed discursively: they are mainly represented as desperate people in need, deserving empathy. The focus is often on children, mothers, and educated people, in line with what Chouliaraki (2008) terms “the mediation of suffering.” Issues concerning migrants and perceived threats such as health hazards, social unrest, and possible internal conflicts are addressed but not focused on. As in other European countries, there is a meta-discussion about which terminology to use when referring to people passing through: refugees, migrants, or asylum seekers. We claim that the focus on positive representations of migrants is used by political elites for positive positioning; that is, strengthening one’s positive self-presentation (e.g., Serbia/Croatia is humane/serious/responsible because it helps migrants) in contrast to negative positioning and evaluations of other countries (e.g., Hungary for erecting a wall, Serbia/Croatia for not cooperating in logistics, etc.). The positive evaluations/presentations align Serbia/Croatia with the EU: Croatia as a member and Serbia as an aspiring member. However, the migrant crisis exacerbated old disputes between Croatia and Serbia, and also among other countries in the region. The migrant crisis was also a topic in the Croatian elections that probably contributed to the change in power. A possible change in context – Croatia or Serbia becoming hotspots for migrants or countries that offer asylum – is addressed, but is dismissed as impossible. The analysis of the data shows that politicians in power use language in a non-aggressive way when referring to the migrants. However, the same politicians use language in an aggressive way when addressing neighboring countries. Typical instances of hate speech against migrants are not found in our data, but they exist in readers’ comments and on the webpages of extreme right-wing groups.

ABSTRACT. In this paper, we look closely at an interaction between a university instructor and a group of bachelor students when whiteness and nationality become construed -- and confused -- as categories. The category "race" is taboo in Norway; Norwegians subcribe to a ideology in which the solution to racism and racial inequality is to not ‘see’ race. This does not mean, however, that Norwegians do not engage in race talk. Research suggests that language about immigration and ‘integration’ of immigrants is racially coded, and the term ‘immigrant’ (innvandrer) has tended to be reserved only for racialized people.

The study this data is drawn from investigates how race and racialization are constituted in classroom discourse at the university level in Norway. In this interaction, the instructor draws on the students' bodies as resources for illustrating disciplinary material on Whiteness Studies. However, her example goes awry, and we demonstrate how repair and laughables function in the group to negotiate back-and-forward movement between race/whiteness and nationality as membership categories that create porous local in-groups and out-groups in the classroom. We ground our analysis with further examples from our corpus of data from four bachelor-level university courses in two Norwegian universities, as well as literature from Membership Categorization Analysis (MCA) and Conversation Analysis (CA). We will also discussion the findings in terms of their pedagogical implications for higher education teaching and learning.

ABSTRACT. A professional identity is commonly understood as the image a person has based on the way she performs a job, and as grounded in particular kinds of knowledge and competencies shared with colleagues. However, because identity must be acknowledged or authenticated in interaction, bodies and appearances may also be made relevant.

Based on an interactionist, practice based approach to professional identity the paper presents research in Norwegian nursing homes with an ethnically diverse staff and an unusually high proportion of male employees. Residents were almost exclusively white ethnic Norwegians, some of whom would reject nurses that they disliked or distrusted on the basis of the nurses' appearance. Certain skin colours, accents, and markers of gender were 'body signs' (Søndergaard 1996) that could be construed as grounds for residents to dismiss a nurse as inappropriate. This troubled the professional identity of the nurse and also the work flow. The paper will focus on how nurses account for such situations in research interviews, and on what kind of identity work their accounts accomplish.

Søndergaard, D. M. (1996). Tegnet på kroppen : køn: koder og konstruktioner blandt unge voksne i akademia. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum.

ABSTRACT. The aim of this paper is to use the framework of discourse analysis to study power narratives in profiles portraying representatives of the Norwegian power elites in a business daily. Over the last decades, the ideology and knowledge systems of the international business community have gained an increasingly important position in society. This has been reflected in a general expansion of the business press. In Norway Dagens Næringsliv is an example of a daily that has extended its readership well beyond the traditional business community, in particular with its end-of-week editions - being currently the business paper in the world with the broadest national audience. It is still a dominantly elite newspaper, but it communicates with a far broader range of elites than before. Part of this change is evident in the way the newspaper over the years have come to cater to women readers.

The paper’s Saturday profiles reflect this shift in both societal and journalistic power relations. The subjects of the profiles range from CEOs via top civil servants to bestselling artists. We plan to study a number of such recent profiles, in order to try to reveal the way power, legitimacy and identity is constructed and understood, and in what contexts. Is there a difference between how power, the justification for power and the road to power, is portrayed between different power elites – between different elite persons depending on their background whether it be business, civil service or art - and gender?

ABSTRACT. In 2014, Norway’s leading online newspaper VG.no launched an innovative 24/7 live news studio, including a forum in which a journalist – the “studio host” – would answer readers’ questions. However, readers struggled to make sense of the forum, as the genre norms were unstable and had to be negotiated, in particular the role of the host. My research question is: Which interpersonal relations are established between the journalist and the readers as this new genre develops, and how intimately are the participants inclined to act?

Following M.A.K. Halliday’s social-semiotic framework and Carolyn Miller's rhetorical view on genre, I explore the interpersonal metafunction of the dialogue, trying to pinpoint the social function of the genre. Findings indicate that the host interchanges between four roles: the like-minded buddy, the neutral news oracle, the online pathfinder, and the comforting psychologist. The host mirrors the style and relation suggested by the reader as long as her professional or private opinions are not asked for, in which case she steps back into a traditional news discourse. If readers express anxiety, for instance after a news story on terror, the host will calm and comfort them. While the news might dramatize and exaggerate the situation, the role of the studio host, then, is quite contrary.

Thus the live studio serves a distinct social function, elaborating on and counter-balancing the major news discourse. However, the relation between readers and journalists remains a pseudo-intimate one, as the host might get personal, but never subjective.

ABSTRACT. This paper sets out to explore the authentication processes of members of a Danish jazz community and illustrates the struggle of being an authentic Western European performer of an African American art form. The analysis is grounded in Harvey Sacks’ Membership Categorisation Analysis (MCA) and includes an analysis of a selected corpus revealing how members orientate towards ’going back’ to childhood influences as a way of being a member and constructing authenticity in autobiographical narratives. In addressing issues of authenticity, identity and genre characterisations this paper provides an analysis of how individual members of ‘official’ jazz groups such as the trad jazz group and the mod jazz group construct their identities as authentically Danish, as well as how the boundaries of authenticity are policed and how these boundaries might be affected by mainstream discourses as to what an authentic jazz identity should constitute. The paper concludes with a discussion of the ways in which speakers’ articulations of jazz construct an independent authentic Danish jazz identity.

ABSTRACT. Participation in the massively multiplayer game World of Warcraft (WoW) can be problematic for people who self-identify as having social anxiety – a disproportional fear of perceived social evaluation (Schlenker & Leary, 1982). Some forms of online interaction can alleviate this anxiety, compared to that experienced in real life, by affordances such as increased anonymity and control over self-presentation, and decreased perceived social risk (Caplan, 2007). They can give such relief that in most research social anxiety is seen as a risk factor for internet addiction (Lee & Stapinski, 2012; Wei et al., 2012; Caplan, 2007). However, early results from this study suggest that, nevertheless, playing WoW often causes social anxiety. The gameplay experience in WoW is highly social (Schiano et al., 2014; Ducheneaut et al., 2006; Yee, 2006), and players must co-operate closely with one another in pursuit of common gameplay goals. The usual affordances of online interaction outlined above may not fully apply in this environment. Using participatory observations in the game and interviews of players I explore why players who experience social anxiety find it hard to participate in WoW. To do this I map out relevant discourses cycling in the present and past WoW gamer culture, following a nexus analytical (Scollon & Scollon, 2004) approach. Understanding the challenges faced by socially anxious people in online environments can guide their design towards better accessibility. This will be valuable as the use of these environments continues to become more common in education and working life.

ABSTRACT. In Sweden, one approach to assist integration and simultaneously alleviate the labour shortage within healthcare is to offer language courses in medical Swedish. This study is part of a dissertation project, focusing on what constitutes L2 education for migrant doctors, nurses, dentists and physio-therapists. The purpose here is to explore how and on what premises the participants co-construct communicative projects (Linell 2009) and how this is relevant regarding preparations for the workplace (see Newton & Kusmierczyk, 2011). The data consists of 20 hours of video and audio recordings from classrooms, ethnographic field notes and teaching materials. The method utilized is termed Communicative Activity Type (CAT) analysis (Linell, 2011). It is defined as an extended CA analysis and amounts to investigating the CATʼs a) framing, b) instantiations of interactional patterns and c) its socio-communicative environment. Tentative results show how students, when exchanging inter-professional and intercultural experiences, are prepared for the teamwork usually applied in Swedish hospitals. Such meta-reflections help the students to regain but also expand their professional identities. Even though sharing different perspectives is encouraged by the teacher, these are sometimes positioned against Swedish healthcare norms only to be used as affordances to define “Swedishness”. This study aims to extend the notion of medical Swedish, by highlighting opportunities for the students to develop healthcare-related communicative competence. It also problematizes the fine line between what sets up assimilative versus awareness-raising pedagogical goals.

Bibliography Linell, P. (2011) Samtalskulturer: Kommunikativa verksamhetstyper i samhället. Volume 1. Studies in Language and Culture No 18. Linköping: The Institution for Culture and Communication, Linköping University Linell, P. (2009) Rethinking Language, Mind and World Dialogically. Interactional and contextual theories of human sense-making. Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing Newton, J. & E. Kusmierczyk (2011) ʻTeaching Second Language for the Workplaceʼ. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics 31, p. 74–92

ABSTRACT. This paper addresses the challenge of capturing the relevant interactional competence for lecturers in international Higher Education, both as a broader concept and in linguistic terms.

With the internationalization of European Higher Education an increasing number of local study programs are taught in English as a lingua franca (ELF) to a largely international student audience by primarily local lecturers. This creates rich multilingual and multicultural environments, with high-stakes learning-oriented interactions. In these contexts, an increasingly debated issue is that of the interactional competence needed to facilitate effective learning, balancing successful use of ELF, subject-specific didactics, and different – often conflicting - academic cultures (Valiente 2008).

Academic research (Knapp 2011) as well as applied practice (Lauridsen 2013) are therefore increasingly converging on the conclusion that the relevant interactional competence arises from complex interplays of language, pedagogy, and culture. Increasingly, the need is being pointed out for an interdisciplinary framework capable of accommodating and capturing this complexity. This paper recruits usage-based linguistics, which offers a socio-cognitive approach (The Douglas Fir Group 2016) that is compatible with ELF perspectives (Alptekin 2013).

Using ecologically valid data from a group of ELF medical lecturers the paper will show that one way of defining the relevant interactional competence is as a set of language functions that are characteristic of specific, narrowly defined didactic scenarios. We will demonstrate that this requires an integrated analytical approach, consisting of a top-down analysis of the relevant educational context, and a bottom-up function-based analysis of the lecturers’ didactic interactions in ELF.

The Douglas Fir Group (2016), A Transdisciplinary Framework for SLA in a Multilingual World. The Modern Language Journal, 100: 19–47.

Alptekin, C. (2013). English as a lingua franca through a usage-based perspective: merging the social and the cognitive in language use. Language, Culture and Curriculum, 26:2, 197-207.

Knapp, A. (2011). Using English as a lingua franca for (mis-)managing conflict in an international university context: An example from a course in engineering. Journal of Pragmatics, 43: 978-990.

Lauridsen, K. (2013). IntlUni: The challenges of the multilingual and multicultural learning space in the international university. ICLJE 2013, Maastricht, The Netherlands.

Valiente, C. (2008). Are students using the 'wrong' style of learning? A multicultural scrutiny for helping teachers to appreciate differences. Active Learning in Higher Education 2008; 9; 73.

ABSTRACT. The aim of the present research is to investigate the importance of teachers non-verbal communication in Italian SL/FL classroom. Language learning must be viewed in the context of social interaction, and the gesture of others, and specifically in this study the gesture of language instructors toward their students, is a form of social interaction and semiotic mediation worthy of attention (Vygotsky, 1978, 1987; Luria, 1982; Ratner, 2006; Wertsch, 1991; Lantolf & Thorne, 2006). Teachers non-verbal behavior is a fundamental aspect of teacher-students interaction (Kendon, 2004; McNeill, 1992; Goldin-Meadow, 2003), because it helps in providing comprehensible and useful didactic input and in improving the language learning process (McCafferty & Stam, 2008; Coughlan & Duff, 1994). Despite the importance of non-verbal communication in human social interaction, it has hardly been investigated (Lazaraton, 2004). A lack of knowledge by SL/FL teachers about this interactional aspect will determine many problems in education, such as incompleteness and inefficiency of classroom teaching. Hence, a multimodal analysis of real video-recordings of Italian as SL/FL lessons is crucial to understand the weight and meaning of some gestural categories, facial expressions and eye contacts. Data included in this study are taken from some video-recordings freely available on YouTube, showing, each one, different classroom settings and speakers. The current study aims to help answer some questions about the topic of gesture in relation to second language acquisition: 1. What patterns of gesture use do foreign language instructors exhibit in the classroom to mediate learning? 2. Which is the reaction of the different actors of classroom communication towards these gestures?

ABSTRACT. The World Federation of United Nations Associations (WFUNA) is an independent, non-governmental organisation representing and coordinating a membership of over 100 national United Nations Associations (UNAs). It is guided by the belief that the United Nations is a powerful force in meeting global challenges, and in its own words, WFUNA works to strengthen and improve the United Nations through the engagement of global citizens who share a global mind-set and support international cooperation.

Whereas ‘global citizens’ is often treated as a readymade concept, this paper follows a particular line of ethnomethodological research (Hester and Eglin, 1997; Jayyusi 1984 and 1991; Watson, 1997) combined with insights from the Montreal School (Schoeneborn et al., 2014; Taylor & Van Every, 2000) and understands the phenomenon as grounded in action (Fairhurst & Putnam, 2004). Drawing on documents and video recorded data from various meetings and events in a local branch of the Danish UNA, the paper investigates how the social phenomenon of global citizens gets accomplished through an array of practices in which people, documents and other materialities intersect. In its approach to data, the paper pushes methodological conventions and focuses at how members distribute memberships, rights and obligations not only amongst people but rather across assemblages of people, non-personal objects (Hester and Eglin, 1997) and materialities at various levels; that is, both at the molecular level of the local NGO as well as at the more molar levels of the Danish UNA and WFUNA (cf. Latour, 2005).

ABSTRACT. It is a well-rehearsed argument within social research on health and illness that a normative obligation of sick people is that they must ‘want’ to get well and return to normal social obligations. But how such 'wants' are established in interaction with others is less clear. This paper uses conversation analysis (CA) to study how 'want' formulations are used in audio-recorded high-stake, multi-professional meetings with sickness benefit recipients in Sweden. The paper shows how establishing that one ‘wants’ to get well and return to the workplace requires extensive interactional work. The analysis describes how, in the studied meetings, the sick person’s ‘want’ oriented utterances make explicit the relationship between ‘wants’ and illness or inabilities, thus allowing for motivational character to be established without committing to its implications (i.e. avoiding indicating imminent return to work), while managing the risk of appearing ‘strategic’ or ‘biased’ in doing so. By contrast, professional parties (doctors, social insurance case officers, employment agents) in the meetings invoke the sick person’s ‘wants’ to return to work, either for establishing a desired course of recovery or to hold him/her accountable for diverting from a previously planned course of recovery. This confirms the centrality of such ‘wants’ in this setting as well as potential risks associated with expressing them. The analysis highlights the relevance of CA for developing classic sociological theory of health and illness, as well as for understanding the situation for people on long-term sick leave in Sweden today.

ABSTRACT. This paper examines resonating verbal and bodily-visual practices as central elements in building colleague support and solidarity in the staff break room. Resonating practices are seen as processes of activating affinity across dialogic interactional turns (Du Bois 2007) (cf. also structure preserving transformations by Goodwin 2013). Specifically, the study identifies and explicates some of the resonating social actions through which colleagues provide and receive support in the break room, for instance, sharing aspects of work and personal life in the form of conversational tellings. Indeed, such resonating conversational tellings have been shown to build affinity and a shared stance between participants in everyday settings (Niemelä 2011). The present study uses video recordings of naturally-occurring Finnish break room interactions as data. The study draws on the current conversation-analytic tradition that considers interaction beyond language to include also bodily-visual resources of communication (e.g. gaze, gestures, facial expressions and the movement and direction of the body). Accordingly, a close microanalysis of break room interaction is performed to identify the recurrent situated verbal and bodily-visual actions that build colleague support and solidarity in the break room. The analysis uncovers not only the explicit resonating expressions of support (such as resonating evaluations by the recipient of the telling) but also the more subtle, implicit instances of colleague support that are built into interpersonal supportive interactions.

ABSTRACT. Young entrepreneurship and start-up companies embody hope and expectations for future economic development. My presentation builds on ethnographic data from a start-up weekend. I followed six young people through fifty hours of intense project development from an initial business idea to the presentation of their final outcomes. Despite the limited time-frame of just a weekend, the material allows for longitudinal analyses of linguistic interactions throughout the process of project development. The main focus of the presentation will on the use of English resources during the (mainly Norwegian) interaction. Mapping the use of English throughout the material reveals manifold shifts between Norwegian and English, including the use of only English with some persons, English expressions in Norwegian talk, a high frequency of English loans, and a preference for English names. Utterances such as "og så gikk vi og narrow litt down i kategorier" (‘and then we went and narrowed down a bit into categories’) are typical. In the dynamics of the unfolding discourse, these resources link different contextual frames (the group interaction, the startup weekend, and wider socio-cultural contexts) and shape cohesion within the discourse. The analysis shows how such linguistic choices involve ideologies of language (concerning entrepreneurship and innovation) and address perceptions of cultural expectations as well as practical challenges. Presenting a multifaceted picture of the use of Norwegian and English resources, the study allows also for more general implications regarding the use of English in certain professional domains.

ABSTRACT. The aim of this paper is to address how migrant parents reflect on, construct and negotiate their children’s learning, language learning and early literacy experiences in Norwegian preschools and schools. The empirical material is based on a set of 19 qualitative interviews with parents of Polish ethnic origin, all recent migrants to Norway and with children attending the last years of preschool or early years in school (3,5-8 years).

Drawing on the notion of positioning in narrative discourse (Bamberg, 1997), I explore how the interviewed parents position themselves and negotiate their positioning in 1) the situated micro-context of the story worlds they construct 2) the interactional dynamics of the interview and 3) the wider socio-cultural discursive context their narrative accounts are embedded in.

The paper demonstrates that while some participants display a mostly negative positioning towards the child- and play-centred Norwegian early childhood education (ECE), most draw on a variety of narrative formats in which they challenge, contest and negotiate their views on doing preschool and school as well as the concept of learning itself. The wider significance of the study is in providing a platform for the interviewed parents to construct unique situated voices engaged in a discursive process of reflection on their new social reality.

References:

Bamberg, M. G. (1997). Positioning between structure and performance. Journal of Narrative and Life History, 7(1-4), 335–342.

ABSTRACT. In multilingual families, parents use different language strategies with their toddlers (Lanza, 2004). Parents’ language ideology and socio-cultural background influence the languages in use (Canagarajah 2014). The language situation in multilingual families might be rather different. Yamamoto (2001) suggests that the domestic language environment, which can be described in four categories, will influence the use of language: monolingual majority language, monolingual minority language, bilingual minority languages, bilingual minority/majority language. In translingual theory, the use of linguistic elements from different languages is seen as a resource for communication (Canagarajah 2014). The aim is to get a better understanding of domestic translingual practices. We will analyse dialogues between parents and toddlers (1:5 to 2:8 years) from four bilingual families. The families are covering monolingual minority language use, as well as different mixtures of minority and majority language use. The data are video recordings and interviews. The video recordings are analysed by using CA; the interviews by content analysis. The four families provide examples of different translingual practices. Language ideology might have an impact on the parents’ and siblings' communication with the toddler. The analyses will also show media’s influence on multilingual acquisition and translingual practice.

Canagarajah , S. (2014). Translingual Practice: Global Englishes and Cosmopolitan Relations (Vol. 98). London / New York: Routledge. Lanza, E. (2004). Language mixing in infant bilingualism: a sociolinguistic perspective (Corrected ed. ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Yamamoto, M. (2001). Language Use in Interlingual Families : A Japanese-English Sociolinguistic Study. Clevedon: Clevedon, GBR: Multilingual Matters Limited.

ABSTRACT. A trial offers an insight into transmediation and its consequences for communication. Trials are a complex medium to gain knowledge about an event – a crime – which cannot be accessed directly, only by transmediations. The event is represented in several oral narratives from different perspectives and involving different modalities and media such as language, body language, images.

The paper will present how oral narratives in court are transformed by the involved parties and delivered via video streaming or supported by evidence mediated by photographs, text messages, etc. These different ¬mediations are seldom explicitly noticed during the trial. I will focus on transmediation from oral speech to other media, and discuss what causes changes in narratives and how the different parties contribute to the story created during the trial. The analysis will focus on a trial with a criminal case of assault, where both the abuser and the abused were too drunk to remember what happened on the scene of the crime. In this criminal case it becomes relevant to study how the legal officials, prosecutors, defender and judge, handle the flimsy evidence available in this crime case and how truth claims are brought forward. The following questions are asked: How do the parties in the trial patch together the story of the crime and by which media is it transmediated during the trial? How does the court handle the truth claim, i.e. what is the official true story of the crime in the written verdict?

ABSTRACT. With the development of new video recording technologies, fresh opportunities arise for data collection and analysis within the discourse and interaction studies paradigm. For example, until fairly recently it was usually not possible to obtain even a single video recording of a spontaneous event. With the advent of portable video cameras and ubiquitous smartphones, in combination with the popularity of online video sharing archives, independent video recordings of events are increasingly common. With multiple sources of third-party video recordings one can look analytically betwixt single camera sources. To explore the issues, concurrent recordings of the participatory ‘human mic’ protest actions in public places by the Occupy social movement are analysed in terms of the accomplishment of audience participation and response. In addition, with 360° video recordings one can look away from and behind the traditional video camera frame. This new technology, however, has not yet been critically explored from a research point of view. The constitutive role of traditional recording technology and the metaphor of the ‘camera’ in shaping our understanding of the world, including talk and social interaction, has been well documented by scholars such as Douglas Macbeth. Indeed, even digital camera recording and video display technology shapes what we see and hear, and therefore what is analysable. To this end, third party 360° video recordings made in a variety of settings in which talk takes place are also analysed in order to document the situated and spatial accomplishment of the ‘interaction order’, peripheral participation and to re-visit Goffman’s notion of front- and backstage.

ABSTRACT. This paper explores the meaning potential of 100 randomly selected selfies published on the social network Instagram. The aim of the paper is firstly to describe the selfies as a genre, and secondly to discuss the production and reproduction of meaning and values in such texts. The main finding is that the selfie is to be understood a global genre, sharing features of a larger global and commercial media discourse. Selfies shared on Instagram appear as multimodal texts. The majority of the images appear as visual stereotypes, representing individuals as passive and stylized in decontextualized settings. The typical “selfie-language“ is influenced by a global style, characterized by a mix of languages, slang, codes and abbreviations. The research draws on theories from Social Semiotics, Critical Discourse Analysis and Critical Multimodal Discourse Analysis (Fairclough 1995; Kress & van Leeuwen 2006; Machin & Mayr 2012; Van Leeuwen 2013).

ABSTRACT. Following the point made by Trudgill (1974 and 2001) that RP speakers have always represented a very small proportion of the population of native speakers of English in Britain, we shall report on a study which assumes that this is most likely also true of what would count as RP in Afrikaans. This paper will give information from a small sample of speakers in a region in the Western Cape (South Africa) where linguistic variation is perceived to run along social, educational and racial divisions. It will use recorded conversations produced in an investigation of characterising features of Afrikaans variants that identify a number of young speakers correlating how they are geographically situated, where they completed their schooling, and what kind of language contact they experienced in their secondary school years to illustrate language variation among the speakers. The paper will show how participants exhibit linguistic variation between a predominantly “Suid-Kaapse Afrikaans” community and one where ostensibly RP Afrikaans rather than a local variety of Afrikaans is in evidence. It refers to grammatical markers of difference, such as the [y]/[dž] alternation as in “jaar” (=year), the [iə]/ [i:] alternation as in “see” (=sea) or the “hê”/”het” alternation as in utterances like “As jy die voordeel wou hê/het, moes jy betyds gevra het.” [If you wanted to have the advantage, you should’ve asked in good time].

One hypothesis is that a number of features perceived typically to identify speakers of the non-standard variant broadly identified as “Suid-Kaap Afrikaans”, are remarkably resilient, even when there is mobility and more contact than ten to fifteen years ago between speakers of the different variants. 

ABSTRACT. Developing a written standard for a minority language is not a neutral process. This has consequences for the status of the language and for how speakers relate to the new standard. An inherent problem with standardisation is whether the users themselves will accept and identify with the standard chosen. Therefore, there is an inherent tension in standardisation processes: standardisation, which was supposed to empower minority language speakers, may create a new form of stigma for those who feel that they cannot live up to the new codified standard (Gal 2006, Lane 2015).

In this presentation, I draw on different methods in order to analyse these complex processes. I will investigate the standardisation of Kven (a minority language in Northern Norway), and I aim to show how different methodological approaches may compliment data from sociolinguistic interviews. Language standardisation usually has material outcomes such as texts resulting from the standardisation processes (text books, grammars and dictionaries), and such objects may be seen as results of actions that have been performed by social actors at some point in time (Norris 2007). By applying the concept of frozen action to language standardisation, standardisation processes are analysed as mediated actions and material results of social actions performed in the past. Taking this as a starting point, I wish to show how including material objects in our analysis may yield a deeper analysis of complex social processes, such as standardisation.