SHARE
An
Electronic Magazine by Omar Villarreal and Marina Kirac ©
Year
7
Number 162 April 14th
2006
10,040
SHARERS
are reading this issue of SHARE this week
__________________________________________________________
Thousands of candles can be lighted from a single candle, and the life of
the candle will not be shortened. Happiness never decreases by being SHARED
__________________________________________________________
Dear
SHARERS,
This
issue of SHARE marks a very special date: we have reached the 10,000 subscribers
certified by Yahoo Groups (please follow this link for certification http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ShareMagazine/
). This makes us one of the biggest Yahoo Groups in the category: Teaching
and Research. Only second to “One World”, an announcement e-mail group
for the Arab World with more than 18,000 subscribers.
Reaching
this figure makes us, needless to say, very proud as it shows that our effort
has an increasingly larger following
and that, with still an awful lot to improve, we are basically on the right
track. This fact, prompts us, at the same time, to renew our commitment to
the ELT profession in our country and in the Latin American continent.
It
is also a good opportunity to pay homage to pioneer Professor Aldo Blanco
who with enormous effort and vision edited and published “The English Language
Journal” in the 1970´s, to Mr.Martin Eayrs M.A. who published a very complete
“ELT News and Views” magazine and ran a small electronic list in the 1990´s
before going back to his home country and to Prof. Oriel Villagarcía M.A.
that delighted us with his “Bridges” during his SBS days. To the three of
them, go these humble words as a token of recognition.
To
all of you, dear SHARERS, something we have said many times but that is born
from the bottom of our hearts: our sincere gratitude for your unfaltering
support.
Love
Omar
and Marina
______________________________________________________________________
In
SHARE
162
2. The Conversation Analysis approach to bilingual interaction.
3. Teacher Expertise Studies and Their Implications for Teacher Education.
4. Repeats of The Tools for Teachers Easter Course.
5. Terceras Jornadas Internacionales del NOA para Profesores de Inglés.
6. Hanif Kuresihi en Buenos Aires.
7. A Letter from ELT Events.
8. A Distinction for Celia Zubiri.
9. Anglia Examination Syndicate.
10. News from ISIP.
11. City & Guilds International Examinations
12. Postgraduate Courses on Translation and Interpreting.
13.- ELT Team Marathon 2006 in Mar del Plata
14. Phonology Course at UCA.
15. Forthcoming Events by Apple Consultancy.
16. A Course on Teaching Pronunciation.
17. 2nd Patagonian Congress for Teachers and students of English.
18. Paraguay TESOL.
19. News from Susan Hillyard.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
1.- A
PRAGMATIC APPROACH TO CONVERSATION ANALYSIS
Our dear SHARERS Adriana Podestá
and Patricia Arbona have generously wanted to SHARE this article with all
of us.
Magister Adriana Podestá will be
lecturing on “The Exercise of Power through Language” at our XII Congress
of Teachers and Students of English (July 14th & 15th
2006)
A
Pragmatic Approach To Conversation Analysis
by
Patricia Arbona and Adriana Podestá
Lecturers at Instituto Superior de
Formación Docente 127- San Nicolás,Pcia Buenos Aires.
Introduction
In this work, we will refer to two concepts
which we consider essential for the study of language in communication. They are
Speech Acts and Politeness, within the field of Pragmatics. First, we will
describe their theoretical background and then, we will analyse a very simple
and short conversation to show both theories in action.
Theoretical
Background
Since
we will apply the concepts above mentioned to a conversational text, we will start by defining conversation.
It is any spoken encounter or interaction between at least two participants:
speaker and listener who exchange roles as the conversation develops. Speaker
and listener have to be good processors
of the spoken word as they both share the business of making sure that the conversation works: in any
interaction there are at least two addressees and two decision makers.
Conversation is also a reciprocal
activity for it is a condition of
most talk that the reactions of the listener affect what is being said. With the
help of these reactions, the message can be adjusted from moment to moment,
understanding can be improved and the speaker's task is thus facilitated.
Conversation is usually addressed directly to someone, and whoever has the role of listener is expected to
reply immediately. This requires the ability to adapt what one says to what has just gone
before, to produce and tailor language smoothly and readily. All these aspects are important components
which are always present in an interaction whose participants know how to negotiate meanings. In other
words, "conversation" refers to the activity that takes place when two or more people have the right to talk or listen
without having to follow a fixed schedule, such as an agenda. In conversation
everyone can have something to say and anyone can speak at any time. In every day life we sometimes refer to
conversation as "chat" and the focus of our work is on this type of spoken interaction, rather than on
more formal, planned occasions for speaking, such as
interviews.
The
purpose of conversation includes exchange of information, the creation and
maintenance of social relationships such as friendship, the negotiation of
status and social roles, as well as deciding on and carrying out joint actions.
Conversation is such a natural part of our lives that many people are not
conscious of what happens within it. However, conversation follows certain rules
which can be described. For example, when we look at normal conversation we
notice that:
(
usually only one person speaks at a time;
(the
speakers change;
(the
length of any conversation varies;
(
there are techniques for allowing the other party or parties to
speak;
(
neither the content nor the amount of what
we say is specified in advance.
It
is necessary to emphasize the
fact that it is people who
communicate and people who interpret. It is speakers/writers who have topics,
presuppositions, who assign information structure and who make reference. It is
hearers/readers who interpret and who draw inferences.
When
we interpret pieces of language , we normally try to understand not only what
the words mean, but what the speaker
or writer of those words
intended to convey. For instance, at a student cafeteria there is a
notice that runs: " This is a self-cleaning cafeteria." One might expect the
plates and cups to put themselves away, judging from other similar phrases in
the language, such as self-cleaning oven, self-raising flour, self-righting
lifeboat. Yet the majority of students interpret the phrase as meaning that
they, the customers, are expected to clear away their plates. Why? The obvious
answer is that they use their
common sense and knowledge of the world to come to the most plausible
interpretation in the circumstances, which is not necessarily the one which is
most consistent with the linguistic structures. This simple and clear example leads us to the field of
Pragmatics , the branch of
Linguistics which studies those aspects
of meaning which cannot be captured by semantic theory. In brief, it
deals with how speakers use language in ways which cannot be predicted from
linguistic knowledge alone.
Pragmatics includes the study of: a) how the interpretation and use of
utterances depend on knowledge
of the real world; b) how speakers
use and understand speech acts; c) how the structure of sentences is influenced
by the relationship between the speaker and the
listener.
When
a speaker utters a sequence of words, he is often trying to achieve some effect
with those words, an effect which might in some cases have been accomplished by
an alternative action. This overall approach is known as speech act theory,
which is another method of classifying the ways in which humans use language, in
this case by treating it as parallel to other actions which humans perform..
Technically speaking, a speech act is an utterance as a functional unit in
communication. The action performed
by producing an utterance consists of three related acts. A locutionary act,
which is producing a meaningful linguistic _expression. For example, saying the
sentence " Read this message" is a locutionary act if hearers understand the words: read, this, message and can
identify the particular message
referred to. An illocutionary act is using an utterance to perform a function.
For example, "Read this message" may be intended as an order, a piece of advice
or some other communicative purpose. This is also generally known as the
illocutionary force of the utterance. A perlocutionary act is the results or effects that are
produced by means of saying something. In our example, performing the act of
reading, would be the perlocutionary act. Of these three dimensions, the most
discussed is the illocutionary force. Indeed, the term "speech act" is generally
interpreted quite narrowly to mean only the illocutionary force of an utterance.
A
different approach to distinguish types of speech acts can be made on the basis
of structure. A fairly simple structural distinction between three general types
of speech acts is provided by the three basic sentence types. For instance, in
a) You come home early; b) Do you come home early?; c) Come home early!, there is an easily recognized
relationship between the three structural forms ( declarative, interrogative,
imperative) and the three general communicative functions. (statement, question,
command/request).
Whenever
there is a direct relationship
between a structure and a function, we have a direct speech act. Whenever there
is an indirect relationship between a structure and a function, we have an
indirect speech act. Thus, a declarative used to make a statement is a direct
speech act, but a declarative used to make a request is an indirect speech act.
When it is used to make a statement, as in "It's cold outside", the speaker is
just talking about the weather. When it is used to make a request, the speaker
is asking you to close the window.
However,
this type of indirect request does not consist of a single utterance. It is a
social situation involving participants who necessarily have a social
relationship of some kind, who on a specific occasion, may have particular
goals. We can look at the set of
utterances produced in this kind of
situation as a speech event. A speech event is concerned with the set of
circumstances present in an interaction which affect what is being communicated.
Therefore, the speech event is closely connected with context. According to Dell
Hymes (1976), the components of context are: its setting ( time and space);
participants (the addressor and addressee ); message content (what is said);
message form (how it is said); code (what language is being used); purpose ( the
intent and effect of the communication); key (tone or manner in which the event
is performed); channel (type of contact between participants) .
Any piece of
conversation normally reveals one important fact about human speech: people tend
to be polite to one another. So politeness
can radically affect the structure of conversations. This phenomenon can
be defined as the means employed to show awareness of another person's face. The
concept of face, on which politeness is based, was developed by Goffman in 1967.
According to this author, face is something that is emotionally invested and
that can be lost, maintained or enhanced and that must be constantly attended to
in interaction. We have heard the common _expression "to lose face" when someone
is embarrassed or humiliated. In general, people cooperate (and assume each
other's cooperation) in maintaining face in interaction, such cooperation being
based on the mutual vulnerability of face. Within our every day social
interaction, we generally behave as if our expectations concerning our public
image, or our self wants, will be respected.
Brown
and Levinson, authors of the Theory of Politeness, assume that all competent
adult members of a society have (and know each other to
have):
I)
face, the public self-image that every member wants to claim for himself,
and
II)
certain rational capacities, in particular consistent modes of reasoning from
ends to the means to achieve those ends.
Face
consists in two related aspects:
a)
Negative face: the basic claim to territories, personal preserves, rights to non
distraction -i.e. to freedom of action, freedom from imposition, need to be
independent.
b)
Positive face: the positive consistent self-image or "personality"(crucially
including the desire that this self-image be appreciated and approved of)
claimed by interactants.
If
a speaker (S) says something that represents a threat to another, it is
described as a Face Threatening Act (F.T.A). Alternatively, given the
possibility that some action might be interpreted as a threat to another's face,
the speaker can choose to lessen the possible threat. This is called a Face
Saving Act (F.S.A.). Examples:
Tom
addressing his neighbour who is playing his trumpet very
loud.
(1)
Stop that awful noise! F.T.A.
(2)
Sorry, Mr Jones, but I think you are playing your trumpet a little loud... and I
have to get up early tomorrow. F.S.A. (Indirect act in this
case).
When
two participants are interacting, there are four faces at stake: the Speaker's
positive and negative faces, and the Hearer's positive and negative
faces.
When
we attempt to save another's face, we can pay attention to his negative face
wants or to his positive face wants.
In
(1), the speaker produced an act that threatened the negative face of the
hearer: an order.
In
(2), the speaker produced a F.S.A. that mitigated the order, so as to lessen the
threat of the order. In this case, the speaker attempted to save the hearer's negative
face, that is, his need to be independent, to have freedom of action, freedom
from imposition.
Let's
consider these examples:
Tom
addressing his neighbour who has asked Tom's opinion about his
music.
(3)
I don´t like the way you play the trumpet. F.T.A.
(4)
I don't understand much about music, you know, but I would say you should need
more practice. F.S.A.
In
both cases Tom has given his opinion. He has produced speech acts of Criticism
that threaten the hearer's positive face, that is, his need to be liked, to be
accepted, to be approved of. In (3), the speaker produces a bald-on-record act,
he expresses his opinion
in
a straightforward way, he does not mind the hearer's feelings.
In
(4), the threat is mitigated by hedges, cautious notes which the S uses to
convey the meaning that what he is saying may not be true. And in this
particular case, he also gives advice (Indirect act). He implies that his
neighbour doesn't play the trumpet well.
In
these examples, Tom has done Acts that threaten the hearer's positive face, his
need to be approved of, to be liked.
Catherine
Kerbrat Orecchioni (1996) objects to Brown and Levinson the fact that they
focused their attention on F.T.A.s, disregarding other acts that enhance,
flatter the faces.
Therefore,
she makes a distinction between Negative Politeness and Positive Politeness. In
the first case, F.S.A.s are produced, that is, acts that mitigate F.T.A.s, that
lessen possible threats. In the second case, Face Flattering Acts (F.F.A.) are
produced, that is, acts that praise, value, enhance the faces such as
compliments, greetings, expressions of thanks, wishes to do well/feel better,
expressions of admiration.
Tom
addressing his neighbour.
(5)
You play the trumpet wonderfully. / Your music is
excellent.(F.F.A.)
F.T.As
*
Acts that threaten the speaker's negative face are offers and promises. These
acts predicate some future action of the S to the H, and in so doing, put some
pressure on the H to accept or reject them.
*
Acts that threaten the speaker's positive face include apologies, confessions,
admission of guilt or responsibility, self-humiliation, acting stupid,
self-contradiction, breakdown or physical control over body, bodily leakage,
stumbling or falling down, non control of laughter or tears. These acts are
damaging to the S's face because of his basic positive face wants of
self-control or self-respect In evidencing failure to achieve these wants he
makes it unlikely that H will approve of him, as well as threatening H's face
(potentially) with embarrassment for S.
*
Acts that threaten the hearer's negative face include orders and requests (S
wants H to do or refrain from doing some act A), suggestions, advice (S
indicates that he thinks H ought to (perhaps) do some act A), remindings (S
indicates that H should remember to do some act A), threats, warnings, dares (S
indicates that he -or someone or something- will instigate sanctions against H
unless he does A).
*
Acts that threaten the H's positive face include expressions of disapproval,
criticism, contempt or ridicule, complaints, reprimands, accusations, insults,
contradictions or disagreements, expressions of violent emotions, irreverence,
mention of taboo topics. These acts indicate that S has a negative evaluation of
some aspect of the H's positive face or that he doesn't care about the H's
feelings or wants, that is, the S is indifferent to the H's positive
face.
There
are different politeness strategies that the speaker develops when he wants to
mitigate possible threats:
*
Violation of the maxims.
*
Presupposition manipulations. Ex.
Negative questions that presume "yes" as an answer show that S knows H's
wants, tastes, habits, values, etc.
*
Use of diminutives or terms of endearment.
*
Use of identity markers or address forms.
*
Use of hedges (S chooses to be vague about his
opinions).
* Use of the inclusive "we".
*
Use of jokes
*
Use of indirect speech acts
*
Begging forgiveness
*
Impersonalizing S and H
*
Replacing of the pronouns "I" and "you" by indefinites
*
Use of jargon or slang
*
Use of dialect
Theories
In Action
Conversation
Father:
What sort of time do you call this? (1)
Girl:
I'm sorry.(2)
Father:
So you should be! It's two a.m.!(3)
Girl:
Oh Dad, do stop nagging(4). I'm over seventeen. It's up to me what time I come
in.(5)
Father:
Not while you are living here, it isn't.(6) Anyway, what on earth were you doing
until two o'clock in the morning?(7)
Girl:
We weren't doing anything. We were just talking. (8)
Father:
I was worried stiff about you.(9)
Girl:
Honestly, Dad, I really am sorry(10), but you don't have to wait up for me, you
know.(11)
Father:
O.K., I know you think I'm fussing(12)
and I'm sorry (13), but next time just let me know if you're going to be
late, O.K.? Give me a ring or something.(14)
Girl:
Yes, O.K. (15)I'll let you know next time. (16) Sorry, Dad
(17)
Father:
That's O.K. (18)
Speech event: the request. The first request
made by the father is implicit. He reprimands the girl, which generates an
argument. His second request is explicit and leads to an agreement. The girl
also makes a request, by producing an indirect speech act as mitigator, and
generates agreement.
Context
Setting:
home, 2 a.m.
Participants:
father and daughter
Message
content: argument (father reprimands the girl for her late arrival and demands
an explanation).
Message
form: conversation.
Code:
the English language.
Purpose:
father lets daughter know he is worried if she comes home
late.
Key:
Familiar but serious tone, especially at the beginning of the conversation,
(father is very angry). As they reach an agreement, the tone becomes
softer.
Channel:
speech.
Speech
acts and Politeness
(1)
Reprimand (indirect act- shows that he is angry)- F.T.A. +
H
(2)
Apology- F.T.A. + S
(3)
Reprimand- F.T.A.+H
(4)
Order- F.T.A. -H (mitigated by use of address form Dad)
(5)
Challenge- F.T.A. +H
(6)
Disagreement- F.T.A. +H
(7)
Request for personal information-F.T.A. +H
(8)
Excuse- F.T.A. +S (mitigated by anything- inference: anything
wrong)
(9)
Confession- F.T.A. +S
10)
Apology-F.T.A.+S- Hedges: Honestly, really- she wants her father to believe that
what she is saying is true. Again, use of address form Dad, expressing
affection.
11)
Request (indirect act)- F.T.A. - H- Hedge: you know (mitigates the
request)
12)
Agreement - F.F.A. H- F.T.A. +S.
13)
Apology-F.T.A. +S
14)
Request F.T.A. -H
15)
Agreement-F.F.A. H
16)
Promise - F.T.A-S
17)
Apology- F.T.A+S (use of address form Dad, expressing
affection)
18)
Acceptance of apology- F.F.A. H
F.T.A.+S
: Act that threatens Speaker`s positive face.
F.T.A.-S:
Act that threatens the speaker's negative face.
F.T.A.
+H: Act that threatens the Hearer`s positive face.
F.T.A.
-H: Act that threatens the Hearer`s negative face
F.F.A:
Face flattering act.
Conflict
and Negotiation:
In
this conversation there is a conflict: girl arrives home late, her father is
very angry, reprimands her.
Girl
argues she is old enough to decide at what time to return
home.
As
the conversation proceeds, girl understands her father has been worried about
her
and
apologises. Father also apologises for having been
fussy.
Then
comes the solution: girl will let him know if she comes home late. The fact that
she apologises three times during the conversation, shows that she recognises
her father is right.
Final
comment
We hope to have given a general
view of two theories applied in conversation analysis. This analysis is in no
way exhausted. There are other features that have not been considered here and
which surely would have enriched our analysis. They will probably be the subject
of a future article.
Bibliography
*
Brown, P., Levinson. S., Politeness- Some universals in language usage,
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1987.
*
Brown G., Yule, G., Discourse Analysis, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge,
1983.
*
Kerbrat-Orecchioni, C., La Conversación, Módulo correspondiente al Seminario
Semántica y Pragmática perteneciente a la Maestría en Enseñanza de la Lengua y
la Literatura, Facultad de Humanidades y Arte, U.N.R.,
1997.
Yule,
G., Pragmatics, Oxford university Press, 1998.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
2.-
THE CONVERSATION ANALYSIS APPROACH TO BILINGUAL
INTERACTION
Our
dear SHARER Wenceslao Mayor from Santiago de Chile has sent us this article to
SHARE
'What
do you want me to say? '
On
the Conversation Analysis approach to bilingual
interaction
Li
Wei
Centre
for Research in Linguistics
Department
of Speech, University of Newcastle upon Tyne, NE1 7RU,
UK
Abstract
Is
language simply a medium for the _expression of intentions, motives or
interests, or is it also a site for uncovering the method through which ordered
activity is generated? This question has wide-ranging implications for the study
of bilingual interaction in particular and for sociolinguistics generally. This
paper attempts to explicate the principles behind the CA approach to bilingual
interaction. It addresses some of the criticisms that have been levelled against
the CA approach, using both new data and new analyses of previously published
examples. (Keywords:Conversation Analysis, bilingual interaction,
code-switching) Running heads: CA approach to
code-switching
CA
Approach To Code-Switching
Introduction
The
last two decades of the 20th century witnessed an increasing diversity of
analytic approaches to bilingual interaction, gradually moving away from an
earlier dichotomy of grammatical analysis of code-switching on the one hand and
sociopsychological analysis of language choice on the other. One of the new
research paradigms is the application of Conversation Analysis (CA) to bilingual
interaction,an example of which is Auer (1998). This work follows the tradition
first developed by Gumperz (e.g. 1982) who described code-switching in bilingual
conversation as socially orderly discourse strategies which index localised
norms and values (see also Scotton, 1988). Particular attention is paid to the
way in which individuals strategically use the codes in their bilingual
repertoires to achieve specific interactional goals. Some advantages of the CA
approach are that it facilitates analysis of fragmentary and unidealised data
and gives primacy to interpretations which are demonstrably oriented to
participant actions rather than to global social
categories.
Nevertheless,
the disciplinary heterogeneity of the researchers who use the CA approach to
bilingual interaction, often with diverse agendas, has led to confusion and
misreading of some key concepts and procedures of the approach. For example, the
technical concept of 'preference' in CA has often been wrongly equated to
the
attitudinal
notion of liking, acts of compliance, or the grammatical construction of
affirmatives (Burt, 1990, 1992; Wardhaugh, 1985. See Bilmes, 1988 for a
discussion of the problems associated with the concept of 'preference') 1. In
the meantime, the CA approach to bilingual interaction has been criticised for
its apparent overemphasis on transcription techniques and minute details of
conversational turn-taking, often without any attempt to offer an explanation of
the speakers' motivations for their language choices (Myers-Scotton, 1999;
Myers-Scotton and Bolonyai, 2001). CA has been described as atheoretical,
empiricalistic,circumstantial, bordering on being trivial (see ten Have, 1990
for a discussion). At least part of the problem is the CA practitioners' own
making: researchers who adopt the CA approach to bilingual interaction have
rarely bothered to explain their rationale systematically and explicitly. For
instance, I have not been able to find any article in international, academic
journals explaining the CA approach to bilingual interaction, although there are
plenty of published studies applying the CA
framework.
Nor have conversation analysts contextualised their work within a broader
sociolinguistic theoretical framework. Some researchers use CA largely as a
transcription method, applying the transcription conventions and level of detail
associated with CA but not drawing CA-like inferences. Nevertheless, the CA
approach requires, in my view, nothing less than a radical change in the focus
of social scientific enquiry. Its belief that language is not simply a medium
for the _expression of intentions, motives or interests, but a site for
uncovering the method
through
which ordered activity is generated has wide-ranging implications for the study
of bilingual interaction in particular and for sociolinguistics
generally.
Whilst
this paper continues with the CA tradition of focusing primarily on
methodological issues, I shall attempt to explicate the principles behind the CA
approach. I shall review some of the studies which aim to apply the CA
principles to bilingual interaction and discuss the criticisms which have been
levelled against the CA approach, using both new data and new analyses of
previously published examples. In doing so, I wish to clarify some of the
misconceptions of CA and highlight its contributions to the study of bilingual
interaction.
The
Intellectual Roots Of CA Approach To Code-Switching
In
order to break the myth of CA as an atheoretical, purely descriptive approach, a
brief outline of its intellectual history is necessary. CA of the kind that is
practised by students of bilingual interaction originated in the work of a
break-away group of sociologists in California in the 1960s, known as
ethnomethodologists. The research agenda of ethnomethodology was developed by
Harold Garfinkel whose point of departure was the theory of social action by his
mentor Talcott Parsons.
Parsons'
theory focused on a dialectic relationship between the teleological (i.e. I have
an end in mind) and the rationalistic (i.e. I work out the means to achieve my
end) aspects of social action. In working out the means, Parsons suggested that
social factors had a 'normative orientation' which he regarded as the 'motor' of
social action,i.e. a sensitivity to the rights and obligations in society which
they then take account of in acting. Parsons argued,These normative rules both
define what immediate ends should and should not be sought, and limit the choice
of means to them in terms other than those of efficiency. Finally, they also
define standards of socially acceptable effort. (Parsons in Hamilton: 1985:
62).
Garfinkel
saw Parsons' theory as addressing primarily two questions, 'what'and 'why'. The
former being what is said or done, which then receives an answer expressed in
causal terms, often alluding to the notion of 'rationality'. However, what of
the 'how'? The issue here is, in Garfinkel's view, one of a disjuncture between
the 'concreteness' of people's activities in everyday life and their analytical
representation in the Parsonian theory of social action. This results being that
'real society' becomes only 'specifiable as the achieved results of
administering the policies and methods of formal, constructive analysis'
(Garfinkel, 1991: 13). Given this, Parsons' social action theory does not render
justice to the very phenomena which it sought to understand because it seeks to
impose a rationality on human conduct which is separated from the practical
concerns of situated everyday life
2.
Garfinkel
raised three specific questions regarding Parsons' theory of social action:
first, what is the status of the actors' accounts of their own actions,
especially when these accounts conflict with the analytic, causal accounts
offered by sociologists? Second, what is the status of people's shared
knowledge? Third, how do people make strategic choices which involve the
manipulation of their environments? Garfinkel suggested that social action
should be analysed in terms of 'senses', with a focus on 'common sense' without
any particular recourse for this purpose to the notions of intentionality or
motives. He argued that social phenomena are meaningful before an analyst
appears on the social scene. Social scientific constructs therefore must satisfy
the 'postulate of subjective interpretation'. In this way, they would then
faithfully reflect these everyday meanings. This contrasts the approach whereby
'ideal types' of action were constructed which served as bridging mechanisms
between
subjective
meanings and relations of cause and effect. In Garfinkel's view, such an
approach failed to address the nature of the relationship between social
scientific analytic categories ('second order' constructs) and the lifeworld
('first order' constructs).
Garfinkel
advocated an abandonment of epistemology in favour of methodology. For
ethnomethodology, social order does not reside in the dictates of external rules
as applied to situated activities. Instead, it emerges from within the practical
circumstances of social life. Ethnomethodologists reject what they see as the
reductionist (i.e. simplifying and generalising) nature of rationalistic
explanations for complex data. Theirs is a sociology in which the problem of
social order is reconceived as a practical problem of social action, as a
members' activity, as methodic
and
therefore analysable. Rather than motivations, functions, or distribution,
reduced to conceptual schemes or numerical tables, ethnomethodologists are
interested, first and foremost, in the procedural study of common-sense
activities. To return to one of the problems in the Parsonian theory of action -
the actor's rationality - the
illumination
of social life through models of formal rationality in social science may be
required for scientific theorising, but it is not required 'in theorising
activities employed in coming to terms with the affairs of everyday life'
(Garfinkel, 1967: 280).
Everyday
rationalities are data to ethnomethodologists, not impediments to their
enquiries: the activities whereby members produce and manage settings of
everyday life are identical with members' procedures for making those settings
'accountable' ... When I speak of accountable ... I mean
observable-andreportable,i.e. available to members as situated activities of
looking and telling. I mean, too, that such practices consist of an endless,
on-going,contingent, accomplishment; that they are carried on under the auspices
of,and are made to happen as events in, the same ordinary affairs that in
organising they describe. (Garfinkel, 1967: 1)
Thus,
the proper object of sociological study is, in the ethnomethodologist's view,
the set of techniques that members of a society themselves utilise to interpret
and act within their own social worlds, hence the use of the term
ethnomethodology, the study of 'ethnic' (i.e. the participants' own) methods of
production and interpretation of social interaction.
Armed
with these intellectual antecedents, Conversation Analysis focused upon a
central problematic: how do social actors come to know, and know in common, what
they are doing and the circumstances in which they are doing
it.
Conversation
analysts argue that the only way to address this question is by exposing the
interpretive procedures which people routinely draw upon in face-to-face
interaction and the data that can most effectively illuminate these procedures
come from naturally-occurring conversation. From the very beginning, the ethos
of CA
consisted
of an unconventional but intense, and at the same time respectful, intellectual
interest in the details of the actual practices of people in interaction (ten
Have, 1999). The availability of the technology of audio recording in the 1960s
made it possible to go beyond the existing practices of gathering data such as
interviews and
field
observation, which were all much more manipulative and researcher-oriented than
the simple, mechanical recording of 'natural', that is, non-experimental,
action.
CA
characteristically takes shape as pieces of inductive reasoning structured
around short extracts of transcripts of tape-recorded conversation. These
extracts are repeatedly scanned for evidence of the participants' procedures
whereby they accomplish an interactional task such as disagreeing or changing a
topic. Little attention is paid to what traditionally sociolinguists might
consider as key social variables such as the identity of the speaker (e.g.
gender, age, occupation, etc.), his/her relations with the other participants in
a conversation (e.g. whether they are friends or distant acquaintances), or
formality of the context. It is not that the relevance of these factors is
denied a priori, but simply that it is not assumed - if participants themselves
can be rigorously shown to employ such categories in the production of
conversation, then they would be of interest to conversation
analysts
(Levinson,
1983: 295).
The
basic principles of CA can therefore be summarised as follows: (i) social order
resides within everyday social life, of which face-to-face interaction is a
critical part; (ii) to 'know' what people are doing in their everyday life does
not require any recourse to hidden motives or models of rationality, but to show
how people actually do it; it then follows that (iii) every claim we as analysts
make about what people do must be proven by evidence from everyday social life
of people, which entails a focused, systematic analysis of their face-to-face
interaction. In Garfinkel's words, 'know' consists really in a structure of
activity. This is what the 'know' consists of. It is not that the member has it
somewhere in the nervous traces or that he has it according to a theory of
personal action, and that this will not permit someone to elicit what he has
available to tell you. ... The 'know' resides in the ability to generate ...
recognisable sentences. (Garfinkel:Untitled transcript of oral contribution, in
Hill and Crittenden, 1968: 47)
While
conversation analysts made it clear from the beginning that their problematic
was a sociological one, their interest in language has been critical in
distinguishing the CA approach from those of other sociological enquiries. At
the heart of the difference between CA and other sociological perspectives is a
tension between language as a medium for the _expression of intentions, motives
or interests and language as a topic for uncovering the methods through which
ordered activity is generated, the latter being the CA
position.
Sacks
and Schegloff, for example, devoted much of their time to the analysis of turn
taking in conversation (e.g. Sacks, et al, 1974). Turn-taking is part of what
Sacks and Schegloff call 'members' procedures' of achieving orderly and
meaningful communication. The ways in which conversation participants design and
modify their
utterances
are 'naturally occurring statements' made by the social actors themselves of how
they make sense of each other's contributions. This tacit, organised reasoning
procedure is critical in our understanding of how social relationships are
developed and higher-level social orders are achieved. The acquired knowledge of
conversational organisation can then be applied to institutional organisation in
order to show how these institutions were 'talked into
being'.
There
now exists a large number of studies which may be described as Conversation
Analysis and within which two strands are identifiable. The first focuses on the
institution of interaction as an entity in its own right, or 'pure' CA, and the
second examines the management of social institutions in interaction, or applied
CA (Heritage,1989). The latter tends to focus on specific interactional
situations, its local,interactional requirements and especially the ways in
which the interactants show their orientations to these situations and
requirements 3. I now turn to the application of CA to the study of bilingual
interaction.
Applications
Of CA To Bilingual Interaction
The
applications of CA to the study of bilingual interaction started against a
background of quantitative analysis of grammatical patterns of bilingual data
and macro-level sociolinguistic analysis of the external factors affecting
language choice.
In
particular, there was a tendency in the literature to explain meanings of
codeswitching - the alternation of language choice in conversation - in terms of
power relations within the speech community, symbolic values of different
languages, and/or socio-psychological motivations of the speaker. Peter Auer,
one of the first
researchers
who used CA to examine bilingual interaction, questioned the way in which the
meaning of code-switching was understood. Echoing Goffman, Auer (1984a) argued
that participants of conversational interaction continuously produce frames for
subsequent activities, which in turn create new frames. Every
utterance,
every
turn, therefore, change some features of the situation and maintain or
reestablish others. In bilingual conversation, 'whatever language a participant
chooses for the organisation of his/her turn, or for an utterance which is part
of the turn, the choice exerts an influence on subsequent language choices by
the same or other
speakers'
(p. 5). It then follows that the meaning of code-switching must be interpreted
with reference to the language choice in the preceding and following turns by
the participants themselves, rather than by correlating language choice with
some externally determined values. As Auer (1984b: 92) points out, 'the proper
locus at
which
semantic values may be assigned to the codes are the very same situations in
which language juxtaposition is used for communicative purposes'. From a
methodological perspective, what is required is an analytic procedure which
focuses on the sequential development of interaction, because the meaning of
code-switching is conveyed as part of the interactive process and cannot be
discussed without referring to the conversational context. Such a procedure is
provided by CA.
To
those who are interested in the meaning of code-switching, the CA approach has
at least two advantages. First, it gives priority to what Auer calls the
'sequential implicativeness of language choice in conversation', i.e. the effect
of a participant's choice of language at a particular point in the conversation
on subsequent language choices by the same and other participants. Second, it
'limits the external analyst's interpretational leeway because it relates his or
her interpretation back to the members' mutual understanding of their utterances
as manifest in their
behaviour'
(Auer, 1984a: 6). Examples of the CA approach to bilingual interaction include
Auer's study of Italian migrants in Germany (see especially 1984a, 1984b,1988,
1995), Sebba's study of young Caribbean Londoners (Sebba, 1993; Sebba and
Wootton, 1998), and Stroud's study of various groups of multilingual speakers
in
Papua
New Guinea (Stroud, 1992, 1998; Kulick and Stroud, 1990). See also Auer,1998,
for a more recent collection of studies of bilingual
conversation.
The
conceptual apparatus upon which Auer builds his analysis is Gumperz's notion of
contextualisation. In general terms, contextualisation refers to the strategic
activities of speakers in varying their communicative behaviour within a
socially agreed matrix of conventions, which are used to alert participants in
the course of the
on-going
interaction to the social and situational context of the conversation (Gumperz
1982: 132-5; 1992: 42-3). Conversation participants appear to exploit variable
spoken language elements at all linguistic levels (prosodic, phonological,
morphological, syntactic; see, for example, Local 1986; Local et al. 1984; 1986)
and at the non-verbal level (gestural, kinesic and proxemic; see for example
Duncan 1969,1972; Kendon 1977) as procedures for signalling contextual
presuppositions. In Gumperz's terms, these are contextualisation conventions or
contextualisation cues,
their
chief function being to signal participants' orientation to each other.
Sometimes they are used primarily to contextualise imminent completion of a turn
at talk or topic shifts, but at other times they have the capacity to signal
meanings such as irony or seriousness, and social identities and attitudes of
the participants. Auer (e.g. 1984a) argues that bilingual code-switching should
be analysed as a contextualisation cue,because it works in many ways like other
contextualisation cues. Nevertheless, codeswitching has some characteristics of
its own in addition to those it shares with such elements as gestures, prosody
and phonological variables. In particular, the
sequential
organisation
of alternative choices of language provides a frame of reference for the
interpretation of functions or meanings of conversational code-switching.
Following the CA procedure, Auer identified a number of sequential patterns of
language choice and proposed a distinction between discourse-related and
participant-related codeswitching.
Discourse-related
code-switching contributes to the organisation of the ongoing interaction, while
participant-related code-switching permits assessment by participants of the
speaker's preference for and competence in one language or the other (see Shin
and Milroy, 2000 for a recent application of the discourse- and
participant-related distinction of code-switching).
Sebba
took issue with the 'we code' versus 'they code' dichotomy, first introduced
into the literature on code-switching by Gumperz (e.g. Gumperz,
1982).
For
most researchers, 'we code' and 'they code' refer respectively to the ethnic
language of a bilingual community and the language of the wider society within
which that community forms a minority. The opposition of 'we-' versus 'they-'
codes thus presupposes a particular relationships between communities and/or
speaker groups, which in turn entails a semantic opposition of the languages
symbolising different communities and groups. Although Gumperz warned explicitly
that the association of 'we' and 'they' with particular codes 'does not directly
predict actual
usage'
(1982: 66) in a given instance, many users of the concepts use them as the basis
for interpreting the meaning of code-switching in conversation; for example, a
switch from 'we' to 'they' is said to be marked and symbolise social distance,
authority, etc.Sebba and Wootton (1998) point out, the boundaries of the
communities and languages are not always clear cut and the 'we-' and 'they-'
codes are often hard to establish empirically. The British-born Caribbeans
living in London whom Sebba studied, for example, use both London English and
London Jamaican, a localised variety of Jamaican Creole (see also Sebba, 1993)
as their 'we' codes. London 'Jamaican is a 'we code' because it excludes
outsiders (particularly white people) and its province is the family and peer
group, especially during information conversation.
But
London English is also a 'we code': it is used among family and peers in the
most intimate discussions and is the preferred code for use most of the time for
most of the speakers in the study' (Sebba and Wootton, 1998: 264). In situations
such as this,which is by no means rare, the 'we code' and 'they code' dichotomy
is too gross and
too
far away from the participants' situated, local practices and should not be used
as an a priori schema to interpret the meaning of code-switching. Sebba argues
for conversation-internal criteria of accounting for code-switching. Following
the CA procedure, Sebba examines self-repairs, speaker-initiated insertion
sequences,
quotations
and other mid-turn or turn-final code-switches and, echoing Auer,demonstrates
how code-switching 'contextualises' various speech activities (Sebba,1993; Sebba
and Tate, 1986; Sebba and Wootton, 1998. See also Gafaranga, 2000 for a recent
application of the CA approach to the analysis of bilingual interaction
where
the
identification of the base language is potentially
problematic.).
In
a similar vein, Stroud considers the 'we code' and 'they code' distinction, as
usually used in the literature, to be 'at best a contextually specific one'
(Stroud, 1998:335). Working with a particular speech genre known as kros in the
linguistic repertoire of the speakers in Papua New Guinea, Stroud shows how
code-switching between Tok Pisin and Taiap is used as a 'double-voicing' or
'polyphony' (Bakhtin,1984) technique, not only to show the speaker's sensitivity
to the co-participant's language preferences but also their language ideology
that fosters opaqueness in the sense that it is often unclear in the kros how
much of what is said is the speaker's own
words
and how much is an echo of others' speech. Using a sequential analysis as
practised in CA, Stroud illustrates the complexity of the intertwining of the
linguistic varieties in the kros and the difficulty in distinguishing what is
the speaker's own words and what is an echo of others' speech, let alone
distinguishing 'we' and 'they'
codes
(see further Stroud, 1992, 1998; Kulick and Stroud,
1990).
As
has been mentioned earlier, the CA approach to codeswitching was developed
against the background of an overwhelming tendency in bilingualism research to
explain code-switching behaviour by attributing specific meanings to the
switches, and by assuming that speakers intend these meanings to be perceived by
their listeners. As Stroud (1992) points out, such tendencies can misrepresent
and obscure the complexity and dynamics of code-switching. In Stroud's words,
'the problem of intention and meaning in code-switching is the problem of
knowing to what extent the intentions and meanings that we assign to switches
can in fact be said to be intended by a speaker or apprehended by his or her
interlocutors' (1992:131).
The
CA approach to conversational code-switching avoids an imposition of
analystoriented classificatory frameworks, attempting rather to reveal the
underlying procedural apparatus by which conversation participants themselves
arrive at local interpretations of language choice. In contrast to other exiting
theories of bilingual code-switching, the CA approach dispenses with
motivational speculation, in favour of an interpretative approach based on
detailed, turn-by-turn analysis of language choices. It is not about what
bilingual conversationalists may do, or what they
usually
do,
or even about what they see as the appropriate thing to do. Rather, it is about
how the meaning of code-switching is constructed in
interaction.
The
CA approach to code-switching does not in any way deny that codeswitching as a
contextualisation cue carries more social meaning in bilingual conversation than
gestural or prosodic cues in monolingual conversation. Because
of
the
differences in historical development and political status of the
languages,different speakers and speaker groups in the same community may
acquire the languages for different reasons and at various rates. Consequently,
their preference for and attitude to the languages co-available in the community
may be different.
Nevertheless,
we must be extremely careful about assigning meanings to individual instances of
code-switching simply on the basis of our (analyst's) knowledge of the
community's social history and of the individuals' language attitudes,
especially when the analyst is an outsider to the community and individuals in
question (The issue of
the
outsider-analyst's effect on data analysis and interpretation has been discussed
extensively in the sociolinguistics literature. See, for example, Briggs, 1984;
Eades,982; Gumperz, 1982; Milroy, Li and Moffatt, 1991 and Li,
2000)
Accepting
that the co-existing languages in the community repertoire have different social
significance for different speakers, the methodological question then is how
much of the meaning is 'brought along' and how much of it is 'brought about' in
interaction (Auer 1992). Social motivation-based theories of
code-switching
emphasise
the 'brought along' meaning. The languages involved in code-switching have
distinctive social, symbolic values, which merely have to be indexed in the
interaction in order to become, or to remain, relevant. Consequently, the
communicative act of code-switching itself is not seen to have any interactional
meaning. In contrast, the CA approach to code-switching stresses the 'emergent'
character of meaning. Meaning emerges as a consequence of bilingual
participants' contextualisation work. It is 'brought about' by the speakers
through the very act of code-switching.
We
can illustrate this point further by re-examining two examples from our
Cantonese-English code-switching corpus which has been gathered as part of a
larger research project on language maintenance and language shift in the
Chinese community in Tyneside. Details of the social and demographic structure
of the community, and of the fieldwork methods, can be found in Li Wei (1994).
Example 1 is taken from an exchange which took place in B's family dining room.
A is a man in his late twenties, and B is a 40-year old woman. They are having
dinner. Also present
is
B's teenage daughter, C.
EXAMPLE
1
B
Sik gai a.
eat
chicken PA
'Have
some chicken.'
A
mm.
(5.0)
A
Haven't seen XXX (name, three syllables) for a long
time.
(2.0)
A
Have you seen him recently?
B
No.
A
Have you seen XX (name, two syllables)?
B
(2.0) (To C) Ning ngaw doei haai lai.
bring
my those shoe ASP.
'Bring
my shoes here.'
(To
A) Koei hoei bindou a?
he
go where PA
'Where
was she going?'
The
conversation up to the beginning of this example has been mainly in Cantonese.
When B, the mother, offers A chicken, A gives a minimal response. The pause that
follows indicates an end of the current interactional episode. After a
fivesecond silence, A attempts to introduce a new topic (the whereabouts of a
friend).
This
topical change is accompanied by the choice of English, which contrasts B's
choice in previous turns. B gives no response; so A reinitiates the topic, this
time with an interrogative. The response from B is in English, but negative and
minimal. A continues by asking about a different person, again in English. After
a short pause, B
selects
a different addressee (C) and switches from English to Cantonese, temporarily
excluding A from the conversation, before she turns back to address him in
Cantonese again.
In
some of our earlier papers (e.g. Milroy, Li and Moffatt 1991; Milroy and
Li,1995), we have suggested that the reason B in this exchange selects a
different addressee and switches to Cantonese was that she did not like to be
addressed in English by another adult, and the reason B did not like to be
addressed in English by another adult was that she belonged to a generation
whose language choice and language preference (in attitudinal terms) were both
clearly Chinese-dominant. While we would maintain that such an interpretation is
correct, we now believe that it told us little that we did not intuitively know
already about bilingual speakers' language behaviour. What seems to be needed is
not an analysis that depended on interactionexternal interpretation but a
detailed, turn-by-turn analysis of the participants' conversational work, which
can demonstrate how such issues as attitude,
preference,
community
norms have been 'brought about' in the actual contributions of the participants.
For instance, the woman B in the above example did actually use English, albeit
a single-syllable word, in responding to A's first question. It is only after A
has asked the second question and after two seconds have elapsed that B has
chosen to switch to Cantonese and a different addressee. At the local level, she
has suspended the second pair part of an adjacency pair (i.e. her response to
A's question) and inserted first pair part (i.e. request to C). In doing so, she
has softened the impact of her language alternation. When she returns to A in
the next turn, her choice of
Cantonese
appears to be more legitimate as it follows from the immediately preceding turn.
Nevertheless, her second pair part takes the form of a question, not a direct
response to A's previous question. B's language alternation, together with her
strategic use of the turn-taking mechanism as a way to shift topic and to change
addressee,helps to 'bring about' her language attitude and
preference.
Similarly,
Example 2 demonstrates how the language preference of speakers of different
generations and the authority structure of Chinese families have been'brought
about' in the language choices of the participants.
EXAMPLE
2
A
is an 8-year-old girl, and C is A's 15-year-old brother. B is their mother who
is in
her
forties.
A
Cut it out for me (.) please.
B
(2.5)
A
Cut it out for me (.) mum.
C
[Give us a look.
B
[Mut-ye?
'What'
A
Cut this out.
B
Mut-ye?
'What?'
C
Give us a look.
(2.0)
B
Nay m ying wa lei?
You
NEG. answer me PA
'Why
don't you answer me?'
A
(To C) Get me a pen.
The
exchange takes place in the family sitting-room. A is making a folder from
pieces of cardboard; C, the brother, is looking on, while B, the mother, is
knitting in a chair nearby. A's initial request for help to the mother receives
a null response. A then repeats it, using a vocative on this occasion to specify
her mother as the next speaker. B's subsequent question Mut-ye? ('What?')
overlaps with C's turn as he self-selects. A then issues her request for the
third time, but B repeats the same question as if she has not heard A's request
properly or she has not understood it.
Again
A fails to amend her request.The lack of co-operation between the speakers is
salient, as is the lack of
alignment
between the language choices of A and B. A's three repeated requests are in
English and show no sign of change in form, while B's questions are in Chinese
which could be described, in conversation-analysis terms, as repair initiators
offering A opportunities to amend her utterances. A fails to repair her turns,
which B apparently
expects,
and changes little her form of request. At the end of exchange, we find
something close to a communicative breakdown, in the sense that B offers no
response at all to A's repeated requests. After a 2-second silence, B asks A why
she does not respond to her. A then turns to C, abandoning the exchange between
herself
and
B.
As
has been suggested earlier, Chinese adults in the Tyneside community in which
our examples were collected generally preferred to speak and to be spoken to in
Cantonese, whereas Chinese children in the community preferred English. In the
meantime, the authority structure of the family in the Chinese culture expects
children
to
comply with their parents. They are expected to behave in a manner appropriate
for their specific status in the family, which means that they should do as
their parents (or adults generally) tell them to. These two aspects of the
background context are of course relevant to our analysis of the sequence. Yet,
the task of the analyst is not to be satisfied by the interaction-external
explanation but to show how the two aspects of the wider context have been
'brought about' by the participants in the exchange in example 2 through their
insistence on divergent language choices.
From
the mother's point of view, she may believe she has the authority over her
children, and when the daughter asks her to do something, she can decide whether
the request is reasonable or not; if she thinks it is not, then she can either
reject it or request an alternative. Her repeated use of the repair initiator
Mut-ye ('What') is
therefore
strategic. What B is doing here is to compete for turn control. She replaces a
second pair part of an adjacency pair with a first pair part, or responds to a
request with a request. Her use of Cantonese contradicts the daughter's language
choice.
These
two aspects of B's local management strategy - responding to a request with a
request and choice of Cantonese - help to 'bring about' her role as the
authority figure in the family. In the meantime, the daughter's insistence on
her non-convergent language choice highlights the inter-generational differences
in language attitude and preference. While it is not possible to predict on an
'if only' basis a possible alternative outcome of A's requests, we can note that
A's failure to achieve the desired compliant response from B has contributed to
the eventual communication breakdown
4.
(See Gumperz 1982: 133 for a comparable case, where failure to read
contextualisation cues by the interactants gives rise to a similarly
unsatisfactory interactional outcome.)
Criticisms
Of The CA Approach To Bilingual Interaction
The
CA approach to bilingual interaction is of course not without its critics.
Some
people
who look at CA from the outside have been 'amazed by the number
of
superficial
features of CA's practice' (ten Have, 1999). It seems to them that
CA
refuses
to use available theories of human conduct to ground or organise
its
arguments,
or even to construct a theory of its own. Furthermore, it seems
unwilling
to
explain the phenomena it studies by invoking 'obvious' factors like identities,
power
relations,
rights and obligations of the participants, their motivations, or
the
institutional
context of the interaction. Specifically, the CA approach to
bilingual
interaction
has been criticised for neglecting aspects of the wider social context
(e.g.
who
participants are in demographic, social network, and even ethnographic
terms),
the
socio-psychological associations and therefore the social messages that
one
linguistic
choice rather than another carries, and the speaker's motivations.
And
finally,
CA seems to be obsessed with the details of its materials. These
impressions
are
not too far off the mark, but, as ten Have (1999: 28) points out, 'the issue is
why
CA
refuses to use or construct 'theories', why it refuses
interaction-external
explanations,
and why it is obsessed with details'. The short answer is that
these
refusals
and obsession are necessary in order to get a clear picture of CA's
core
phenomenon,
the in situ organisation of conduct, and especially talk-in-interaction.
So
CA
is not atheoretical but has a different conception of how to theorise about
social
life
and a different concept of the nature of evidence and how to validate
hypotheses.
In
general, conversation analysts believe that there is no independent
social
reality
which exists separately from the daily social interaction between
people.
Society
is viewed as the fitting together of joint actions between individuals
(Bulmer,
1969:
76). The so-called individual motivations take a myriad of forms and
are
therefore
viewed as the 'formation of workable relations'. And joint actions
fit
together
through the acts of interpretation and definition in pragmatic mode.
By
identifying
the social acts which they are about to join, an individual is then able
to
orientate
him/herself. These acts of interpretation thereby guide actions, as well
as
serve
as orientating mechanisms towards the actions of others. The explanation
for
action
is therefore in its meaning for others in the same interactional process
rather
than
in interaction-external causal origins (Bulmer,
1969:76).
In
its strictest form, conversation analysts would argue that social settings are
not
of
interest because people use conversational devices to account for what they
do,
regardless
of the situation in which it takes place. The talk itself will then
reflect
methods
of accounting which may even transcend cultural context. They may
omit
reference
to not only the purposes of conversations, but also the settings in which
they
take
place. What is or is not empirically admissible is then set according to
such
precepts.
For
those who adopt the CA perspective, there are three fundamental points
about
how
one approaches conversational code-switching: (i) relevance, (ii)
procedural
consequentiality
and (iii) the balance between social structure and
conversational
structure.
Given
that code-switching can be, and indeed has been, described
and
interpreted
in so many ways, how does one show that one's (analyst's) description
and
interpretation
are relevant to the participants themselves in an on-going
interaction?
As
has been pointed out earlier, there is a tendency in code-switching research
to
attribute
macro-societal value to individual instances of switching and to assume
that
speakers
intend such meaning to be understood by their co-interactants. Analysts
who
adopt
the CA approach argue that while code-switching is indeed a
socially
significant
behaviour, their task is to try and show how the analyses
are
demonstratively
relevant to the participants.
The
point of procedural consequentiality involves demonstrating whether
and
how
extra-linguistic context has determinate consequences for
conversational
interaction.
One cannot simply import our intuition about, say, the family- or
worklike
character
of the interaction; instead, one must demonstrate what gives a
particular
piece
of interaction its specific family or work character. This is what
some
practitioners
of CA call 'co-construction' (see a collection of studies in Jacoby
and
Ochs,
1995).
This
relates to the third point, the balance of social and
conversational
structures.
Those who adopt the CA approach to code-switching argue that one
must
not
assume that, in any given conversation, speakers switch languages in order
to
'index'
speaker identity, attitudes, power relations, formality, etc.; rather, one must
be
able
to demonstrate how such things as identity, attitude and relationship
are
presented,
understood, accepted or rejected and changed in the process of
interaction.
These
three points imply an important shift of analytic interest. It is
suggested
that
any interpretation of the meaning of code-switching, or what might be called
the
broad
why questions, must come after fully examining the ways in which
the
participants
are locally constituting the phenomena, i.e. the how questions. In
Auer's
words,
one needs to look for the procedures
used
by participants in actual interaction, i.e. that they are supposed to
be
interactionally
relevant and 'real', not just a scientific construct designed
to
'fit
the data'. So there is an analytic interest in members' methods
(or
procedures,
as opposed to an interest in external procedures derived from
a
scientific
theory. In short, our purpose is to analyse members' procedures
to
arrive
at local interpretations of language alternation. (Auer, 1984a:
3;
original
italics)
Let
us look at one example. The following extract was originally published
in
Li
Wei 1994: 163, as an example of how code-switching can be used to
contextualise
preference
organisation in bilingual conversation. It has been re-analysed by
Myers-
Scotton
and Bolonyai (2000) in terms of Myers-Scotton's 'markedness' theory
of
language
choice, which has recently been recast in what has been called the
Rational
Choice
model.
EXAMPLE
3
Mother
speaking to a 12 year old boy who is playing with the
computer.
A:
Finished homework?
B:
(2.0)
A:
Steven, yiu mo wan sue?
want
NEG. PERF. review book
'Do
you want to do your homework?'
B:
(1.5) I've finished.
The
starting point of Myers-Scotton and Bolonyai's analysis is the
assumption
that
mother (A) and son (B) have different preferences for unmarked languages
in
mother-son
interactions. The mother prefers to speak Cantonese and her son
prefers
English.
The mother's initial choice of English is therefore 'unexpected', or
'marked'.
Her
motive, according to Myers-Scotton and Bolonyai, 'seems to be to suspend
the
unmarked
RO (rights and obligations) set in order to bring about a desired effect'
(p.
20).
When the mother does not get an adequate response to her question, she
switches
to
Cantonese. Myers-Scotton and Bolonyai suggest that the switch displays how
the
mother
weighs and prioritises her goals differently at this point: taking account of
the
available
evidence (lack of response to English) she makes her goal and her
preferred
RO
set (i.e. her desires and values) unambiguous for her son. The focus is now on
her
desires
and goals and not on accommodating to her son in any way. Presumably,
her
main
goal is to have her son pay attention and respond. The switch is from
the
marked
(and, in this case, ineffective) choice of English to her unmarked choice
of
Cantonese.
When she does not succeed in establishing her authority about
school
matters
through speaking some English, she satisfies her ultimate goal by switching
to
Cantonese.
Myers-Scotton and Bolonyai further argues that to assess
available
evidence
is one of the mechanisms guiding choices under an RC approach. Under
an
RC
interpretation, the mother's choice to switch to Cantonese is motivated by
the
evidence
that both mother and son know that she has some measure of authority in
the
RO
set that her use of Cantonese indexes. Her authority is recognised: the son
replies,
albeit
in English.
The
point I want to make here is not whether such an interpretation is
correct
(In
fact, I believe Myers-Scotton and Bolonyai's interpretation is largely
correct.), but
whether
the meaning of the mother's code-switching could be interpreted
without
invoking
the interaction-external factors such as marked and unmarked choices
and
the
RO set which are not always consistently empirically definable. Using the
CA
approach,
we can demonstrate the 'responsive treatment' (Schegloff,1982) of
the
mother
and the son of each other's language choices and the procedures
they
themselves
have used in interpreting the meaning of code-switching in conversation
-
when
the mother asks the son in English if he has finished his homework, the
son's
response
is a 'noticeable silence', a typical dispreference marker. It is
this
dispreference
marker that has prompted the mother to switch to Cantonese to
reiterate
her
question. This reiteration is apparently understood by the son as an
indirect
request
to do his homework. A pause marks his turn as another dispreferred
second
pair
part and his choice of language contrasts with that of his mother in
the
immediately
preceding turn, reinforcing dispreference. Note here that we
use
'dispreference'
as a technical term of CA to refer to the various kinds of
structural
complexity
accompanying particular instances of second pair parts of adjacency
pairs,
not
as a social-psychological notion (see further Levinson, 1983: 307;
Pomerantz,
1984;
Sacks, 1987) 5. It is a general procedure whereby conversation
participants
signal
to each other their understanding. By focusing on such
commonly-used
procedures,
conversation analysts aim to reveal the evidence of social reality
and
pinpoint
the origin of social meaning, i.e. how meaning is generated from
face-to-face
interaction.
For those who adopt the CA approach to code-switching, the meaning
is
not
given through the inculcation of values and norms, or any structural forms
which
pre-exist
or underlie individual actions and utterances. Instead, it resides in
conversational interaction itself.
Eviodence
-based Analysis
Conversation
analysts have a different concept of evidence which is not based on the
analyst's own intuition (perhaps characteristic of some schools of generative
linguistics) or quantitative information (typical of sociolinguistics of the
variationist paradigm), but on members' (i.e. conversation participants')
procedures of
interpretation
and interaction. This has led to a preoccupation of transcription conventions
for recordings of conversation which, in many people's view, has become an
obsession. The preoccupation is based on the belief that such evidence is
extremely rich and inexhaustible in the complexity of its details on the one
hand, and the
scepticism
regarding the authenticity of some of the data used to support existing theories
and models of bilingual interaction on the other.
It
has long been recognised that transcription is not only a technically complex
process but also an ideologically-laden one in which the theoretical position of
the transcriber is fully implicated (Ochs, 1979). All transcripts take sides,
enabling certain interpretations and advancing certain theories. As Bucholtz
(2000) points out in a
recent
article, 'embedded in the details of transcription are indications of
purpose,audience, and the position of the transcriber toward the text' (p. 143).
Conversation analysts in the early days of the discipline sought to develop a
complete convention which would faithfully represent relevant features of the
actual interaction in the
original
context. While they have succeeded in raising the awareness among researchers of
the importance of the minute details of communication (e.g. silence,prosody,
non-lexicalised discourse markers, non-verbal cues, etc.), they have come to
realise that an ideology-free transcription is impossible (e.g. Schegloff,
1997).
Although
most published studies of bilingual interaction give fairly clear accounts of
the transcription methods used in the work being reported, we, as readers,do not
often make the link between the transcriptive representation of the data and the
researcher's ideology, identity, and preference. Let us now look at one specific
transcript of an extract of a conversation between two Mandarin Chinese-English
bilingual youths.
EXAMPLE
4a.
A:
Tim rang and wanted to borrow me bike.
B:
Oh yeah?
A:
Again, you know?
B:
(Silence)
5
A: You're seeing him tonight, aren't you?
B:
Yup.
A:
Oh don't know. I think I'm going to ask Susan to tell
him.
B:
Rang Susan shuo shenma?
let
say what
'What
do you want Susan to say?'
A:
He broke the bloody gear you know? I mean...
10
B: mm
A:
Ni gen ta shuo wo yao chuqu yitang.
you
PREP. him say I want go-out once
'You
tell him that I'm going out'.
B:
Susan buhui guan de.
NEG.
will bother PA.
'Susan
won't bother (about that).'
A:
(Silence)
B:
What do you want me to say?
A
transcription of this kind calls for an interaction-external motivation-based
explanation. For the sake of argument, we can assign English as the preferred
(in the non-CA sense) language of speaker A, as this is the language in which he
initiated the exchange. His intention, one would assume, is to persuade speaker
B to let Tim know that he does not want to lend him his bicycle. Upon realising
B's reluctance, A switches to Mandarin Chinese in Line 11, which could be B's
preferred language which he has used in his first full sentence in Line 8. What
is interesting though is that B ignores A's request and tells A that Susan would
not help him. But he clearly
understands
A's intention. Perhaps in order to maintain his friendship with A, B finally
switches to English and asks the obvious 'What do you want me to say?'. Of
course there is no guarantee that English is in fact A's preferred
language.
It
may well be that he started off in what he assumed to be B's preferred language
in order that his request would be accepted. One evidence in support of this
assumption is B's eventual use of English in asking what A wants him to do. Such
an interpretation would then trigger a rationality-based discussion of how the
speakers evaluate the cost and benefit of their choices.
The
fact of the matter is, however, that the two speakers in the conversation are
'routine' bilinguals, who code-switch frequently and regularly as part of their
daily conversational routine. They are very rarely in a monolingual mode and
their codeswitching is not triggered by the so-called rights-and-obligations set
(e.g. Myers-Scotton, 1993a). A CA approach will not only give a rather different
interpretation of the meaning of code-switching in this sequence of
conversation, but also reveal the members' procedure of accomplishing an
interactional task, which in this case is making and refusing a request. To
undertake a conversation analysis, a more detailed transcription is required.
Example 4b presents the same extract of conversation in CA
conventions.
EXAMPLE
4b.
A:
Tim rang [and (.) wanted to borrow me bike.
B:
[oh yeah?
(1.0)
A:
again you know?
5
B: (1.0)
A:
You're seeing him tonight, aren't you.
B:
Yup.
A:
(1.0) ohhh dunno (.) I think I'm going to ask Susan to tell
him.
B:
(0.6) Rang Susan shuo shenma.
let
say what
'What
do you want Susan to say?'
10
A: He broke the bloody gear you know? (.) [I mean...
B:
[mm
A:
Ni gen ta shuo wo yao chuqu [yitang.
you
PREP. him say I want go-out once
'You
tell him that I'm going out'.
B:
[Susan buhui guan de.won't
bother PA.
'Susan
won't bother (about that).'
A:
(1.5)
15
B: What do you want me to say.
Transcription
conventions relevant to this extract.
(0.0)
number in parentheses indicate elapsed time in silence by tenth of
seconds.
(.)
A dot in parentheses indicates a tiny 'gap' within or between
utterances.
word
Underscoring indicates some form of stress, via pitch and/or amplitude
.?
Punctuation marks are used to indicate characteristics of speech production,
especially intonation; a period indicates a stopping fall in tone; a question
mark indicates a rising intonation.
worddd
Repeated letter in a word indicates lengthening of the syllable or
sound.
The
first thing to be noticed here is the amount of details that was missing in the
previous transcript, especially overlaps, gaps and prosodic cues. It is exactly
such details that provide the local management mechanism whereby conversation
participants interpret each other's moves and achieve joint
understanding.
In
CA terms, A's initial utterance is a pre-sequence, introducing a new
interactional episode and at the same time checking B's position. Following a
sequential analysis, we can see that B's utterance in Line 2 comes in the middle
of A's turn, although at an appropriate turn construction unit. Nevertheless, it
results in a one-second gap, which cannot be attributed to either A or B. A then
reinforces his invitation to B for comment and makes it more explicit using
stress, discourse marker and rising intonation. The one-second gap that follows
is attributable this time, to B,and in CA terms it constitutes 'significant
silence', indicating a dispreferred response.
A
does not give up at this point (If he did, he would have changed the topic
completely) but pursues the topic by reiterating it with a tag question. B gives
a 'preferred' response this time, but only in structural terms. He offers no
clear evidence to A if he understands B's real intention for the time being.
Realising he has failed to
convey
his intention to B, A changes his tactic and says he is going to ask Susan to
tell Tim. B's response is clearly marked as dispreferred with a 0.6-gap and a
switch to Chinese. This forces A to make his request more explicitly in Lines 10
and 12.Noticeably, he switches from English to Chinese, the language B has
chosen in the previous turn to make the request. B's decline to A's request
comes in two parts - first in Chinese a remark that he does not think Susan
would help, then, after a longerthan-usual silence by A (Normally, 1-second is
the maximum tolerable silence in English conversation; Jefferson, 1989), he
switches to English and asks what A wants him to say.
Here,
it is not the choice of one language versus the other that is meaningful,but the
switching between the languages, in sequential context, that triggers an
interpretation first and foremost by the interactants themselves and secondarily
by the analyst. The immediate task, as far as the interactants are concerned, is
how to make
and
refuse a request. A sequential analysis can show how code-switching is used to
accomplish this task. Such an analysis can be done without alluding to
interactionexternal norms and values, or to the psycholinguistic mode of the
speaker (Grosjean,2001), but requires a much more careful transcription than the
one for a motivation based analysis
Summary
and Conclusion
It
is obvious that the CA approach to bilingual interaction is very different from
the other sociolinguistic models hitherto proposed. Rather than attempting to
describe structures of code-switching in quantitative terms and divorced from
its natural site of occurrence (i.e. conversation), or to explain meanings of
codeswitching by invoking interaction-external concepts such as speakers' rights
and obligations, the CA approach focuses on collaborative achievements of the
conversation participants, especially the methods and procedures they deploy in
achieving understanding. The relevance of the sociological background of CA to
sociolinguistics generally is the methodological preferences that derive from
it. The belief that language not simply a medium for the _expression of
intentions, motives or interests but a topic for uncovering the methods through
which ordered activity is
generated
has driven CA to focus on the observation of 'naturally occurring' statements
made by participants of social activities at the expense of premature
theorisation, epistemology and philosophical speculation. The CA approach will
remain unattractive to those who still wish to 'predict' social behaviour.
However, contrary to what some commentators have claimed, CA is by no means a
purely descriptive technique. In fact, it requires nothing less than a radical
shift in the focus of social scientific enquiries. As May (1996: 98) points out
'sociologists, for example,should no long assume Durkheim's notion of social
reality as sui generis, or view human behaviour as following the impersonal and
general rules of a role, or the covering laws of cause and effect. Instead,
social order is a direct result of people's 'accomplishments' in their everyday
lives. Psychologists should cease experiments
which
are of no relevance to the practical activities of people as they go about their
daily lives'. CA goes beyond a methodology; it is a theory of a different kind,
an ideology and a worldview which cannot be overlooked, trivialised or
dismissed.
Notes
1.
To complicate the matter, leading practitioners of CA, such as Auer, talk about
'language preference' in Pomerantz's (1984) sense of 'preferred-action turn
shape'. Schegloff (1988) calls it 'practice-based' use of the concept, as
opposed to the 'structure-based' use which refers to the structural regularities
that mark alternative
second
pair parts. In this paper, language preference is used in a non-CA
sense.
2.
Similar comments could be made on the sociolinguistic work in the
quantitativevariationist paradigm.
3.
There has been considerable debate about the legitimate 'uses' of CA in
different contexts. For example, Wetherell (1998) has tried to contextualise CA
within a post-structuralist framework. See Schegloff (1997 and 1998) for
comments.
4.
In the strictest CA sense, it is the sequence failure, i.e. no party was willing
to give the second pair part, that contributed to the
breakdown.
5.
The notion of preference in CA is very close to the linguistic concept of
markedness especially as used in morphology, where there is an opposition
between two members and one member is felt to be more usual, more normal, less
specific and has less material than the other. As Levinson (1983: 333) points
out, 'The parallel is therefore quite apt, because in a similar way preferred
(and thus unmarked) seconds to different and unrelated adjacency pair first
parts have less material than dispreferred (marked seconds), but beyond that
have little in
common
(cf. 'irregular'). In contrast, dispreferred seconds of quite different and
unrelated first parts (e.g. questions, offers, requests, summonses, etc.) have
much in common, notably components of delay and parallel kinds of
complexity.'
6.
In this paper, I have not discussed the notion of 'language' in bilingual
interaction (and associated notions of 'matrix language' or 'base language').
Many researchers who apply the CA approach to code-switching argue that the
information that there are two languages involved is potentially
interaction-external. One of the tasks of the analyst is to demonstrate, through
a sequential analysis, that the languages are oriented to as different by the
participants (see, for example, Auer, 1999;
Gafaranga, 2000, Alvarez-Caccamo, 1998).
Acknowledgements:
The
writing of the paper was prompted by an invitation to speak at the conference on
Spoken Bilingual Databases: Transcription, analysis, exchange, at Lancaster
University, UK, in September, 2000. The conference was organised by the LIPPS
(Language Interaction in Plurilingual & Plurilectal Speakers) Group. I am
particularly grateful to Mark Sebba, Roeland van Hout, Penelope Gardner-Chloros
and Melissa Moyer for their invitation and for their comments on the
presentation. I am also grateful to the participants of a research seminar at
the University of York, UK, in
November,
2000, where the paper was presented, especially to John Local, Sali Tagliamonte
and Mahandra Verma, for their feedback. Lesley Milroy, Margaret Deuchar and
Joseph Gafaranga read and commented carefully and constructively on an earlier
version of the paper. Comments from Jane Hill, editor of this journal, and two
anonymous reviewers helped to clarify several key points both in the paper and
in my understanding of the CA approach and reduce the number of errors and
shortcomings that are entirely my own responsibility. As ever, my wife Zhu Hua
read and commented on various versions of the paper and discussed the ideas that
went into it. But more crucially this time, she has taken on full responsibility
of looking after our new-born son, Andrew, while I revised the
paper.
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preferred/dispreferred turn shapes. In J.M. Atkinson and J. Heritage
(eds)
Structures
of Social Action. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press
Sacks,
Harvey (1987) On the preferences for agreement and contiguity in
sequences
in
conversation. In Button, Graham and Lee, John R.E. (eds) Talk aand
Social
Organisation.
Clevedon: Multilingual Matters pp. 54-69
Sacks,
Harvey, Schegloff, Emanuel A. and Jefferson, Gail (1974) A
simplest
systematics
for the organisation of turn-taking for conversation. Language,
50:
696-735
Schegloff,
Emanuel (1982) Discourse as an interactional achievement: some uses
of
'uh
huh' and other things that come between sentences. In D. Tannen
(ed.)
Analysing
Discourse: talk and text. Georgetown University Roundtable
on
Language
and Linguistics
___
(1988) On a virtual servo-mechanism for guessing bad news. Social Problems
35:
442-57
___
(1997) Whose text? Whose context? Discourse and Society 8:
165-87
___
(1998) Reply to Wetherell Discourse and Society
9:413-6
Sebba,
Mark (1993) London Jamaican. Harlow: Longman.
Sebba,
Mark and Tate, S. (1986) 'You know what I mean?' Agreement marking
in
British
Black English. Journal of Pragmatics, 10: 163-72
Sebba,
Mark and Wootton, Tony. (1998) We, they and identity: sequential
versus
identity-related
explanation in code-switching. In Auer, P. (ed.)
Code-Switching
in
Conversation. London: Routledge, pp. 262-86
Shin,
Sarah J. and Milroy, Lesley (2000) Conversational code-switching
among
Korean-English
bilingual children. International Journal of Bilingualism 4:
351-
84
Stroud,
Christopher (1992) 'The problem of intention and meaning in
code-switching',
Text
12:127-55.
___
(1998) Perspectives on cultural variability of discourse and some implications
for
code-switching.
In Auer, P. (ed.) Code-switching in Conversation.
London:
Routledge
pp. 321-48
ten
Have, Paul (1990) Methodological issues in Conversation Analysis.
Bulletin
de
Methodologie
Sociologique 27: 23-51
___
(1999) Doing Conversation Analysis. London, Sage
Wardhaugh,
Ronald (1985) How Conversation Works. Oxford:
Blackwell
Wetherell,
Margaret (1998) Positioning and interpretative repertoires:
Conversation
analysis
and post-structuralism in dialogue. Discourse and Society 9:
387-412
©
2002 by Language in Society
------------------------------------------------------------------------
3.- TEACHER
EXPERTISE STUDIES AND THEIR IMPLICATIONS FOR TEACHER
EDUCATION
Teacher
Expertise Studies and Their Implications for Teacher Education: A Review of the
Literature
By
Nancy Keranen (*)
Background
For
anyone not in areas involved in artificial intelligence or robotics, research
into areas of expertise might be unknown or at least not well known. The purpose
of this brief literature review is intended to provide an introduction to
expertise studies in the area of teacher education. As teacher educators, expertise studies
can be useful or even essential to our understanding of the characteristics of
novice and expert teachers. Those
characteristics have implications for both pre-service and in-service teacher
education.
Before
we talk about the implications, it would probably be useful to briefly discuss
four main terms used in the studies:
Expert
- Expertise literature from a variety of domains provides a fairly consistent
definition of what an expert is.
There are certain qualities that can be accepted as characteristics of an
expert. Tsui defines being an
expert as someone who is very knowledgeable of their particular area, one who
can "engage in skillful practice, ... make accurate diagnoses, insightful
analysis, and [can make] decisions" usually very quickly (2003, p. 1).
Experienced
- Experience does not necessarily imply expertise. We all know teachers with years of
experience but whom we would be reluctant to label as experts. Some people fail to develop into
experts. Bereiter and Scardamalia
(1993) suggest that instead of looking for comparisons between experts and
novices as most studies have done, research should look for factors or
differences between the experienced non-expert and the expert and try to
determine why some people become experts while some remain merely experienced
non-experts.
Novice
and beginner - These terms signify people lacking in experience or newcomers to
a particular domain. In teaching,
novice and beginner refer to teachers who are in their first year or who are
still in their student teaching phase (Tsui 2003). Sometimes people from outside of
teaching enter the field. They have
content knowledge but no pedagogical knowledge. These people have also been referred to
as novices or "postulants" (Berliner & Carter; Sabers, Cushing, and
Berliner, studies cited in Tsui, 2003).
Implications
for Teacher Development from Expertise Studies
One
of the biggest contributions of expertise studies in teaching has been related
to a sort of new teacher myth.
Berliner (1994) reminds us of the historical devaluing of pedagogical
knowledge. The bright, shiny,
young, fresh out of training, new teacher is commonly favored when
administrations consider hiring teachers.
As Berliner states, those qualities would not be considered as assets
when, for example, one selects a surgeon or hires a commercial airline
pilot. In fact, there are very few
professions that favor the raw novice over the experienced professional other
than teaching. Berliner gives
several reasons for that. One is
that teaching is traditionally considered something like child care or as
something that requires no specific abilities. For example, many teachers in higher
education have not been trained in pedagogy but are merely hired for their
domain expertise (see for example: Roche and Marsh, 2002; Hattie and Marsh,
1996; Marsh, 1987). Another reason
for this devaluation, according to Berliner, is due to the fact that teaching
(primarily K-12) is considered by many to be "women's work", and therefore, he
says, not nearly as complicated as "physics problem solving, a male domain"
(1994, para. 10). However, as he
concludes, and as most teachers know, teaching is a complicated process which
includes mastery of "a complex social and political environment" ( Berliner
1994, para. 10).
After
a discussion of the five stages from novice to expert as described by Dreyfus
and Dreyfus, Berliner formulates 12 propositions regarding teaching
expertise. The propositions come
from expert studies across a variety of domains as well as from teacher
expertise studies. Each one of the
propositions has its pedagogical implications for teacher development.
To
avoid repetition of the implications and in the interest of space limitations, I
have presented below only propositions one, two, three, four and
six.
Berliner's
Proposition One
Berliner
(1994) cites expertise studies from a variety of domains and their criteria for
describing an expert. From Chi,
Glaser, and Farr (1988) comes the idea that experts are expert in mainly a
single domain. This is because of
the amount of time required to become expert in a particular area. Humans rarely have the time necessary to
become expert in more than one area.
Studies that talk about time commitments to becoming an expert include
Lesgold, Rubinson, Feltovich, Glaser, Klopfer, and Wang (1988), who found that
expert radiologists have looked at at least 100,000 x-rays before developing an
expertise in identifying irregularities in the pictures; de Groot (1965), found
that chess have spent between 10,000 and 20,000 hours playing chess; in Berliner
(1994) expert teachers have had at least five years of classroom practice before
most researchers would begin to consider them expert. Berliner estimates that a
teacher with 10 years of classroom practice will have about 10,000 hours in the
classroom as well as about 15,000 hours before that as a student in an
educational setting; however, he states that there is no evidence that
experience as a student adds anything to teaching expertise. The main point is that all expert
teachers have years of classroom practice behind them.
Implications: The implication is that a certificate
given at the end of teacher training does not signify that the teacher is a
fully competent and prepared teacher since becoming a fully prepared teacher is
the result of years of experience, among other factors (Bereiter &
Scardamalia, 1993). Almost always
new teachers are put into positions that assume that they have expertise or are
fully competent teachers. The
studies show that new teachers should not be expected to perform at expert
teacher levels. Instead they should
be mentored and supervised in their first years of practice.
The
Chi, Glaser, and Farr study (cited in Berliner 1994) implies that expertise is
highly contextualized. It is not
appropriate to assume that teachers can move their expertise to new
contexts. Because a teacher is an
expert in one level does not automatically mean they will have equally expert
performance in another grade level or in other subjects. Also, because of this contextualization,
Berliner (1994) says that teacher evaluations that use simulations in an
artificial classroom environment are probably not valid because they take
teachers out of their contexts and put them into a controlled laboratory
environment. For evaluation
purposes, teachers should be observed in their own contexts, not always a
practical way to accomplish evaluations, however.
Berliner's
Proposition Two
Studies
which Berliner (1994) cites, such as Glaser (1987), Leinhardt and Greeno (1986),
Krabbe and Tullgren (1989), and Brooks and Hawke (1985), have shown that expert
teachers rely on routinization and automaticity for handling repetitive
classroom actions. This, according
to Berliner and the studies cited above, allows the teachers to allocate more of
their cognitive processes to dealing with novel or spontaneous classroom
situations.
Implications:
Berliner notes that teacher training should perhaps focus more on establishing
routine behavior such as handling homework; classroom management functions such
as taking attendance, giving and turning in assignments; testing procedures; and
opening, transition, and closing lesson routines. If those functions can be well
established in the novice teacher during initial training, then, like the
expert, they could possibly attend to the more cognitive challenges of teaching.
Berliner's
Proposition Three
In
studies by Glaser and Housner and Griffey (cited in Berliner 1994), expert
teachers were shown to be more aware of the demands and the social context of
teaching situations. In other
words, when asked to plan a class or activities in a special context, expert
teachers asked more questions about the situation and especially about the
students involved in the task. The
conclusion is that expert teachers are more sensitive to the "social and
physical environment in which instruction was to take place" (Berliner 1994,
Proposition Three, para. 1).
Implications:
Administrations often regard a newly-graduated university trained teacher to be
completely ready to teach. However,
studies like those cited above show that novice teachers cannot perform like
expert teachers when it comes to judging and reacting to situations associated
with classroom practice. New
teachers should be closely supervised and mentored instead of being thrown into
the classroom to "sink or swim" (Berliner 1994, Proposition Three, para. 6).
Berliner's
Proposition Four
Expert
teachers were found to be more creative, flexible, improvisational,
opportunistic, and spontaneous to novel situations than novices (Glaser; Borko
& Livingston; Westerman; Sharpe & Hawkins cited in Berliner 1994). Other studies looking at planning
strategies of expert teachers show that they focus their planning on students'
abilities and interests, available materials, the educational setting, and
lesson content rather than on the more structural planning which starts with
lesson aims and objectives (Tsui, 2003).
In a study of university novice and award-winning teachers' concepts on
teaching, Dunkin (2002) reports that novice teachers were not able to access
alternative approaches in a classroom situation due to a lack of pedagogical
strategies. He says that even
though a teacher has content knowledge, without the experience related to
pedagogical knowledge, novice teachers are limited in their choice of classroom
strategies.
Implications: Berliner (1994) reminds us that children
need to crawl before they can walk.
Developmental stages are involved in all types of learning, including
learning to become an expert teacher.
Many innovative curriculum revision programs that call for alternative
student-centered approaches to teaching in education might just fail because
novice teachers are unable to use such approaches at novice developmental
levels. As Berliner says, perhaps
teachers must work through being highly structured before they can be expected
to be creative, spontaneous, opportunistic, and unstructured.
Berliner's
Proposition Six
Experts
can quickly assess and act on situations based on highly developed pattern
recognition abilities. This ability
allows expert teachers to make sense of a given situation. Expert teachers are able to "read" a
classroom like expert chess players are able to read the pieces on a chess board
and accurately determine the next move.
Novice teachers are not able to do this because the ability is the result
of years of classroom experience and the subsequent acquisition of content as
well as pedagogical knowledge. In
their study of decision making processes of novice and expert teachers, Vanci
Osam and Balby (2004) found similar characteristics of time spent in decision
making as those identified by Berliner.
Implications:
The studies cited in this proposition indicate that novices frequently cannot
"make a lot of sense of what they experience" simply because they do not have
the experience that allows this (Berliner, 1994, Proposition Six, para.
12). Once again Berliner notes the
practice of hiring new teachers fresh from their initial training as something
desirable. This practice indicates
"a deep underestimation of the complexity of teaching" (Berliner, 1994,
Proposition Six, para. 12). People
involved in teacher preparation and expert teachers need to inform
decision-makers of the findings of expert studies that novice teachers are not
yet fully prepared to take on the cognitive and performance loads of expert
teachers. Once again the findings
indicate that mentoring and supervision programs should be in place to help
novice teachers develop toward expertise.
Discussion
The
implications also have something to say about people entering teaching from
alternative tracks rather than through traditional ones of university training
in pedagogy. While there is no
evidence to date that teachers entering through the traditional tracks develop
any better than those entering through alternative tracks, there is evidence
that content knowledge or real-world work experience is not a replacement for
pedagogical knowledge (Berliner, 1994; Dunkin, 2002; Shulman,
2000).
Berliner's
propositions and the research cited in expertise studies clearly indicate that
there are significant differences between novices and experts. Novices are generally not prepared or
ready to perform at an expert level.
In fact, their performance can be characterized as lacking in many
ways. Novice or beginning teachers
should not be abandoned when they finish their initial training. The educational work setting should have
programs in place for their continuing growth and
development.
The
studies also show clearly the value of expertise in teaching, the value of
expert teachers. The devaluing of
pedagogical knowledge favors novice teachers over expert teachers. As Berliner (1994) says, this shows a
complete misunderstanding of the complexity of teaching on the part of school
administrations and decision makers, parents, and other interested parties. Expert research can help reverse this
misconception.
In
her review of expertise literature, Tsui (2003) discusses three main areas: 1)
the characteristics of expert performance; in other words, how have expertise
researchers defined what makes up or what the qualities of an expert performance
are, 2) the characteristics or features that define an expert and that define a
novice, and 3) how people move from being novices to being experts and how they
maintain their expertise.
Tsui
(2003) notes that there is a great amount of agreement between studies showing
that expert performance is characterized as a product of an extensive amount of
time in the area of performance, i.e. experience and practice. In what ways experts differ from novices
is still not exactly clear. Dreyfus
and Dreyfus (1986) consider that through extensive experience in a domain,
experts are able to develop automatic and routinized performances which free up
their minds for dealing with spontaneous or novel performances or
problem-solving. Glaser and Chi
(1988) also recognize the characteristic of automatic performance but add that
experts act in a deliberate manner based on knowledge of the situation and
reflection. Eraut takes it one more
step and dismisses automatic performance, saying that expert performance is
characterized by "conscious deliberation" that can be seen in expert
problem-solving. Through reflection
and self-monitoring, experts "maintain their superior performance" (Eraut cited
in Tsui, 2003, p. 20).
Regarding
the third area on expertise discussed by Tsui (2003), the issue of how experts
become experts, Tsui notes that not many studies have looked at this. She says that Bereiter and Scardamalia's
expertise theory is one of the few.
They propose that studies comparing novices and experts may not be as
useful in understanding expert performance as comparing experienced non-experts
with experts. Scardamalia and Bereiter (1991) observe that most of the studies
also do not show the process that an individual moves through to become an
expert. The studies only attempt to define expertise. They regard expertise as a process
rather than a state that one achieves after years of practice. Their theory takes into account the fact
that there are plenty of people with a lot of experience but who would not be
considered experts.
Areas
for Further Research
With
Scardamali and Bereiter's theory in mind, research that shows the development of
expertise would fill a gap in the research. Tsui (2003) presents other gaps in the
research. Specifically related to
teaching, she says that there are few studies of why "expert teachers become
what they are while their peers remain experienced nonexperts" (p. 3). Studies cited in Tsui that look at this
are Bullough (1989) and Bullough and Baughman (1993, 1995).
Tsui
(2003) says that with the exception of Leinhardt, Putnam, Stein, and Baxter;
Leinhardt and Smith; Elbaz; and Grossman there have been few studies that
attempt to understand expertise in specific knowledge contexts. Most of the expertise studies have been
in classroom management or in some general aspect of teaching (cited in Tsui,
2003). Studies that look at
expertise and content knowledge in a specific discipline would help fill this
gap.
Another
area that needs further research is in expertise in English as a second language
(ESL) teaching. Tsui (2003) cites
one study: Richards, Li, and Tang on expertise in second-language. This study was a novice/expert
comparison study. Tsui says there
is even less research in the area of development of expertise in ESL teaching.
Her book begins to fill that gap by reporting on her case study research of four
K-12 ESL teachers. It is clear that
this field is wide open for research.
Research on expertise in foreign language teaching in a non-English
speaking setting would be particularly welcome as well as expertise studies in
higher education in a non-English speaking setting.
Finally,
Tsui (2003) suggests one more gap in the research. Most novice/expert studies examine what
happens in the minds of teachers as if they were divorced from the work
context. Ethnographic research on
teachers' lives reveals that the context in which the teacher works and their
"knowledge and skills" are almost inseparable (p. 2). Expertise research that considers
teachers and their responses to their contexts is
needed.
Expertise
research in teaching is an area that can provide exciting new theories about
teachers and teaching. It can
enlighten how we educate the next generation of teachers as well as how we
encourage teacher development of practicing teachers. As seen above, there are still many gaps
in the research that need to be filled.
References
Berliner,
D.C. (1994). The wonder of exemplary
performances. In Mangieri, J. N.
& C. Collins Block (Eds.), Creating powerful thinking in teachers and
students. Fort Worth, TX: Holt,
Rinehart & Winston. Retrieved
May 7, 2005, from http://courses.ed.asu.edu/berliner/readings/expertise.htm.
Dunkin,
M.J. (2002). Novice and award-winning teachers'
concepts and beliefs about teaching in higher education. In N. Hativa & P. Goodyear (Eds.),
Teacher thinking, beliefs and knowledge in higher education (pp. 41-57). London: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
Hattie,
J., & Marsh, H.W. (1996). The relationship between research and
teaching - a meta-analysis. Review
of Educational Research, 66, 507-542.
Marsh,
H.W. (1987). Students' evaluations of university
teaching: Research findings, methodological issues, and directions for future
research. International Journal of
Educational Research, 11, 253-388.
Roche,
L.A., & Marsh, H.W.
(2002). Teaching
self-concept in higher education.
In N. Hativa & P. Goodyear (Eds.), Teacher thinking, beliefs and
knowledge in higher education (pp. 179-218). London: Kluwer Academic
Publishers.
Scardamalia,
M. & Bereiter, C. (1991). Literate expertise. In K. Anders Ericcson & J. Smith
(Eds.), Toward a general theory of expertise: Prospects and limits (pp.
172-194). Cambridge University
Press.
Shulman,
L.S. (2000). Teacher development: Roles of domain
expertise and pedagogical knowledge.
Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology, 21(1),
129-135.
Tsui,
A.B.M. (2003). Understanding expertise in teaching:
Case studies of EFL teachers.
Cambridge University Press.
Vanci
Osam, U. & Balby, S.
(2004) Investigating the
decision making skills of cooperating teachers and student teachers of English
in a Turkish context. Teaching
& Teacher Education, 20, 745-758.
(*)
Nancy Keranen has an MA-TESOL from Seattle Pacific University. She is a full-time associate professor
at the Benemérita Universidad Autonóma de Puebla, in Puebla, Mexico. She is also a first year PhD candidate
at Lancaster University, Lancaster, United Kingdom. Her research is on expertise and teacher
professional development.
©
2005 by NEXUS
------------------------------------------------------------------------
4.-
REPEATS OF THE TOOLS FOR TEACHERS EASTER COURSE
First of all, Tools for
Teachers would like to express its gratitude to SHARE for the support in
making the information available to its subscribers and is pleased to announce
repeats of its Easter course:
Saturday 6th May -
10:00 to 13:00 - Vulgar English
Saturday 3rd June -
10:00 to 13:00 - Sixteen Ways to be a Teacher
Friday 9th June - 17:00 to 20:00 - Ideas that
work
Thursday 22nd June -
17:00 to 20:00 - Simple
Techniques for your well being
All
sessions conducted by Oriel E. Villagarcía
Profesor
en Inglés, Universidad Nacional de Tucumán, M.A. in Linguistics for ELT from the
University of Lancaster, England, graduate studies at the University of Texas,
Fulbright and British Council Scholar, Master Practitioner of NLP, Certificate
of Completion, NLP University, Santa Cruz, California, Certified Administrator
of the Myer Briggs Type Indicator, CAPT, Florida, Certified Breema Practitioner,
Certified Reflexologist, Certified Jin Shin Jyutsu Practitioner Certified
Massage Practitioner, and Certified Instructor of Bodywork on Balance Balls (Esferodinamia
Terapéutica) Oriel has also studied Thai Massage, Esalen Massage, Polarity,
Shiatsu, yoga and Chi Kung among other mind body disciplines. He was Head of
English Department at the Universidad Católica de Salta, taught Linguistics at
the Universidad Nacional de Rio Cuarto, and NLP at the Universidad Nacional de
Santiago del Estero. He is a co-founder of
what is FAAPI (Federación
Argentina de Asociaciones de Profesores de Inglés) today, and co-founder and
first president of ASPI, Asociación Salteña de Profesores de Inglés.
Venue: SBS
Palermo, Coronel Díaz 1745, Ciudad de Buenos Aires.
Fee: $ 20 per
session
Full information on the academic
contents of these workshops, and details on how to register, can be obtained by
sending an email to http://ar.f530.mail.yahoo.com/ym/Compose?To=newtoolsforteachers@yahoo.com.ar
For more information, visit: http://www.sbs.com.ar/bin/default.asp
Tools For
Teachers would hereby like to wish
teachers throughout the country a very Happy Easter.
Oriel E.
Villagarcia
-----------------------------------------------------------
5.- TERCERAS
JORNADAS INTERNACIONALES DEL NOA PARA PROFESORES DE
INGLÉS
Our dear SHARER Stella
Caramutti has sent us this
announcement:
Terceras
Jornadas Internacionales del NOA para Profesores de
Inglés
Instituto
de Enseñanza Superior "Lola Mora"
Estimados
colegas:
Les
informamos que la Secretaría de Educación de la Nación ha declarado de "Interés
Educativo" a estas Jornadas mediante resolución 43SE del 01 de febrero de 2006 y
que mediante el expediente 021988/230-I-05 hemos solicitado la misma declaración
a la Secretaría de Educación de la Provincia de
Tucumán.-
Confirmaron
su presencia los siguientes disertantes:
Lic.
Omar Villarreal
Magíster
Juan Ferretti
Prof.
Alfredo Bilopolsky
Jamie
Duncan
Susan
Hillyard (Auspiciada Por OUP)
La
primera fecha de inscripción se ha prorrogado hasta el 28 de abril próximo dados
los numerosos pedidos. Para mayor información, contactar: Estela Maria Caramuti
stemarprini@uolsinectis.com.ar or Instituto Lola Mora jornadasingles2006@yahoo.com.ar
------------------------------------------------------------
6.-
HANIF KURESIHI EN BUENOS AIRES
Our
dear SHARER Mary Godward writes to us:
El
escritor británico Hanif Kureishi estará llegando a Buenos Aires la semana que
viene. Se presentará en la Feria del Libro y en el Festival de Cine
Independiente en Malba. Les envío una corta biografía y los detalles de los dos
eventos públicos.
Biografía
Novelista
y guionista, Hanif Kureishi nació en un suburbio del sur de Londres, el 5 de
diciembre de 1954, hijo de padre pakistaní y madre inglesa. Estudió filosofía en
el King’s College de Londres. En 1981 ganó el premio
George
Devine por su ensayo
Afueras
(Outskirts)
y
en 1984 escribió
Mi
hermosa lavandería (My Beautiful Launderette),
la
cual fue llevada al cine el mismo año, bajo la dirección de Stephen Frears,
recibiendo una nominación al Oscar de la Academia - mejor guión original. Su
novela
El
Buda de los suburbios
(The Buddha of Suburbio)
(1990)
recibió el premio Withbread como mejor novela además de haber sido traducida a
20 lenguas y emitida por la BBC. En su segunda novela,
El
álbum negro
(Black
Album)
(1995),
trata el tema del fundamentalismo islámico. En 1997 publicó su primera colección
de historias cortas
Amor
en tiempos tristes (Love in a Blue Time)
y
en 1998
Intimidad
(Intimacy).
En
su ensayo,
Algo
dado
(Something
Given),
comenta la historia de su padre, un emigrante pakistaní en Inglaterra. Sus
escritos ponen de manifiesto su visión personal de la realidad de la sociedad
británica. Junto a Kazuo Ishugiro y Salman Rushdie es una de las voces más
destacadas de la nueva narrativa inglesa y representante de una importante
generación de escritores.
Para
una biografía más completa, ver:
http://www.contemporarywriters.com/authors/?p=auth57
La
página y la pantalla - Viernes 21 de abril, 1800 hs
Conversación entre Hanif
Kureishi y Edgardo Cozarinsky, moderada por Silvia Hopenhayn.
Buenos Aires
Festival Internacional de Cine Independiente (BAFICI)
MALBA- Museo de Arte
Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires
Avda Figueroa Alcorta 3415, Buenos Aires
Ingreso: por orden de llegada
Dialogando
con Hanif Kureishi
Sábado 22 de abril, 1630 hs
Entrevistado por Osvaldo
Quiroga, Hanif Kureishi habla sobre su trayectoria literaria.
Feria
Internacional del Libro - La Rural, Predio Ferial de Buenos Aires
Avda.
Sarmiento 2704, Buenos Aires
Entradas: el British Council dispone de un
número limitado de entradas para este evento así que si desea ir, le rogamos se
contacte con nosotros.
Para
más información comuníquese con
el
British Council al teléfono 4311 9814.
Agradecemos el apoyo brindado por
Riverside SA (distribuidora de Anagrama en Argentina), Buenos Aires Festival
Internacional de Cine Independiente (BAFICI), Feria Internacional del Libro y
Malba Colección Costantini
Mary
Godward
Manager Knowledge and Learning- British Council
M T de Alvear 590
- 4th Floor - C1058AAF Buenos Aires – Argentina
T
+54
(0)11 4311 9814 - F
+54
(0)11 4311 7747 - http://ar.f530.mail.yahoo.com/ym/Compose?To=mary.godward@britishcouncil.org.ar
------------------------------------------------------------
7.-
A LETTER FROM ELT EVENTS
Dear
SHARERS,
It
is with regret that we announce that the HLTC Tour with Mr. Mario Rinvolucri and
guest speakers has had to be postponed. ELT Events, who was in charge of the
local operations was very excited about this tour, but this decision was
taken together with the developers of this event, Betty Wolf (Bewnetwork), due
to organisational inconveniences that have cropped up these last days. We
thought that the commitment to keeping the high standard we seek for is what you
deserve. Thanks for your understanding.
Anyway,
we have a number of conferences scheduled for later this year:
Spring
Conference 2006, Western Conference 2006, 1ras Jornadas sobre Evaluación en
Lenguas Modernas among them. You will hear about them
very soon.
We
would like to thank you for all the events submisions this month, which have
made www.eltevents.com.ar
the most comprehensive calendar for the ELT Community. We remind you that you
need to send the info by completing the form and that you just have to click on
the calendar to see the May & June events .
Thanks for your continuous
support!
The ELT EVENTS Team
------------------------------------------------------------------------
8.- A
DISTINCTION FOR CELIA ZUBIRI
It
is with great joy that we publish this note that our dear SHARER Fernando
Armesto has sent us. Our heartfelt congratulations to our dear Celia for such a
well deserved distinction!
Dear
SHARERS,
It
is my pleasure to share with you this important news that entails our ELT
community. Our friend and colleague, Celia Zubiri, managing Director of the
theatre company the Buenos Aires Players, was awarded the highest membership as
a playwright in Argentores, Sociedad General de Autores de la Argentina, due to
the number of plays written and performed, the number of performances for each
play and the huge amount of audience. For your information, nowadays there are
only around 200 TV, radio, films and theatre authors in our country that
have achieved this membership. Last but not least, Celia is the first
playwright in English in our country to get this distinction. I really want
to congratule her for this achievement that marks a difference and opens a new
dimension for the ELT Community.
Prof.
Fernando Armesto
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
9.- ANGLIA
EXAMINATION SYNDICATE
Our
dear SHARER Chris Kunz, Local Representative for Anglia Examination Syndicate in
South America and Spain, is very proud to announce the
following:
1.
Chichester College receives Royal Seal of Approval -24th February 2006
The
Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh have presented a prestigious award to Chichester
College at a ceremony at Buckingham Palace.
On
25th November 2005 Chichester College was awarded The Queen's Anniversary Prize
for Higher and Further Education in recognition of its work with students from
overseas through its International Department. The awards are the choice of Her
Majesty the Queen on the advice of the Prime Minister. They represent glowing
examples of the extraordinary excellence of work that is to be found in the
Universities and Colleges of the United Kingdom. Other prizewinners in 2005
include the universities of Cambridge, Oxford and York. As part of the
International Department, ANGLIA EXAMINATION SYNDICATE is recognised for its
contribution towards this prestigious accolade. The steady growth in the number
of Anglia candidates throughout the world has certainly made it possible for
more and more students worldwide to have access to an internationally recognised
qualification.
Chichester
College won the award "for developing the College and its community through
International student intake and integration". From a total of more than 300
entries, Chichester was the only college in the South to receive the award, in a
list of 21 universities and colleges. Over the last decade, the number of
international students at Chichester College has increased tenfold, from 234 to
2,400 in 2005, with students coming from over 85
countries.
2. ANGLIA joins
EALTA
European
Association for Language Testing and Assessment - www.ealta.eu.org EALTA is a
professional association for language testers in Europe. EALTA's interests are
independent of those of any other organisation. EALTA is being set up with
financial support from the European Community. The purpose of EALTA is to
promote the understanding of theoretical principles of language testing and
assessment, and the improvement and sharing of testing and assessment practices
throughout Europe. Anglia Examination Syndicate has become an institutional
member of EALTA.
3.
Second Anglia International Congress For ELT
Professionals
After
the great success our FIRST INTERNATIONAL CONGRESS FOR ELT PROFESSIONALS had
last year, we're now more than happy to announce the second round to take place
in Buenos Aires on 10 & 11 August 2006. National as well as international
keynote speakers will delight all our delegates with updated and high-quality
elt-related issues. More than 20 academic presentations to choose from and a
handful of commercial presentations offering the latest materials/ services for
ELT. Further information regarding The Congress will follow
shortly.
To
contact us, please drop us a line at info@angliaexams.com or
give
us ring on +11 4246-3547.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
10.- NEWS FROM
ISIP
Our
dear SHARER Lic. Rith
Lapidus from Instituto Superior de Investigaciones Psicológicas
has
sent us this message:
The
English Lesson: how to teach and how to evaluate
with
Prof. Gladys Baya
2nd
meeting: April 22 – 9:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m
Meetings
take place once a month. Official credit for course attendants ("acredita
puntaje"). You can still join!
Interested
in getting more information, or a detailed syllabus? Visit www.institutoisip.com.ar or email us to isip@ciudad.com.ar
You
can also phone ((011) 4373-0604; Tel/Fax (011)4374-0161) or visit us at our
school (Viamonte 1716 - 2nd floor - Capital Federal) from 12:00 to 6:30
PM.
-----------------------------------------------------------
11.- CITY
& GUILDS INTERNATIONAL EXAMINATIONS
Our
dear SHARER Silvina Requejo writes to us:
Dear
Colleagues
We
would like to inform you that as from 2006 City & Guilds - Pitman
Qualifications will be completely migrated to City & Guilds. Following
extensive research it was felt that we could bring greater benefits to
candidates, both in the UK and internationally, by focusing on one single
brand.
In
Argentina, we continue offering the qualifications needed for today's job
opportunities and for university entry requirements. As you all know, our
qualifications are recognized by the following universities: UCA, UADE,
Universidad de Belgrano and Universidad Austral. Our qualifications include 6
levels in General English and a wide range of qualifications for specific
purposes, which can be sat for in any of our 5 dates throughout the academic
year.
If
you require any further information do not hesitate to contact us
at:
37
Warren Road School of English
Representative
in Argentina: Mrs. Silvina Requejo, Local Examinations
Secretary
Rosario
531 Cap. (C1424CCK) - Tel/Fax: (011) 4901-0967/3381
E-mail:
37warrenroad@ciudad.com.ar
-
Websites: www.37warrenroad.com.ar
City
& Guilds International Examinations
Training
Session - April 21st 2006
Are
you interested in offering your students international qualifications? Come and
join us! On April 21st at 6 p.m. you'll have the chance to
become acquainted with City & Guilds ESOL Examinations. We will go through
past papers and we will give you all the necessary tools to lead your students
to success.
Admission
free of charge
Enrolment
essential either by phone or e-mail
(see contact details below)
Certificates
of attendance will be issued
Venue:
Rosario 531 Capital.
Contact:
Tel/Fax:
(011) 4901-0967/3381 - E-mail: 37warrenroad@ciudad.com.ar
------------------------------------------------------------
12.- POSTGRADUATE
COURSES ON TRANSLATION AND INTERPRETING
Universidad
de Buenos Aires
Cursos
de posgrado en traduccion e interpretacion
Estos
seminarios forman parte del proyecto de la Carrera de Especialización y Maestría
en Traducción e Interpretación aprobado por el H. Consejo Directivo de esta
facultad el 5/9/05 mediante Res. Nro. 2848/05 y que a la fecha se encuentra a
estudio y consideración por el H.
Consejo Superior de la Universidad de Buenos
Aires.
“Traducción
y Lingüística”
Profesor:
Aldo Blanco
32 hs. -
Sábados de 8 a 12
hs.
Desde
el 22/04/06 - Inscripción hasta 19/04/06
“Fonología
del Inglés
Profesor:
Norberto Ruiz Díaz.
32
hs. - Sábados: de 9 a 13 hs.
Desde
06/05/06 - Inscripción hasta 02/05/06
“Estudios
Lingüísticos Comparativos”
Profesora:
María Teresa Viñas Urquiza.
32
hs. - Sábados de 9 a 13 hs. y de 14
a 18 hs.
Desde
06/05/06 - Inscripción hasta 02/05/06
“Actualización
en Traducción Directa”
Profesora:
Ada Franzoni de Moldavsky
32
hs. -Sábados de 9 a 12 hs. y de 13 a 16 hs.
Desde 06/05/06
- Inscripción hasta 02/05/06
“Introducción
a la Interpretación”
Profesores: Margarita Ana Moschetti y Laura
Bertone
32
hs. - Sábados de 9 a 13 hs.
Desde 20/05/06 - Inscripción hasta
16/05/06
destinatarios
(todos los cursos): Traductores Públicos, Técnicos, Científicos, Literarios,
Profesores de Lengua Inglesa con Título Universitario o Terciario.
Informes
Por Correo Electrónico: traducto@derecho.uba.ar
–
Carrera
De Traductor Publico
4809-5679.
Inscripcion:
Departamento De Posgrado. Facultad De Derecho – F. Alcorta 2263 2ª Piso Ciudad De Buenos Aires, - Lunes A
Viernes de 9 a 20 hs.- T.E.
4809-5606/5607/5609
------------------------------------------------------------------------
13.- ELT TEAM MARATHON 2006 IN MAR DEL
PLATA
Our
dear SHARERS from ELTeam have got an invitation to
make:
ELTeaMarathon
2006: The Hues of English
We
invite you to this compelling event which places the teaching and learning of
the English language on stage in different lights.
*
The Backstage of Business English by Marcelo Vilches
Discover the pros and cons of business
English in the workplace, obtain a framework for business activities and tap
into proposals with original materials.
*
School Culture Across Cultures by Marcelo Vilches
Marcelo reveals
through his experience as an exchange student in the U.S.A, the high school events that got the students
involved in the "school culture".
*
Emotional Intelligence at work by Marta García Lorea.
Educators
know that learning implies making use of cognitive strategies but are we aware
of the key emotional and social skills and competencies students need? Can our
students handle anxiety and anger?
Can they empathize or keep themselves motivated? Learn effective ways of
making these features in our implicit curriculum
memorable.
*
Effective Conflict Management by Marta Garcia Lorea
Conflict
can also be regarded as positive. If we address it constructively we can sharpen
our understanding of the root causes, conflict dynamics and look for
opportunities of conflict transformation, thus enriching our role as
teachers.
*
American Expressions in
Context for Teachers and Teaching by Liliana Michelotti
Invite
yourselves into the alluring world of idioms as they pertain to situational
learning and reveal the attitudes behind idioms. Discover that by putting idioms
in context they can become both "learnable" and "teachable" in turn.
Marcelo
Vilches: Economics student at U.N.L.P, Rotary International Exchange student in
Penn. U.S.A., FTBE Award (Business
English) sponsored by the London Chamber of Commerce, English language teacher,
Business English teacher and teacher of Spanish for
foreigners.
Marta
Garcia Lorea: Post graduate in e-learning UNED (Spain). Post graduate studies in
Teaching of English CAECE
University. Currently ELT consultant and Project Liason Manager, ESP immersion
courses and professional development seminars.Co author, Teacher's Guide for
kinder ELT course Mac Graw Hill. Author of "What´s Up Doctor?" not published.
Former Supervisor and Head at B. A.
Municipal Schools of Languages. Former ELT Consultant, Simon &
Schuster and Pearson publishers. ARTESOL secretary. Thirty years teaching
experience - all levels.
Liliana
Michelotti: Carried out elementary and high school studies in New York City.
Graduated with honors from both La Guardia Com College and Queens College (NY
University) as a bilingual education major. Co -founder of "Communicating Language Circle".
Certified Teacher of Business English.
Date:
April 22nd 9:00 - 18:00
Fee:
$ 18 (On spot registration $20) - Ask about special discounts for ELTeam
members
Venue: Museo del Mar ( Av. Colon 1114 - Mar del Plata)
Also
includes: Raffles and coffee break
- Certificates of attendance.
For
more info:
info@elteamconsultancy.com or call
0223-475-8631
-------------------------------------------------------------
14.-
PHONOLOGY COURSE AT UCA
Our dear SHARER Martha
Ortigueira has sent us this information:
Curso
de Extensión organizado por el Departamento de Lenguas de la Facultad De
Filosofía Y Letras de la Universidad Católica Argentina
"Los
rasgos segmentales en la cadena del habla en la lengua inglesa"
A
cargo del Dr. Héctor Valencia
Dirigido
a : profesionales de Lenguas, alumnos avanzados del profesorado en Inglés
Días
y Horarios de Cursada : miércoles, 5 de abril a 28 de Junio, 13 a 14.30
Aranecel:
$30 por mes
Informes
e inscripción: julia_sanmarting@uca.edu.ar - M. Julia San Martín Granel
4338-0789
--------------------------------------------------------------------
15.-
FORTHCOMING EVENTS BY APPLE CONSULTANCY
Our dear SHARERS Valeria Goluza
& Gabriela Diaz have sent us this invitatoion:
(1)
First
Apple Congress for Teachers of English
"Teaching
Different Contexts, Facing Different Realities"
Sede
del Congreso: Instituto Superior Grilli, Vicente Lopez 246, Monte
Grande
Días
2 y 3 de junio de 2006
Los
speakers que ya han confirmado su presencia para las sesiones plenarias
son:
Susan
Hylliard - Laura Szmuch y Jamie Duncan - Charlie López - Valeria Goluza y
Gabriela Díaz
(2)
ISFDT No. 43 – LOBOS & APPLE
Consultancy
invite
you to attend a one day long workshop:
"Teaching
& Learning: Strategies that Work"
Schedule:
10.00
-13.00'Strategies for Skills Work'by Valeria Goluza and Gabriela
Diaz
14.00
-14.45 Three concurrent sessions:
'Videos
in the Classroom'
by Diego Dominguez
'English
through Music'
by Cecilia Denis
'Readers
at Use'
by Silvia Videla
15.00
-16.00 - 'Games:Fun and much more' by Valeria Goluza
and Gabriela Diaz
16.00
Raffles!
Certificates
of attendance will be issued.
Venue:
Santa Marina - Day: May 6th
Fee$20-
Please confirm attendance to: (02227) 430076 or by e-mail: info@appleconsultancy.com.ar or www.appleconsultancy.com.ar
--------------------------------------------------------------------
16- A
COURSE ON TEACHING PRONUNCIATION
Our
dear SHARERS from Asociación de Ex-Alumnos del Profesorado en Lenguas Vivas
announce:
La
Pedagogía de la Fonética
Curso
en 3 módulos de 50 hs. totales y 24 hs. presenciales c/u., a cursarse sabado por
medio.
Profesora:
Clem Durán
Inicio
del primer módulo: 8 de abril - Finalización: 17 de junio
Duración:
6 encuentros - Modalidad: semi-presencial
Horario:
sábados de 9:00 a 13:00 hs
Sede:
EP-Paraná: Paraná 145, 2do piso. Ciudad de Buenos
Aires
El
Ce.P.E.L. es un nuevo proyecto de la Escuela de Posgrado de la UNSAM,
desarrollado en forma conjunta con la Asociación ex Alumnos en Lenguas Vivas y
la Escuela de Humanidades de la UNSAM.www.posgrado.unsam.edu.ar
Para
mayor información, escribir a cepel@unsam.edu.ar o comunicarse al
4580-7263.
--------------------------------------------------------------------
17.- 2nd
PATAGONIAN CONGRESS FOR TEACHERS AND STUDENTS OF
ENGLISH
Our
dear SHARER Liliana Maiolo regrets to announce that the 2nd
Patagonian Congress for Teachers and students of English that was to be held in
Neuquén on April 28th.& 29th, 2006 with the participation of Daniel
Fernandez, Patricia Gómez, Jamie Duncan, and Laura Szmuch, has now been
cancelled.
Liliana
Maiolo lmaiolo@infovia.com.ar (0299)477-0941 ELT
Today
------------------------------------------------------------
18.- PARAGUAY
TESOL
17th Paratesol Annual
Conference
"Facing Diversity in a Globalized World"
July 13th And
14th, 2006
Centro Cultural Paraguayo Americano
Asunción-Paraguay
Deadline for Proposals May 31st
For information contact: Mr. Marcelo Olivieri / Ms. Mirta
Ucedo.
Telephone: 595-21-503-012/014 Ext. 136. / 595-961-636-599 /
595-981-
987-141
E-mail: http://ar.f530.mail.yahoo.com/ym/Compose?To=paratesol@yahoo.com
- Web Page: http://www.paratesol.org/
------------------------------------------------------------
19.- NEWS FROM SUSAN
HILLYARD
Our
dear SHARER Susan Hillyard writes to us:
Susan
Hillyard - Educational Consultant and Speaker
hillyard@ciudad.com.ar Tel: 45413010
Dear
All,
I
have decided to devote the rest of my teaching life to teachers and teenagers
and have some new offers for 2006. I will continue, as in 2005,
with
Workshops
on Professional Development for Teachers, Coordinators and
Heads,
eg: Drama in ELT., Classroom Management, Are you a Manager or a
Leader?
I
have added some new Initiatives for teachers and teenagers:
Talks
for Teens,
eg Let's Live Liverpool: Poetry,
Plays and Songs from the City of the Beatles, A History of Rock n Roll: with
live and recorded music (by Mick Hillyard and Ben
Zuckerman)
Demonstration
Classes,
where a number of teachers can observe a class at work with me on: How to work
with Games in ELT, How to facilitate Creative Writing, Working with Songs and
Music, How to prepare for the Oral Component in International
Exams.
Book
Presentation:
A workshop for teachers, trainee teachers or teenagers on "Global Issues", a Resource Book for
Teachers, written by Ric Sampedro and Susan Hillyard, Ed. Alan Maley Publisher:
OUP (This is free of charge, within
the city of Buenos Aires)
For
a complete list of any of these initiatives, please contact
me.
--------------------------------------------------------------------
We would like to finish this
issue of SHARE with this moving poem “Only when women sing” that Carole Fontaine
wrote and that our dear SHARER Marta Garay <mhgaray@hotmail.com>
sent
us:
Only
When Women Sing
Do
not show me tiny crowds of handpicked men;
do not regale me with films of
gunfire in the air-
these mean nothing.
Show
me instead the mothers,
pictures of long-dead sons at their breast;
show
me their sisters, whose brothers
and husbands never came home;
let me see
their joy, if they have it.
Show
me battalions of little girls, if you can-
healthy and learned, with futures
and names.
Show me their mothers, with homes all arrayed
in abundance and
peace, with color and song.
Do
not pronounce victories, missions accomplished,
when tyrants go skulking from
palace to hole:
show me the women, show me the old,
wreathed now in hope,
with a sense of 'it's over',
formerly broken, now a little more
whole.
It
will only be victory when women sing in the streets,
their veils firmly
chosen and anchored in place,
or off and waving, if they have the
taste,
but both equally safe-to choose, to live, to learn, to love.
It
will only be victory when the women sing.
Carole R.
Fontaine
December, 2003
HAVE
A WONDERFUL WEEK
Omar
and Marina.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
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is distributed free of charge. All announcements in this electronic magazine are
also absolutely free of charge. We do not endorse any of the services announced
or the views expressed by the contributors. For more information about the
characteristics and readership of SHARE visit: http://www.groups.yahoo.com/group/ShareMagazine
VISIT
OUR WEBSITE : http://www.ShareEducation.com.ar
There you can read all past issues of SHARE in the section SHARE ARCHIVES.