Journal articles on the topic 'Education policy|Sociolinguistics|Language'

AbstractThis article examines the nexus of neoliberalism, globalization, and the spread of English, using English-language education (ELE) policies in Taiwan between 2000 and 2008 as a case study. Data from ethnographic work, including interviews with school principals and education managers, is contextualized using recent theoretical innovations in the sociolinguistics of globalization and language and neoliberalism. Neoliberalism venerates the ideals of ‘choice’, ‘competition’, and the ‘free market’. For students and parents, English proficiency is less a ‘choice’ than a necessity for success in education and employment. ‘English for all’ policies are thus imperatives rather than opportunities when individuals, schools, and regions are put into deleterious ‘competition’ with each other in public education, and when public education is pressured by a parallel ‘free’ market private education sector. The structural function of English as a valued capital is examined alongside language ideologies regarding the ‘earlier-the-better’ argument for L2 acquisition and the idealization of the native-speaking teacher. (Taiwan, neoliberalism, globalization, English, sociolinguistics, language policy)*

ABSTRACTIn 1977, a bilingual education project began in rural areas of Puno, Peru, as a direct result of Peru's 1972 Education Reform. This paper presents results of an ethnographic and sociolinguistic study comparing Quechua language use and maintenance between: 1) a bilingual education school and community, and 2) a nonbilingual education school and community. Classroom observation indicated a significant change in teacher–pupil language use and an improvement in pupil participation in the bilingual education school. Community observation and interviews indicated that community members both valued and used their language. Yet the project has had difficulties expanding or even maintaining its implementation. (Quechua; Puno, Peru; Peru; Andes; bilingual education; classroom language use; ethnography; sociolinguistics; community development; language planning; language maintenance; educational policy)

This review provides a state-of-the-art overview of Spanish sociolinguistics and discusses several areas, including variationist sociolinguistics, bilingual and immigrant communities, and linguistic ethnography. We acknowledge many recent advances and the abundant research on several classic topics, such as phonology, morphosyntax, and discourse-pragmatics. We also highlight the need for research on understudied phenomena and emphasize the importance of combining both quantitative and ethnographic methodologies in sociolinguistic research. Much research on Spanish has shown that the language's wide variation across the globe is a reflection of Spanish-speaking communities’ rich sociohistorical and demographic diversity. Yet, there are many areas where research is needed, including bilingualism in indigenous communities, access to bilingual education, attitudes toward speakers of indigenous languages, and language maintenance and attrition. Language policy, ideology, and use in the legal and health care systems have also become important topics of sociolinguistics today as they relate to issues of human rights.

The strong motive of East Timor government to establish a national identity through education had brought serious issues. This writing primarily discusses about the drawbacks regarding to East Timor language policy in education sector during the period of 2000 – 2008. Spolsky’s framework was employed to analyze the sociolinguistics situation, working of national/ethnic/other identity within the community, minority language rights and English role as a global language. The study was done by thorough library research in the related fields. The results show that while community language practice was ignored, the top-down language policy put more emphasis on Portuguese as the national identity language, Tetun Dili and English as the global language. As a result, the teachers and students were disadvantaged due to the inability to speak Portuguese, Tetun Dili and English. Second, the strong socio-historical context and political affinity to Portugal and its language had given little role to local languages in Mother Tongue Based-Multilingual Education.

The International Journal of Literacy, Culture, and Language Education (IJLCLE) was born out of the peer-reviewed Working Papers in Literacy, Culture, and Language Education (WPLCLE) published virtually in five volumes from 2012 to 2017. IJLCLE is an open-source, peer-reviewed international journal dedicated to publishing research in the field of literacy, culture, and language education from multi-, inter-, and transdisciplinary perspectives. Its mission is to promote the academic exchange of ideas and dissemination of research among scholars and researchers from diverse fields of study worldwide. Authors are invited to submit manuscripts describing scholarly research on a wide range of topics related to language, literacy, and culture in education. Theoretical and conceptual study, empirical and applied research using qualitative and/or quantitative methodologies, critical papers, special issues, and book reviews are all invited. Contributions from a host of disciplines such as sociolinguistics, sociology of language, psycholinguistics, educational linguistics, applied linguistics, linguistic anthropology, raciolinguistics, literacy studies, cultural studies, language and gender studies, language and political economy, media and technology, language education, teacher education, educational policy, semiotics, pragmatics, language policy and planning, language revitalization, and linguistic landscapes are very welcome. The intended audience of IJLCLE are researchers, scholars, educators, and graduate students from around the world.

Theory on Teaching English is currently moving on a paradigm shift. This paradigm occurred because of a review on the basics of linguistic, pedagogic and the review on the impact of sociolinguistics in a globalized setting. This paper aims to show the results of comparative study which is textual on the teaching and learning English paradigm and the policy has been implemented by both universities. The objective of the study is to describe the comparison of the paradigm between English Language Education and academic policy in both universities. Descriptive qualitative in the form of textual analysis is used in this study. Data were taken from the analysis of documents and interviews with academicians in both universities then analyzed using the theory of a paradigm shift in learning English (Kostoulas, 2010) and academic policy (Center for Quality Assurance, UGM, 2012) using an interactive model of Miles and Huberman. The validity of the data used triangulation methods and data sources. The results show that the content of English Language Education taught at the Division of English Language Education (ELE) HKU and at the English Language Education Department (PBI) IAIN Surakarta have the same characteristics but the ways in providing educational materials are relatively different. The paradigm and academic policiy in ELE HKU applied the learning paradigm while at PBI IAIN Surakarta is still applying on teaching paradigm. When the study was conducted by researcher, the ELE Department IAIN Surakarta has been moving towards a paradigm shift in some academic elements as the use of the methods by lecturers called learning paradigm, although the method is not covered by the policy. The difference between Paradigm and policy in both universities is influenced by the context of the political situation, especially the rules of ministry of higher education, cultural context and the orientation on each university. Keywords: Paradigm Shift, Academic Policy, English Language Education, Intertextual Analysis

AbstractAs children’s agency in influencing institutional language practices is often not carefully reflected in early childhood education curricula, the objective of this paper is to offer meaningful insights about how institutional language policies are both reproduced and transformed by children’s everyday use of language. For this purpose, we will combine conceptual resources from social theory, sociolinguistics and childhood studies in order to analyse children’s linguistic behaviour by applying a structure-agency perspective as a relational approach. Drawing on data from ethnographic field research within institutional day care centres in Luxembourg, our findings demonstrate that the status of children as actors in institutional language practices is strongly connected to institutional policies as a structural condition. However, this does not mean that children just enact these language policies, because they are actors of both maintaining, undermining and alternating them. In this respect, especially the translanguaging of children and caregivers plays a crucial role in the Luxembourgish context as it allows to build a bridge between the official institutional language policy and the individual linguistic repertoires. Considering the goal of establishing a plurilingual environment in early childhood education which now is paramount to the educational language policy of the Luxembourgish government, this article suggests that translanguaging practices should be considered as one of the key starting points to create a plurilingual ecology in and through everyday practice in the day care centres.

This article looks at the definitions and scope of multilingualism and the different perspectives used in its study. Multilingualism is a very common phenomenon that has received much scholarly attention in recent years. Multilingualism is also an interdisciplinary phenomenon that can be studied from both an individual and a societal perspective. In this article, several dimensions of multilingualism are considered, and different types of multilingualism are discussed. The article summarizes the themes researched in various areas of the study of multilingualism such as neurolinguistics, psycholinguistics, linguistics, education, sociolinguistics, and language policy. These areas look at language acquisition and language processing as well as the use of different languages in social contexts and adopt a variety of research methodologies. The last section of the article compares monolingual and holistic perspectives in the study of multilingualism, paying special attention to new approaches developed in the past few years that argue for establishing more fluid boundaries between languages.

The Centre for Applied Language Research at the University of Southampton is one of two research centres within the discipline of Modern Languages. Established in 2004, CALR now has more than 50 members, predominantly faculty members working in the School of Humanities/Modern Languages, as well as growing number of postgraduate researchers. The Centre has always sought to work collaboratively with other centres and institutions worldwide and regularly hosts visiting international scholars. Additionally, many of its members work closely with the Centre for Transnational Studies, which also comes under the School of Modern Languages. CALR promotes an extensive applied language research agenda, including language education policy, second language acquisition (SLA), foreign language learning (FLL) and teaching, sociolinguistics, intercultural communication and language globalisation. Emanating from the legacy of Christopher Brumfit, the founder of the Centre, CALR work has always reflected an awareness of global and local issues in language use and learning. Brumfit was renowned for balancing his concerns for the rights and freedoms of the language learner with his influential work on classroom pedagogy. Since his passing in 2006, these values have lived on in the work of the Centre.

The marginalization of English second (L2) and foreign language (EFL) users in the academic and practical pursuit of English language teaching (ELT) has fueled the hegemonic power of the inner circle of world Englishes (CWE). Because of the inequality among the circles of world Englishes, this paper pursues a dual purpose: firstly, it sets out to determine the sociolinguistic effects of globalization on the CWE; and secondly, it establishes how these sociolinguistic effects contribute to the homogenization of the circles and a seemingly more equitable notion of (world) English(es). Drawing on available qualitative descriptions and empirical data, three practical contexts of sociolinguistics were identified (viz. demographic shifts, economic motivations, and language education policy) to realize the dual research purpose. Based on a qualitative instrumental case study of a purposive sample of one country from each CWE, the study assesses the possibility to justify the proposition that the functions of English across the circles are becoming more similar as globalization homogenizes the global English sociolinguistic ecology. The findings support claims of major evolutionary processes that entail significant implications for the ELT community across the CWE.

Since ancient times India has been a multilingual society and languages in India have thrived though at times many races and religions came into conflict. The states in modern India were reorganised on linguistic basis in 1956 yet in contrast to the European notion of one language one nation, majority of the states have more than one official language. The Linguistic Survey of India (LSI) conducted by Grierson between 1866 and 1927 identified 179 languages and 544 dialects. The first post-independence Indian census after (1951) listed 845 languages including dialects. The 1991 Census identified 216 mother tongues were identified while in 2001 their number was 234. The three-language formula devised to maintain the multilingual character of the nation and paying due attention to the importance of mother tongue is widely accepted in the country in imparting the education at primary and secondary levels. However, higher education system in India impedes multilingualism. According the Constitution it is imperative on the “Union to promote the spread of the Hindi language, to develop it so that it may serve as a medium of expression for all the elements of the composite culture of India … by drawing, wherever necessary or desirable, for its vocabulary, primarily on Sanskrit and secondarily on other languages.” However, the books translated into Hindi mainly from English have found favour with neither the students nor the teachers. On the other hand the predominance of English in various competitive examinations has caused social discontent leading to mass protests and cases have been filed in the High Courts and the Supreme Court against linguistic imperialism of English and Hindi. The governments may channelize the languages but in a democratic set up it is ultimately the will of the people that prevails. Some languages are bound to suffer a heavy casualty both in the short and long runs in the process. References Basil, Bernstein. (1971). 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Language Planning Newsletter, 8(4) November, 1–3. Retrieved from http://languagemanagement.ff.cuni.cz/en/system/files/documents/Je rnudd_LP%20as%20 LC.pdf. Kamat, V. The Languages of India. Retrieved from http://www.kamat.com/indica/diversity/languages.htm. King, K., & Mackey, A. (2007). The Bilingual Edge: Why, When, and How to Teach Your Child a Second Language. New York: Collins. Kosonen, K. (2005). Education in Local Languages: Policy and Practice in Southeast Asia. First Languages First: Community-based Literacy Programmes for Minority Language Contexts in Asia. Bangkok: UNESCO Bangkok. Lewis, E. G. (1972). Multilingualism in the Soviet Union: Aspects of Language Policy and Its Implementation. Mouton: The Hague. Linguistic Survey of India. George Abraham Grierson (Comp. and ed.). Calcutta: Office of the Superintendent of Government Printing, India, 1903–1928. PDF. Retrieved from http://dsal.uchicago.edu/books/lsi/. Macaulay, T. B. (1835). Minute dated the 2nd February 1835. Web. Retrieved from http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00generallinks/macaulay/txt_minute_ed uca tion_1835.html. Mansor, S. (2005). Language Planning in Higher Education. New York: Oxford University Press. Mishra, Dr Jayakanta & others, PIL Case no. CWJC 7505/1998. Patna High Court. Peñalosa, F. (1981). Introduction to the Sociology of Language. New York: Newbury House Publishers. Sapir, E. in “Mutilingualism & National Development: The Nigerian Situation”, R O Farinde, In Nigerian Languages, Literatures, Culture and Reforms, Ndimele, Ozo-mekuri (Ed.), Port Harcourt: M & J Grand Orbit Communications, 2007. Simons, G., Fennig, C. (2017). Ethnologue: Languages of the World, Twentieth edition. Dallas, Texas: SIL International. Retrieved from http://www.ethnologue.com/country/IN. Stegen, O. Why Teaching the Mother Tongue is Important? Retrieved from https://www.academia.edu/2406265/Why_teaching_the_mother_tongue_is_important. “The Tower of Babel”. Genesis 11:1–9. The Bible. 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Asia is a ‘homeland’ for bilingualism research in regards to its diversity. It is considered as a vivid research site where there is significant growth of academic areas of exploration. Yet, there are very few scientific attempts to map bilingualism research in an Asian context so far. Thus, I bring the idea of mapping previous works through this literature study by specifically scrutinizing (a) bilingualism research in Southeast Asia, (b) bilingualism research in other parts of Asia, and (c) lessons to learn as a stepping stone to define the future of Indonesian bilingualism. The general data mapping I have explored includes Southeast Asian countries (Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Thailand, and Vietnam) and other parts of Asia (China, India, Israel, and Kazakhstan. The findings from the 33 previous works can be considered as empirical evidence that I will use to portray the research trends in Asia’s bilingualism. The trends show that 19 (55%) works have approached bilingual data from sociolinguistics perspective, whereas the other 14 (45%) have framed their analysis under psycholinguistic approach. Based on the methodological concerns from these works, I propose two major areas of exploration: Family Language Policy (FLP) and trilingual acquisition. FLP in Indonesian is a promising ground, as it brings together issues in language maintenance and shift that instigate a wider aspect of investigation; these aspects include bilingual language dominance, cross language influence, and so forth. Trilingual acquisition, the situation most Indonesian children are growing with, has a potentially significant impact on education, especially where a language curriculum is carefully planned and implemented. In conclusion, this mapping will hopefully shed a light on how bilingualism has academically been very appealing and will continue to fascinate more researchers.

This study aimed to present the status quo of linguistic studies on social media in the past decade. In particular, it conducted a bibliometric analysis of articles from the field of linguistics of the database of Web of Science Core Collection with the aid of the tool CiteSpace to identify the general characteristics, major strands of linguistics, main research methods, and important research themes in the area of linguistic studies on social media. The main findings are summarized as follows. First, the study reported the publication trend, main publication venues, researched social media platforms, and languages used in researched social media. Second, sociolinguistics and pragmatics were found to be major strands of linguistics used in relevant studies. Third, the study identified seven main research methods: discourse analysis, critical discourse analysis, conversation analysis, multimodal analysis, narrative analysis, ethnographic analysis, and corpus analysis. Fourth, important research themes were extracted and classified based on four dimensions of the genre framework of social media studies. They were the participation nature and technology affordances of social media in the dimension of compositional level, the researched topics of education, (language) policy and politics in the dimension of thematic orientations, the researched discursive practices of (im)politeness, humor, indexicality and multilingualism in the dimension of stylistic traits, and the researched communicative functions of constructing identity, communicating (language) ideology, and expressing attitude in the pragmatic dimension. Moreover, linguistic studies on social media tended to be characterized by cross-disciplinary and mixed-method approaches.

In recent decades, the commodification of the English language has aroused intensive research interest in the sociolinguistics on a global scale, but studies on the commodification of the Chinese language are relatively rare. Most studies take a critical approach in relation to its adverse impacts on minority rights and social justice. This study examined the language landscape in Chiangmai, Thailand, and the linguistic beliefs of local Thai Chinese language learners. Based on their feedback, this study investigated the commodification of Chinese language education in the community of Chinese language learners in Chiangmai. We found that from a less critical perspective, the commodification of a second language provides more accessible and affordable educational opportunities for learners, especially those from low-income families, and at the same time language proficiency can broaden learners’ career choices and provide employees with additional value in industries, such as tourism, commerce, and services. This finding implies that language commodification, rather than typically being associated with linguistic imperialism and unbalanced socio-economic status, can be a contributing factor in promoting higher-education availability and social sustainability in certain circumstances. There may be some mediating factors between the commodification of language and changes in the sustainable balance of language, opening up space for future research to explore.

06–360Blackledge, Adrian (U Birmingham, UK), The magical frontier between the dominant and the dominated: Sociolinguistics and social justice in a multilingual world. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development (Multilingual Matters) 27.1 (2006), 22–41.06–361Boughton, Zoë (U Exeter, UK; z.c.boughton@exeter.ac.uk), Accent levelling and accent localisation in northern French: Comparing Nancy and Rennes. Journal of French Language Studies (Cambridge University Press) 15.3 (2005), 235–256.06–362Brown, N. Anthony (Brigham Young U, Utah, USA; tony_brown@byu.edu), Language and identity in Belarus.Language Policy (Springer) 4.3 (2005), 311–332.06–363Cameron, Deborah (U Oxford, UK) Language, gender, and sexuality: Current issues and new directions. Applied Linguistics (Oxford University Press) 26.4 (2005), 482–502.06–364Deutch, Yocheved (Bar-Ilan U, Israel; yochd@netvision.net.il), Language law in Israel. Language Policy (Springer) 4.3 (2005), 261–285.06–365Edwards, John (St Francis Xavier U, Nova Scotia, Canada), Players and power in minority-group settings. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development (Multilingual Matters) 27.1 (2006), 4–21.06–366Edwards, Viv & Lynda Pritchard Newcombe (U Reading, UK), When school is not enough: New initiatives in intergenerational language transmission in Wales. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism (Multilingual Matters) 8.4 (2005), 298–312.06–367García, Patricia (Stanford U Graduate School of Education, USA), Parental language attitudes and practices to socialise children in a diglossic society. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism (Multilingual Matters) 8.4 (2005), 328–344.06–368Garner, Mark (U Aberdeen, UK), Christine Raschka & Peter Sercombe, Sociolinguistic minorities, research, and social relationships.Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development (Multilingual Matters) 27.1 (2006), 61–78.06–369Goto, Yuko (U Pennsylvania, USA; ybutler@gse.upenn.edu) & Masakazu Iino, Current Japanese reforms in English language education: The 2003 ‘Action Plan’. Language Policy (Springer) 4.1 (2005), 25–45.06–370Hankoni Kamwendo, Gregory (U Botswana, Botswana; kamwendog@mopipi.ub.bw), Language planning from below: An example from northern Malawi. Language Policy (Springer) 4.2 (2005), 143–165.06–371Kaur Gill, Saran (U Kebangsaan, Malaysia, Malaysia; saran@pkrisc.cc.ukm.my), Language policy in Malaysia: Reversing direction. Language Policy (Springer) 4.3 (2005), 241–260.06–372Lantolf, James P. (Pennsylvania State U, USA; jpl7@psu.edu), Sociocultural theory and L2: State of the art. Studies in Second Language Acquisition (Cambridge University Press) 28.1 (2006), 67–109.06–373Määttä, Simo K. (U California, Berkeley, USA; asunto@uclink.berkeley.edu), The European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages, French language laws, and national identity. Language Policy (Springer) 4.2 (2005), 167–186.06–374Mills, Jean (U Birmingham, UK), Connecting communities: Identity, language and diaspora. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism (Multilingual Matters) 8.4 (2005), 253–274.06–375Pavlenko, Aneta (Temple U, USA), ‘Ask each pupil about her methods of cleaning’: Ideologies of language and gender in Americanisation instruction (1900–1924). International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism (Multilingual Matters) 8.4 (2005), 275–297.06–376Richland, Justin B. (U California, Irvine, USA), The multiple calculi of meaning.Discourse & Society (Sage) 17.1 (2006), 65–97.06–377Silver, Rita Elaine (Nanyang Technological U, Singapore; resilver@nie.edu.sg), The discourse of linguistic capital: Language and economic policy planning in Singapore. Language Policy (Springer) 4.1 (2005), 47–66.06–378Tannenbaum, Michal & Marina Berkovich (Tel Aviv U, Israel; mtannen@post.tau.ac.il), Family relations and language maintenance: Implications for language educational policies. Language Policy (Springer) 4.3 (2005), 287–309.06–379Vaish, Viniti (Nanyang Technical U, Singapore; vvaish@nie.edu.sg), A peripherist view of English as a language of decolonization in post-colonial India. Language Policy (Springer) 4.2 (2005), 187–206.06–380Zuengler, Jane & Elizabeth R. Miller (U Winconsin-Madison, USA), Cognitive and sociocultural perspectives: Two parallel SLA worlds?TESOL Quarterly (Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages) 40.1 (2006), 35–58.

Theory on Teaching English is currently moving on a paradigm shift. This paradigm occurred because of a review on the basics of linguistic, pedagogic and the review on the impact of sociolinguistics in a globalized setting. This paper aims to show the results of comparative study which is textual on the teaching and learning English paradigm and the policy has been implemented by both universities. The objective of the study is to describe the comparison of the paradigm between English Language Education and academic policy in both universities. Descriptive qualitative in the form of textual analysis is used in this study. Data were taken from the analysis of documents and interviews with academicians in both universities then analyzed using the theory of a paradigm shift in learning English (Kostoulas, 2010) and academic policy (Center for Quality Assurance, UGM, 2012) using an interactive model of Miles and Huberman. The validity of the data used triangulation methods and data sources. The results show that the content of English Language Education taught at the Division of English Language Education (ELE) HKU and at the English Language Education Department (PBI) IAIN Surakarta have the same characteristics but the ways in providing educational materials are relatively different. The paradigm and academic policiy in ELE HKU applied the learning paradigm while at PBI IAIN Surakarta is still applying on teaching paradigm. When the study was conducted by researcher, the ELE Department IAIN Surakarta has been moving towards a paradigm shift in some academic elements as the use of the methods by lecturers called learning paradigm, although the method is not covered by the policy. The difference between Paradigm and policy in both universities is influenced by the context of the political situation, especially the rules of ministry of higher education, cultural context and the orientation on each university.

When speaking of languages in ethnic minority areas of Vietnam, people often refer to ethnic minority languages and Vietnamese. Accordingly, domestic and international linguistics has mainly focused on these languages. However, along with socioeconomic development, ethnic minorities in Vietnam have witnessed significant changes in not only material and spiritual life but also people’s awareness. From the linguistic perspective, one of the most significant changes in ethnic minorities’ awareness is their outlook on foreign languages (this is called "language attitude" in sociolinguistics). This article is part of our investigations into "the situation of languages used in ethnic minorities of Vietnam". The study has revealed some major ethnic minorities’ language attitudes towards foreign languages, including the needs to know foreign languages, the necessary foreign languages to be known and the reasons for knowing foreign languages. Therefore, the article will, hopefully, make contributions to laying scientific foundations for policy-making on foreign language education in Vietnam, in general and in ethnic minorities, in particular.

When speaking of languages in ethnic minority areas of Vietnam, people often refer to ethnic minority languages and Vietnamese. Accordingly, domestic and international linguistics has mainly focused on these languages. However, along with socioeconomic development, ethnic minorities in Vietnam have witnessed significant changes in not only material and spiritual life but also people’s awareness. From the linguistic perspective, one of the most significant changes in ethnic minorities’ awareness is their outlook on foreign languages (this is called "language attitude" in sociolinguistics). This article is part of our investigations into "the situation of languages used in ethnic minorities of Vietnam". The study has revealed some major ethnic minorities’ language attitudes towards foreign languages, including the needs to know foreign languages, the necessary foreign languages to be known and the reasons for knowing foreign languages. Therefore, the article will, hopefully, make contributions to laying scientific foundations for policy-making on foreign language education in Vietnam, in general and in ethnic minorities, in particular.

AbstractInstitutions of higher education (HEIs) in English-speaking countries have been engaged in internationalization for decades. Among the many factors driving their internationalization are commitments to increasing and celebrating diversity as well as a desire to foster cross-cultural cooperation. Nonetheless, the linguistic diversity of their multi-national student body and faculty poses challenges for HEIs, including the decades-old controversy surrounding international teaching assistants (ITAs) in the United States. Despite their commitments to respecting diversity, HEIs have generally adopted a deficit approach to ITAs’ language, framing it as ‘flawed’ and attributing communication problems to those ‘flaws’. I argue that, despite its more nuanced understanding of the issue, applied linguistics has adopted an implicit politics complicit with this dominant framing which leads researchers to ignore the student’s role in ITA-student communication. In response, I propose an alternative approach grounded in critical sociolinguistics. Working from this perspective, I examine students’ discourse about their international instructors, arguing that their statements suggest contrasting orientations to communication across linguistic difference. Some students seek to cooperate with their international instructors, while others prefer to avoid them. I examine their justifications for these orientations in detail and discuss implications for higher education policy.

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IntroductionNew digital technologies hold promise for equalising access to information and communication for the Deaf community. SMS technology, for example, has helped to equalise deaf peoples’ access to information and made it easier to communicate with both deaf and hearing people (Tane Akamatsu et al.; Power and Power; Power, Power, and Horstmanshof; Valentine and Skelton, "Changing", "Umbilical"; Harper). A wealth of anecdotal evidence and some recent academic work suggests that new media technology is also reshaping deaf peoples’ sense of local and global community (Breivik "Deaf"; Breivik, Deaf; Brueggeman). One focus of research on new media technologies has been on technologies used for point to point communication, including communication (and interpretation) via video (Tane Akamatsu et al.; Power and Power; Power, Power, and Horstmanshof). Another has been the use of multimedia technologies in formal educational setting for pedagogical purposes, particularly English language literacy (e.g. Marshall Gentry et al.; Tane Akamatsu et al.; Vogel et al.). An emphasis on the role of multimedia in deaf education is understandable, considering the on-going highly politicised contest over whether to educate young deaf people in a bilingual environment using a signed language (Swanwick & Gregory). However, the increasing significance of social and participatory media in the leisure time of Westerners suggests that such uses of Web 2.0 are also worth exploring. There have begun to be some academic accounts of the enthusiastic adoption of vlogging by sign language users (e.g. Leigh; Cavander and Ladner) and this paper seeks to add to this important work. Web 2.0 has been defined by its ability to, in Denise Woods’ word, “harness collective intelligence” (19.2) by providing opportunities for users to make, adapt, “mash up” and share text, photos and video. As well as its well-documented participatory possibilities (Bruns), its re-emphasis on visual (as opposed to textual) communication is of particular interest for Deaf communities. It has been suggested that deaf people are a ‘visual variety of the human race’ (Bahan), and the visually rich presents new opportunities for visually rich forms of communication, most importantly via signed languages. The central importance of signed languages for Deaf identity suggests that the visual aspects of interactive multimedia might offer possibilities of maintenance, enhancement and shifts in those identities (Hyde, Power and Lloyd). At the same time, the visual aspects of the Web 2.0 are often audio-visual, such that the increasingly rich resources of the net offer potential barriers as well as routes to inclusion and community (see Woods; Ellis; Cavander and Ladner). In particular, lack of captioning or use of Auslan in video resources emerges as a key limit to the accessibility of the visual Web to deaf users (Cahill and Hollier). In this paper we ask to what extent contemporary digital media might create moments of permeability in what Krentz has called “the hearing line, that invisible boundary separating deaf and hearing people”( 2)”. To provide tentative answers to these questions, this paper will explore the use of participatory digital media by a group of young Deaf people taking part in a small-scale digital moviemaking project in Sydney in 2009. The ProjectAs a starting point, the interdisciplinary research team conducted a video-making course for young deaf sign language users within the Department of Media, Music and Cultural Studies at Macquarie University. The research team was comprised of one deaf and four hearing researchers, with expertise in media and cultural studies, information technology, sign language linguistics/ deaf studies, and signed language interpreting. The course was advertised through the newsletter of partner organization the NSW Deaf Society, via a Sydney bilingual deaf school and through the dense electronic networks of Australian deaf people. The course attracted fourteen participants from NSW, Western Australia and Queensland ranging in age from 10 to 18. Twelve of the participants were male, and two female. While there was no aspiration to gather a representative group of young people, it is worth noting there was some diversity within the group: for example, one participant was a wheelchair user while another had in recent years moved to Sydney from Africa and had learned Auslan relatively recently. Students were taught a variety of storytelling techniques and video-making skills, and set loose in groups to devise, shoot and edit a number of short films. The results were shared amongst the class, posted on a private YouTube channel and made into a DVD which was distributed to participants.The classes were largely taught in Auslan by a deaf teacher, although two sessions were taught by (non-deaf) members of Macquarie faculty, including an AFI award winning director. Those sessions were interpreted into Auslan by a sign language interpreter. Participants were then allowed free creative time to shoot video in locations of their choice on campus, or to edit their footage in the computer lab. Formal teaching sessions lasted half of each day – in the afternoons, participants were free to use the facilities or participate in a range of structured activities. Participants were also interviewed in groups, and individually, and their participation in the project was observed by researchers. Our research interest was in what deaf young people would choose to do with Web 2.0 technologies, and most particularly the visually rich elements of participatory and social media, in a relatively unstructured environment. Importantly, our focus was not on evaluating the effectiveness of multimedia for teaching deaf young people, or the level of literacy deployed by deaf young people in using the applications. Rather we were interested to discover the kinds of stories participants chose to tell, the ways they used Web 2.0 applications and the modalities of communication they chose to use. Given that Auslan was the language of instruction of the course, would participants draw on the tradition of deaf jokes and storytelling and narrate stories to camera in Auslan? Would they use the format of the “mash-up”, drawing on found footage or photographs? Would they make more filmic movies using Auslan dialogue? How would they use captions and text in their movies: as subtitles for Auslan dialogue? As an alternative to signing? Or not at all? Our observations from the project point to the great significance of the visual dimensions of Web 2.0 for the deaf young people who participated in the project. Initially, this was evident in the kind of movies students chose to make. Only one group – three young people in their late teens which included both of the young women in the class - chose to make a dialogue heavy movie, a spoof of Charlie’s Angels, entitled Deaf Angels. This movie included long scenes of the Angels using Auslan to chat together, receiving instruction from “Charlie” in sign language via videophone and recruiting “extras”, again using Auslan, to sign a petition for Auslan to be made an official Australian language. In follow up interviews, one of the students involved in making this film commented “my clip is about making a political statement, while the other [students in the class] made theirs just for fun”. The next group of (three) films, all with the involvement of the youngest class member, included signed storytelling of a sort readily recognisable from signed videos on-line: direct address to camera, with the teller narrating but also taking on the roles of characters and presenting their dialogue directly via the sign language convention of “role shift” - also referred to as constructed action and constructed dialogue (Metzger). One of these movies was an interesting hybrid. The first half of the four minute film had two young actors staging a hold-up at a vending machine, with a subsequent chase and fight scene. Like most of the films made by participants in the class, it included only one line of signed dialogue, with the rest of the narrative told visually through action. However, at the end of the action sequence, with the victim safely dead, the narrative was then retold by one of the performers within a signed story, using conventions typically observed in signed storytelling - such as role shift, characterisation and spatial mapping (Mather & Winston; Rayman; Wilson).The remaining films similarly drew on action and horror genres with copious use of chase and fight scenes and melodramatic and sometimes quite beautiful climactic death tableaux. The movies included a story about revenging the death of a brother; a story about escaping from jail; a short story about a hippo eating a vet; a similar short comprised of stills showing a sequence of executions in the computer lab; and a ghost story. Notably, most of these movies contained very little dialogue – with only one or two lines of signed dialogue in each four to five minute video (with the exception of the gun handshape used in context to represent the object liberally throughout most films). The kinds of movies made by this limited group of people on this one occasion are suggestive. While participants drew on a number of genres and communication strategies in their film making, the researchers were surprised at how few of the movies drew on traditions of signed storytelling or jokes– particularly since the course was targeted at deaf sign language users and promoted as presented in Auslan. Consequently, our group of students were largely drawn from the small number of deaf schools in which Auslan is the main language of instruction – an exceptional circumstance in an Australian setting in which most deaf young people attend mainstream schools (Byrnes et al.; Power and Hyde). Looking across the Hearing LineWe can make sense of the creative choices made by the participants in the course in a number of ways. Although methods of captioning were briefly introduced during the course, iMovie (the package which participants were using) has limited captioning functionality. Indeed, one student, who was involved in making the only clip to include captioning which contextualised the narrative, commented in follow-up interviews that he would have liked more information about captioning. It’s also possible that the compressed nature of the course prevented participants from undertaking the time-consuming task of scripting and entering captions. As well as being the most fun approach to the projects, the use of visual story telling was probably the easiest. This was perhaps exacerbated by the lack of emphasis on scriptwriting (outside of structural elements and broad narrative sweeps) in the course. Greater emphasis on that aspect of film-making would have given participants a stronger foundational literacy for caption-based projectsDespite these qualifications, both the movies made by students and our observations suggest the significance of a shared visual culture in the use of the Web by these particular young people. During an afternoon when many of the students were away swimming, one student stayed in the lab to use the computers. Rather than working on a video project, he spent time trawling through YouTube for clips purporting to show ghost sightings and other paranormal phenomena. He drew these clips to the attention of one of the research team who was present in the lab, prompting a discussion about the believability of the ghosts and supernatural apparitions in the clips. While some of the clips included (uncaptioned) off-screen dialogue and commentary, this didn’t seem to be a barrier to this student’s enjoyment. Like many other sub-genres of YouTube clips – pranks, pratfalls, cute or alarmingly dangerous incidents involving children and animals – these supernatural videos as a genre rely very little on commentary or dialogue for their meaning – just as with the action films that other students drew on so heavily in their movie making. In an E-Tech paper entitled "The Cute Cat Theory of Digital Activism", Ethan Zuckerman suggests that “web 1.0 was invented to allow physicists to share research papers and web 2.0 was created to allow people to share pictures of cute cats”. This comment points out both the Web 2.0’s vast repository of entertaining material in the ‘funny video’genre which is visually based, dialogue free, entertaining material accessible to a wide range of people, including deaf sign language users. In the realm of leisure, at least, the visually rich resources of Web 2.0’s ubiquitous images and video materials may be creating a shared culture in which the line between hearing and deaf people’s entertainment activities is less clear than it may have been in the past. The ironic tone of Zuckerman’s observation, however, alerts us to the limits of a reliance on language-free materials as a route to accessibility. The kinds of videos that the participants in the course chose to make speaks to the limitations as well as resources offered by the visual Web. There is still a limited range of captioned material on You Tube. In interviews, both young people and their teachers emphasised the central importance of access to captioned video on-line, with the young people we interviewed strongly favouring captioned video over the inclusion on-screen of simultaneous signed interpretations of text. One participant who was a regular user of a range of on-line social networking commented that if she really liked the look of a particular movie which was uncaptioned, she would sometimes contact its maker and ask them to add captions to it. Interestingly, two student participants emphasised in interviews that signed video should also include captions so hearing people could have access to signed narratives. These students seemed to be drawing on ideas about “reverse discrimination”, but their concern reflected the approach of many of the student movies - using shared visual conventions that made their movies available to the widest possible audience. All the students were anxious that hearing people could understand their work, perhaps a consequence of the course’s location in the University as an overwhelmingly hearing environment. In this emphasis on captioning rather than sign as a route to making media accessible, we may be seeing a consequence of the emphasis Krentz describes as ubiquitous in deaf education “the desire to make the differences between deaf and hearing people recede” (16). Krentz suggests that his concept of the ‘hearing line’ “must be perpetually retested and re-examined. It reveals complex and shifting relationships between physical difference, cultural fabrication and identity” (7). The students’ movies and attitudes emphasised the reality of that complexity. Our research project explored how some young Deaf people attempted to create stories capable of crossing categories of deafness and ‘hearing-ness’… unstable (like other identity categories) while others constructed narratives that affirmed Deaf Culture or drew on the Deaf storytelling traditions. This is of particular interest in the Web 2.0 environment, given that its technologies are often lauded as having the politics of participation. The example of the Deaf Community asks reasonable questions about the validity of those claims, and it’s hard to escape the conclusion that there is still less than appropriate access and that some users are more equal than others.How do young people handle the continuing lack of material available to the on the Web? The answer repeatedly offered by our young male interviewees was ‘I can’t be bothered’. As distinct from “I can’t understand” or “I won’t go there” this answer, represented a disengagement from demands to identify your literacy levels, reveal your preferred means of communication; to rehearse arguments about questions of access or expose attempts to struggle to make sense of texts that fail to employ readily accessible means of communicating. Neither an admission of failure or a demand for change, CAN’T-BE-BOTHERED in this context offers a cool way out of an accessibility impasse. This easily-dismissed comment in interviews was confirmed in a whole-group discussions, when students came to a consensus that if when searching for video resources on the Net they found video that included neither signing nor captions, they would move on to find other more accessible resources. Even here, though, the ground continues to shift. YouTube recently announced that it was making its auto-captioning feature open to everybody - a machine generated system that whilst not perfect does attempt to make all YouTube videos accessible to deaf people. (Bertolucci).The importance of captioning of non-signed video is thrown into further significance by our observation from the course of the use of YouTube as a search engine by the participants. Many of the students when asked to research information on the Web bypassed text-based search engines and used the more visual results presented on YouTube directly. In research on deaf adolescents’ search strategies on the Internet, Smith points to the promise of graphical interfaces for deaf young people as a strategy for overcoming the English literacy difficulties experienced by many deaf young people (527). In the years since Smith’s research was undertaken, the graphical and audiovisual resources available on the Web have exploded and users are increasingly turning to these resources in their searches, providing new possibilities for Deaf users (see for instance Schonfeld; Fajardo et al.). Preliminary ConclusionsA number of recent writers have pointed out the ways that the internet has made everyday communication with government services, businesses, workmates and friends immeasurably easier for deaf people (Power, Power and Horstmanshof; Keating and Mirus; Valentine and Skelton, "Changing", "Umbilical"). The ready availability of information in a textual and graphical form on the Web, and ready access to direct contact with others on the move via SMS, has worked against what has been described as deaf peoples’ “information deprivation”, while everyday tasks – booking tickets, for example – are no longer a struggle to communicate face-to-face with hearing people (Valentine and Skelton, "Changing"; Bakken 169-70).The impacts of new technologies should not be seen in simple terms, however. Valentine and Skelton summarise: “the Internet is not producing either just positive or just negative outcomes for D/deaf people but rather is generating a complex set of paradoxical effects for different users” (Valentine and Skelton, "Umbilical" 12). They note, for example, that the ability, via text-based on-line social media to interact with other people on-line regardless of geographic location, hearing status or facility with sign language has been highly valued by some of their deaf respondents. They comment, however, that the fact that many deaf people, using the Internet, can “pass” minimises the need for hearing people in a phonocentric society to be aware of the diversity of ways communication can take place. They note, for example, that “few mainstream Websites demonstrate awareness of D/deaf peoples’ information and communication needs/preferences (eg. by incorporating sign language video clips)” ("Changing" 11). As such, many deaf people have an enhanced ability to interact with a range of others, but in a mode favoured by the dominant culture, a culture which is thus unchallenged by exposure to alternative strategies of communication. Our research, preliminary as it is, suggests a somewhat different take on these complex questions. The visually driven, image-rich approach taken to movie making, Web-searching and information sharing by our participants suggests the emergence of a certain kind of on-line culture which seems likely to be shared by deaf and hearing young people. However where Valentine and Skelton suggest deaf people, in order to participate on-line, are obliged to do so, on the terms of the hearing majority, the increasingly visual nature of Web 2.0 suggests that the terrain may be shifting – even if there is still some way to go.AcknowledgementsWe would like to thank Natalie Kull and Meg Stewart for their research assistance on this project, and participants in the course and members of the project’s steering group for their generosity with their time and ideas.ReferencesBahan, B. "Upon the Formation of a Visual Variety of the Human Race. In H-Dirksen L. Baumann (ed.), Open Your Eyes: Deaf Studies Talking. 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