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Spring seminar, Edge Hill 2003

List of participants

(Note: Participants submitted their contact details and research interests before the seminar for circulation.  Where participants have given permission for these details to be posted online, you can link to them by clicking the names which are underlined below.)

Jo Arthur
Richard Barwell
Jill Bourne
Angela Creese
Jurgita Dzialtuvaite
Lindsey Crickmay
Peter Flynn
Jane Freeland
Julia Gillen
Rachel Heath
Rachel Hodge
Rosaleen Howard
Moira Inghilleri
Piotr Kuhiwczak
Sarah Lawson
Adam Lefstein
Vally Lytra
Steve Marshall
Deirdre Martin
Marilyn Martin-Jones
Margaret Obondo
Ben Rampton
Massimiliano Spotti
Christopher Stone
Brian Street
Karin Tusting

Name: Jo Arthur 

Institution: Edge Hill College of Higher Education 

Email: arthurj@edgehill.ac.uk

In the 1980s and 1990s I taught and researched in Botswana, southern Africa, and this developed into a broader interest in investigating bilingual language use in classrooms in other post-colonial societies. My key concerns were to explore how the interactional order observed in classrooms relates to underlying pedagogic beliefs of teachers and to social and cultural values beyond the school. More recently, I have been engaged in ethnographic research among Somali speakers in Liverpool, England, focusing particularly on the relationship between language and literacy practices and identity formation among young people in this minoritised community. This research included a case study of literacy learning and teaching in community language classes. I hope to continue to add to work in the neglected research area of community schooling through a project-in-planning on the experience of children and young people in Chinese community language classes in Britain. Central questions in this research will concern the aims of such provision - as envisaged by learners, parents and teachers - and how success in achieving these aims might be gauged. Other research in its early stages (i.e. proposed for funding) concerns the use of Scots in Scottish classrooms, in the context of its ambiguous status, between on the one hand official recognition as an indigenous heritage language of Scotland and on the other hand widespread stigmatisation as a non-standard dialect of English.

Name: Richard Barwell 

Institution: Graduate School of Education, University of Bristol 

Email: Richard.barwell@bris.ac.uk

My research concerns the mathematical thinking of students in multilingual contexts. I am interested in how bilingual students participate in and make sense of mathematical interaction. I am also interested in the relationship between sociolinguistic context and the patterns of interaction and meaning-making that arise in mathematics classrooms. What is the difference between a mathematics lesson in South Africa or London? What of the difference is related to the different multilingual contexts of the classrooms?

Bilingual students are likely to draw on a wide range of cultural, linguistic and social experiences in meaning-making in the classroom, presenting challenges for interpretive research. I am therefore also interested in the methodological issues which arise from researching in diverse contexts. How can interaction in culturally and linguistically diverse contexts be analysed? What can be said about the role of students' home languages if these are not heard in the classroom? How can we account for the experience of the researcher in making sense of classroom data?

References

Barwell, R. (2002) 'Understanding EAL issues in mathematics.' In Leung, C. (Ed.) Language and Second/Additional Language Issues for School Education: A Reader for Teachers, pp. 69-80. Watford: NALDIC Publications Group. 

Barwell, R. (2002) 'Whose words?' Mathematics Teaching 178, pp. 34-36.

Barwell, R. (2001) Learning from listening: talk in a multilingual mathematics classroom. NALDIC Occasional Paper 14. Watford: NALDIC Publications Group.

Name: Lindsey Crickmay 

Institution: Department of Social Anthropology, University of St Andrews 

Email: lc8@st-andrews.ac.uk

Lindsey Crickmay has a PhD in Amerindian Studies from the University of St Andrews where she has taught ethnography of the Andean region and Mesoamerica, sociolinguistics and Quechua language for a number of years in the Department of Social Anthropology and where she is presently based. She has also taught at the Institute of Latin American Studies at Liverpool University. Her research interests include textile production and tourism in the present day Andes as well as linguistic issues surrounding the conversion process in the same area during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

Name: Peter Flynn 

Institution: Department of English, Ghent University, Belgium 

Email: peter.flynn@ugent.be

Abstract of Doctorate

Though there can be no translations without translators, few studies of the complex field of translation focus on the translator or, to be more specific, on translators. The main purpose of this doctorate, therefore, is to try and fill up this lacuna and include translators in the overall equation of translation. In order to do so, I've opted for an ethnographic approach, the purpose being to discover how (literary) translators do actually go about their work with specific texts in specific languages, in this case poems written in English and Irish by a number of Irish poets over the last 30 years and their Dutch translations. Through my research, which involves in-depth interviews with translators and a close analysis of their translations, I hope to gain a deeper insight into the translation process and hence contribute in some way to the growing field of translation theory and practice. This will involve contrasting findings from my data with existing theoretical translation models and examining situated translation practices, with a view to balancing speculation on how translators function within their community and how they relate to and position themselves with respect to macro issues of literary translation.

I also hope to be able to contrast the practice-based approaches of translators to their translations with other (theoretical and textual) approaches and in so doing unearth both varying and contrasting ideologies of language and text (including literary texts) and also versions of culture(s). I consider an ethnographic approach to be vital to the whole enterprise, as it provides an adequate paradigm for arriving at empirical data on translators and their translations in a way that does not divorce textual analysis from the perspectives of their users and yet provides room for critical leverage (cf. ethnography revolving around the twin poles of distanced observation and sympathetic involvement).

Outline of PhD Research 

Title: A Linguistic Ethnography of Literary Translation: Irish Poems and Dutch-speaking Translators

Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Stef Slembrouck

Each phase below will form the various chapters of the doctorate

Initial Phase - Theory and Methodology 

Why ethnography? Because ethnography does not divorce use from the user and his or her 'life world', perceptions, etc.; because knowledge is rooted in communication. How can we make sense of the broader picture unless we (in addition to analysing translations) also try to understand how (i) translators make sense of cultural difference, sociolinguistic realities, publishing as an institutional network, the translation process, what is a text, etc. as well as how (ii) such notions inform what translators do when they make a translation?

Phase Two - Fieldwork 

In-depth qualitative interviews with literary translators in Belgium and the Netherlands.

Phase Three - Translators' Views 

Transcription and analysis of the interview data and a comprehensive discussion of the emerging data. Analysis so far points to the practice-based (1), ethos-oriented (2) and situated (3) nature of the various approaches to translation found in the data.

Contrast of findings from data with theoretical translation models, while also drawing on other models of analysis relating to language (use), literature and society, (Bourdieu, Lotman, Habermas, et al.). The goal here is to provide some perspectives on translation theory in general and on system and norm theory (Toury, Chesterman, et al.) in particular. One issue already emerging from the data so far is the importance of the distinction between practice-based (largely metaphor-driven) and text-based (analytic, academic) orientations.

Phase Four - Translators' Work 

A comparative study of poems in English and Irish and their Dutch translations (theoretical anchor point - Bakhtin, et al.). The features emerging from this comparison will also be treated in the light of such notions as 'performance' (Briggs, Bauman, et al.) and post-structuralist approaches to text(genres) (Barthes, et al.).

Phase Five - Rhyming Views and Work? 

A contrastive analysis of interview data and translation features. The discussion at this phase will be conducted in the light of issues already emerging from the data (the translator's perspective) that can be grouped tentatively under the following headings: 

  • Versions of culture (including ideological considerations informing perceptions of cultural and social differences); 
  • Perceptions of literary and other text genres; 
  • Ideologies of language (varieties).

Final Phase - Findings 

Contribution of such empirical studies to translation theory and practice.

Name: Jane Freeland 

Institution: Visiting Research Fellow, University of Southampton 

Email: jane@freelanj.demon.co.uk

I am now a Visiting Research Fellow at Southampton University, having taken early retirement from the University of Portsmouth, where I taught Spanish Language, Sociolinguistics and Translation Theory and Practice on the Spanish and Latin American Studies degrees. I have researched and written extensively on the development of linguistic rights in the multilingual region of Nicaragua's Caribbean Coast, both during and after the Sandinista revolution. Since this research involves interviews in other languages than English I am particularly exercised by the problems of representing the resulting data in academic journal articles in English, and for the informants also to read. I attended the Second Linguistic Ethnography Research Seminar and was one of those promoting translation and representation as a subject for this one.

I am currently co-editing with Donna Patrick, Brock University, a book, Language rights and language survival, to appear this year (2003) with St. Jerome Press, based on the colloquium of that title we organised at Sociolinguistics Symposium 14 in Ghent. It aims to provide a constructive critique of the discourse of linguistic rights and its implementation in real situations.

Name: Julia Gillen 

Institution: Faculty of Education and Language Studies, The Open University

 Email: j.gillen@open.ac.uk

My main research interest is the language of novice users of technologies. This falls into three main clusters of study. The area that I have investigated most is young children's telephone discourse. I've also done some work in other areas I'm keen to extend further: children's cooperative interactions, including but not limited to language, involving computers; and novice adult writing in asynchronous electronic conferencing. These fields of exploration involve me in engaging with related theoretical and empirical study across a number of disciplines.

Study of child language (development) is, I believe, a particularly fascinating nexus of interdisciplinary work at present with influences from sociocultural and semiotic perspectives among others. Although psycholinguistic approaches continue to contribute an unparalleled amount to the study of young children's language, I tend to engage above all with studies of spontaneous discourse, where diverse approaches to notions of 'context' are crucial to appreciating dynamic aspects of the situation. Interpretive approaches are challenging and at present are being informed by social theory and many developments in discourse analysis including Critical Discourse Analysis, Conversation Analysis and others. The term 'linguistic ethnography' is for me at present a term that encapsulates what I aspire to rather than anything I've yet achieved.

Current Publications

'The emergence of early childhood literacy' in Hall, N., Larson, J and Marsh, J. (eds) The Handbook of Early Childhood Literacy. Thousand Oaks, CA/London: Sage Publications, (forthcoming; written with Nigel Hall). 

'Engaged from birth: children under two talking on telephones' in A. Schorr, B. Campbell & M. Schenk (eds) Communication Research and Media Science in Europe. Berlin: DeGruyter (2003).

'Methodological issues involved in studying children's interactions with ICT' in K.S. Miller and P. Thompson (eds) Unity and Diversity in Language Use: selected papers from the Annual Meeting of the British Association for Applied Linguistics held at the University of Reading, September 2001. London: Continuum in association with BAAL. (2002)

Moves in the territory of literacy? - the telephone discourse of three- and four-year-olds. Journal of Early Childhood Literacy 2 (1) 21-43. (2002)

I'm also working towards journal submission of a conference paper: Utilising WebCT in the enhancement of EdD education programmes: the Manchester Metropolitan University story. Part of a group symposium: Exploring potentials - internet-based course tools and the development of reflective practitioners, held at the 23rd Annual Ethnography in Education Research Forum 'Dialogue Across Time, Space and Perspective', University of Pennsylvania, March 1st-2nd, 2002.

Name: Rachel Heath 

Institution: National Audit Office Researcher, Cardiff 

Email: Rachel.Heath@nao.gsi.gov.uk

Research Interests 

Education policy and practice in Wales, post-16 pathways, language-in-education, teaching through the medium of Welsh, language planning and policies.

Current Research 

My current research work involves investigating the Welsh Assembly Government and other public sponsored bodies. Within this, I specialise in studies on education.

Previous Research

My ESRC sponsored doctoral project entitled Language, Culture and Markets in Further Education in particular focused on the role of language and culture within post-16 choice. Whilst existing research knowledge has shown that biographical determinants including school attainment, social class, gender and ethnicity shape choices, this PhD project uncovered the shaping role that language played in terms of language background and ability.

Language also steered student pathways in more subtle ways. The research project revealed the multiple Welsh identities among students, teachers and parents in Welsh-speaking schools in Wales and describes the ways in which these identities were inter-woven with biographical factors to steer student pathways. Moreover, the findings highlighted the shaping role that the school, as a social system, played in "creating Wales" and a particular Welsh identity. Students' identification with either the school cultures or student cub-cultures steered their choice of courses, subjects and destinations post-16.

Methodological Experiences and Interests

As a fluent Welsh speaker, I conduct my research bilingually - in Welsh and English. I have found many benefits to working with participants in their first and preferred language, including building a rapport and as a result collecting richer data. Subtle and shared meanings are also conveyed and by analysing transcripts in the language used at interview, then the complex meanings and cultural nuances sometimes lost during translation are captured.

There are also challenges. There is more than double the workload and costs. A heightened awareness of meanings and identities is required of the social scientist when analysing bilingually. There are also difficulties with recruiting transcribers and translators and whether they appreciate the confidentiality and sensitivity of the data.

'Making the familiar strange' was even more important for me when researching through Welsh. Reflection on- and in-action were crucial to consider during analysis. My research journal highlights how my field roles, representation and identities potentially impact on my research findings and the language medium of working has also shaped the data.

Name: Rachel Hodge 

Institution: Lancaster Literacy Research Centre, Lancaster University 

Email: r.hodge@lancaster.ac.uk

Rachel Hodge is currently a Research Associate of the Lancaster Literacy Research Centre. Her broad research interests are related to ethnographic studies of social uses of language and literacy, particularly in multilingual settings. She is currently working on the 'Adult Learners' Lives' (ALL) project for the National Research and Development Centre in Adult Literacy and Numeracy, initially carrying out a case study with students seeking asylum and refugee status learning English at Blackburn College. Issues of interpretation and translation are central to this work. From a strong practitioner ESOL background herself, she is committed to strengthening the links between research and practice and is at present involved in developing a 'Teacher-Researcher' programme as part of the ALL project. She has recently been Project Advisor with Community Literacy Project Nepal (DfID funded) supporting participatory/ethnographic research and programmes related to social uses of literacy.

Name: Moira Inghilleri 

Institution: Goldsmith's College, University of London 

Email: m.inghilleri@gold.ac.uk

My current research is in the area of interpreting/translation theory and practice.

I currently hold an ESRC grant for a project entitled, 'Translation, interpretation and asylum adjudication'. The research focuses on explicit normative practices of interpreting in political asylum interviews and appeal hearings and the implicit understandings about language and acts of translation that are involved. It explores the potential impact of such understandings on the construction of the interpreter's role within the asylum process and ultimately, on the representation of meanings that an asylum applicant wishes to convey. Interviews have been conducted with a wide range of participants, and observations are taking place of formal interpreter training programmes where some, though not all, interpreters may receive some initial training, and of formal asylum interviews and appeal hearings.

The research analyses the ways in which the protocols of interpreting are framed by institutionally organised judicial bodies as well as training expectations and practices. How far the norms and expectations of the courts influence the professional practice norms of the interpreting and interpreter training, and the ways in which these may influence the establishment of the 'credibility' of individual asylum applicants constitute the main focus of the research.

Relevant Publications

(In press) 'Habitus, field and discourse: interpreting as a socially situated activity', Target: International Journal of Translation Studies.

(In press) 'Aligning Macro and Micro Dimensions in Interpreting Research', in C. Schaeffner (ed.) Translation and Interpreting Research, Multilingual Matters.

(2001) 'Britton and Bernstein on Vygotsky: Divergent views on mind and language in the pedagogic context', Pedagogy, Culture and Society. Vol. 10, No. 3, 471-486.

(2000) 'Intersubjectivity: the holy grail of mutual understanding?', Language and Communication, 20, 133-148.

(1999) 'Cultural and Linguistic Diversity Revisited', in A. Tosi and C. Leung (eds.), Rethinking Language Education, London: CILT, 59-69.

Name: Piotr Kuhiwczak 

Institution: Centre for Translation & Comparative Cultural Studies, University of Warwick 

Email: P.Kuhiwczak@warwick.ac.uk

I am working at the moment on a research project The Holocaust in Translation. The Holocaust was a European phenomenon. English was not the first language of either the victims or the perpetrators, but the study of the Holocaust and the debates about its implications have taken place mainly in English-speaking countries. English is therefore the main medium through which the phenomenon has been represented to the world. As a result, large quantities of primary source material have been translated into English, and many conclusions have been drawn from texts read only in translation. My aim is to investigate how far translation has altered the nature of these primary sources, and how linguistic - and hence cultural - mediation has influenced interpretations of the Holocaust. I concentrate primarily on the oral and written evidence of eyewitnesses, because these eyewitness accounts have been often used by researchers to support or discredit a variety of contradictory interpretations of events. 

The premise of this study is that although translation has been instrumental in making eyewitness accounts available to researchers and the general public, it has created an invisible barrier between the original text and the foreign reader. The complexity of the witness's background (social status, level of assimilation to a non-Jewish environment, social milieu reflected in verbal expressions) has often been erased in translation, and as a result the witnesses are often placed within a false framework of reference. Victor Klemperer's seminal work on the language of Nazi Germany has demonstrated that the study of language use is crucial to our understanding of the social and historical circumstances under which the extermination of the Jews took place. My purpose is to look at a variety of eyewitness accounts, establish their linguistic status, identify the shifts that have occurred in the passage to translation, and demonstrate how linguistic 'losses' have influenced the interpretation of the actual events which the witnesses narrate. This research may help us understand why the exponential increase in Holocaust scholarship of the last two decades has not succeeded in producing any general consensus about the causes, mechanisms and consequences of the events. 

Most recent publication: 'Buried in Translation', The Cambridge Quarterly, vol. 31, issue 3, 2002, pp. 199-211.

Name: Sarah Lawson 

Institution: Centre for Language & Communication Research, Cardiff University

Email: lawsons@cardiff.ac.uk

Having taught for many years in multilingual and multicultural classrooms, I am currently working on a project investigating language and tourism as a global cultural industry, where the focus is particularly on tourist-host interactions, and tourist and host perceptions of these interactions. Recent work has involved fieldwork in West Africa (Senegal and The Gambia), Poland and Mexico. Working in such multilingual contexts has raised many linguistic questions, e.g., issues around conducting interviews in a language which is neither participant's first language; using powerful majority languages to talk to less powerful minority group members; who speaks to whom when mutual intelligibility is an issue - and thus who gets a voice.

Name: Adam Lefstein

Institution: King's College, University of London

Email: adam.lefstein@kcl.ac.uk

I am a doctoral student in Educational Studies at Kings College London. My research explores how teachers interpret and implement the National Literacy Strategy, and how their teaching of reading integrates theoretical, technical and practical knowledge. I hope that this study will shed some light on the general theoretical issues of the scientific-technical rationalization of education and the interaction of method and subjectivity in teaching, and the practical issues of curriculum design and teacher professional development.

Prior to undertaking this course of study, I worked in a comprehensive school reform program in Israel, as a teacher, as a facilitator of teacher professional development, and as director of the program. In this capacity I struggled with a number of practical educational issues, including critical thinking education, pupil-text encounters, teacher professional development, classroom culture and school change. Publications stemming from this work include discussions of the relationship between discipline and instruction in progressivist pedagogy, the role of questioning in learning, and the drive for "community" in schooling. In my spare time, I pursued a postgraduate degree in cultural studies and hermeneutics at Bar Ilan University.

Name: Steve Marshall 

Institution: Institute of Education 

Email: marshallsj@hotmail.com

I am in the fourth year part-time of an MPhil/PhD at the Institute of Education, London. My research focuses on Spanish-speaking Latin Americans who settle and work in Barcelona, where they find themselves negotiating, and interpreting the meanings of, new social practices in new discursive spaces, in which varieties of Spanish and Catalan co-exist and compete. I have found that the present situation in Catalonia challenges many of the traditional macro and micro approaches to sociolinguistics.

I am addressing a number of issues:

  • the effects of modernity and globalisation on language use, 
  • language policies, 
  • norms of language use and codeswitching, 
  • competition/negotiation of discursive space between non-indigenous new migrant speech communities and indigenous linguistic minorities.

I am collecting my data via semi-structured interviews with Spanish-speaking Latin Americans, and ethnographic observation in specific settings. For triangulation, I am also interviewing/observing members of three key groups: Catalan speakers, Iberian Spanish speakers, and new migrants from other speech communities.

I have chosen not to employ a narrow focus on one key site of social and cultural production and reproduction, such as a single school, one family, or a single national group. Instead, I am focusing on linguistic interactions in the daily life paths and routinised actions of individuals. I argue that it is in these spaces that the old, modern and new-modern aspects of life in Spain and Catalonia co-exist and intersect. My focus is on settings/situations where structure and agency (Giddens, 1995) interact, and where indigenous and non-indigenous compete.

Name: Deirdre Martin 

Institution: School of Education, University of Birmingham 

Email: d.m.martin@bham.ac.uk

I have drawn on various methodological approaches and procedures in researching my interest in language diversity and disability. I used an ethnographic approach to explore early development of aspects of English in bilingual children. Through a quasi-experimental approach I have studied aspects of identification of difficulties in the development in languages of bilingual children, and I have drawn on action research to look at intervention practices with bilingual children with reported language and learning disabilities. Through interviewing and self-report I have explored the construction of identity through language of bilingual children, and language practices from a gender perspective. Using corpus linguistic techniques I have examined aspects of language change in the spoken Panjabi of young bilingual children. More recently, I have drawn on the ideas of communities of practices to look at the positioning of bilingual professional assistants in speech and language therapy departments who I have interviewed about their in-situ professional development.

Name: Marilyn Martin-Jones 

Institution: Rinkeby Institute of Multilingual Research, Sweden 

Email: marilyn.martin-jones@rinkeby-multiling.stockholm.se

I have been involved in two types of ethnographic research in multilingual urban settings in Britain:

School and classroom based research (with Mukul Saxena) in the N.W. of England (1989-1992, ESRC Grant X204252001). 

The main aim of this research was to gain insights into the ways in which a local educational policy intervention (i.e. that of providing 'bilingual support' for children's learning in the early years) was being translated into classroom practice, in classrooms where bilingual assistants were working alongside monolingual class teachers. The ethnographic fieldwork included: classroom observation, fieldnotes, interviews and the gathering of texts used, produced and talked about in these classes. The main body of data was a corpus of bilingual classroom talk (Panjabi/Urdu/English) from key teaching/learning events in different areas of the curriculum. (These events were audio & video-recorded over a two-year period in 8 classes.) The data analysis focused on: (1) the nature and purpose of the bilingual talk exchanged between learners and bilingual assistants; (2) the organisational practices and communicative routines of the classes (and the ways in which these were orchestrated by the monolingual class teachers); (3) the ways in which these practices and routines facilitated or constrained the use of the children's home or community language. Classroom discourse analysis (e.g. identifying bilingual routines which emerged in events with particular participant structures) was combined with analysis of the ethnographic and textual material we gathered. Our interpretation and analysis of key events was shared and checked with the bilingual assistants and the class teachers before it was written up.

Ethnographic research (with Arvind Bhatt and David Barton) on multilingual literacy practices in homes, schools and workplaces in the E. Midlands (1989-1992, ESRC grants: R000 23 3833 & R000 22 1534). 

I coordinated two ethnographic projects on multilingual literacy in Leicester 1993-6. These focused on multilingual literacies in the lives of Gujarati speakers in the city. The first project, Multilingual Literacy Practices: Home, Community and School, was based in 12 households where Gujarati was spoken. The main body of data gathered during this project was a corpus of semi-structured interviews (in Gujarati & English). We also observed literacy events, kept fieldnotes, used still photography and gathered literacy materials. Two examples of the ethnographic writing based on this work are: (1) a paper on gender and multilingual literacy (my own contribution to the project); (2) an account (with Arvind Bhatt) of how different literacies entered the lives of the young people in these households (mostly young people of secondary school age or older) and the ways in which these young people drew on these literacies in different domains of their lives. In the second project, Literacies at Work in a Multilingual City, our ethnographic work was extended into local workplaces. The aim of this project was to investigate the language and literacy demands placed on Gujarati-speaking staff appointed to posts in the public sector with a specific brief to use the languages and literacies in their communicative repertoire at work. We focused on: (1) the intertwining of different spoken languages and literacies across the communicative events of their working lives; (2) their positioning as 'mediators' of particular kinds of texts produced in English; (3) the ways in which they responded to this positioning. As in the previous ethnographic work in Leicester, our data included semi-structured interviews, field-notes from observations of literacy events and still photography. We also experimented with the use of literacy diaries and diary-based interviews, as means of capturing daily work routines and, at the same time, bringing the voices of the participants into our account.

Most recent work 

Over the last few years, I have mostly been involved in writing. I have written about issues of theory and method arising from the 7 years of ethnographic work described above. I have also endeavoured to give work on multilingual literacy and classroom-based research in multilingual settings greater visibility by publishing edited collections.

Name: Margaret Obondo

Institution: Rinkeby Institute of Multilingual Research, Sweden

Email: Margaret.obondo@rinkeby-multiling.stockholm.se

Short Biography 

I received my doctorate at the Centre for Research in Bilingualism at Stockholm University in 1996 with a dissertation entitled: From Trilinguals to Bilinguals? A study of the social and linguistic consequences of language shift on a group of urban Luo children in Kenya. The study investigated a group of urban Luo children in Kenya who live in a second language dominant environment and are shifting away from using Dholuo, towards using English and Kiswahili, the national lingua francas. Since 1997, I have worked as Research Fellow at Rinkeby Institute of Multilingual Research in Stockholm. Rinkeby Institute focuses its research on language, literacy and education of linguistic minorities within the Stockholm City.

Research Interest and Recent Work 

My research interest includes language and education in Africa, language and literacy socialisation of bilingual pre-school and school children in immigrant and non-immigrant contexts. Since 1998, I have been the principal investigator in a project: Bridging home-school cultures? An ethnographic study of language and literacy socialisation practices of immigrant children at home and in the pre-school - the case of immigrants from Somalia. The project (financed by the Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation, project no. 1198-0078:01) is a three year ethnographic study of language and literacy socialisation of Somali pre-school children in a multilingual suburb. The ethnographic fieldwork (conducted together with Christina Rodell Olgac and Salada Robleh) focused on three sites: (a) the pre-school context (b) the family context and (c) the wider community context. The main body of data from the three sites include: interview data from different key players in the children socialisation (i.e., parents, teachers the children's families, Swedish and Somali pre-school caregivers), field notes from pre-school classroom observations, audio recordings of caregiver child interactions during different pre-school activities, interview and observation data from the families and audio-recording of mother-child interactions during a literacy event during the family visits. The goal of our data analysis is to highlight the socio-cultural and linguistic context in which the pre-school children are socialised for school and integration in to the Swedish society.

Current and Future Work

Since early this year (2003), I have been focusing on the writing of two volumes; a Swedish and an English volume based our findings from the Somali project presented above.

A) The first volume is in Swedish and it is co-authored by Christina Rodell Olgac (Swedish counterpart) and Salada Robleh (Somali counterpart) who worked with me in the project during the course of the three years. The book's proposed title is Socialisation, lärande och integration-somalier i en svensk diaspora to be published by Språkförskningsinstitut i Rinkeby.

B) The second volume is authored by Margaret in English and the proposed title is Socialisation, Language and Pedagogy of Somali Diaspora in a Swedish Immigrant Suburb. I am in the process of looking for a publisher for this volume.

Name: Ben Rampton 

Institution: King's College, University of London 

Email: ben.rampton@kcl.ac.uk

My research generally works on the Gumperzian premise that as it's a key site for the negotiation of social order, relations and identities, a close look at situated interaction can throw new light on issues of more general social, cultural and educational debate. I have done three periods of intensive fieldwork focusing on urban heteroglossia among adolescents in youth clubs, playgrounds and schools in London and the South Midlands (1984-85, 1987, 1997-98), and most of my fieldwork involves participant-observation, interviews, radio-microphone recording, and playback sessions. My approach is grounded in interactional sociolinguistics and the ethnography of communication, though I have also drawn quite extensively on themes and concepts from cultural studies, anthropology and sociology. Along with Roxy Harris, Constant Leung and Celia Roberts, I am part of the Language and Ethnicities Research Group (previously the Urban Multilingualism RG) at King's, and our stated aims are (a) to develop applied and sociolinguistic frameworks adequate to the analysis of contemporary urban language, learning, literacy and interaction, and (b) to develop modes of intervention within language education policy and practice that are productively tuned to the local realities of urban institutional life.

My own efforts to contribute to this larger programme have been influenced by the ways in which my empirical data on urban heteroglossia resonate with wider debates about late/post-modernity. This coalescence of data and theory throws doubt on the traditional linguistic assumptions that (i) language study should be centrally concerned with systematicity in grammar and coherence in discourse, and (ii) that people learn to talk grammatically and coherently from extensive early experience of living in families and fairly stable local social networks, and it has led to critical engagement with prevailing sociolinguistic perspectives on ethnicity, speech community, intercultural communication, and code-switching. Urban heteroglossia involves a complex dialogue around self/us and the other, but there has been very little sensitivity to this in the massive linguistic literature on second/foreign/additional language learning, and so this has been a second field of engagement. Language education policy and practice constitute a third area, and here I have explored the interface between urban heteroglossia and the teaching of ESL, minority languages, language awareness, and foreign languages. Lastly, I have argued that ongoing epistemic shifts provide applied linguistics with a good opportunity to move beyond SLA+ELT to Hymes' view of a socially constituted linguistics and to a much fuller relationship with interdisciplinary research and intervention elsewhere in the social sciences.

My current research includes a project on Interaction, Media Culture and Adolescents at School (2001-2002; Rampton, Harris and Dover; Spencer Foundation) Representative Publications

Rampton, B. (1995) Crossing: Language and Ethnicity among Adolescents. London: Longman.

Rampton, B. (1997) 'Returning in applied linguistics.' International Journal of Applied Linguistics. 7 (1): 3-25.

Rampton, B. (1998) 'Speech community.' In J. Verschueren, J-O +la, J. Blommaert and C. Bulcaen (eds) Handbook of Pragmatics 1998. Amsterdam: John Benjamins

Rampton, B. (1999) 'Sociolinguistics and Cultural Studies: New ethnicities, liminality and interaction.' Social Semiotics. 9 (3): 355-374.

Rampton, B. (1999) 'Deutsch in inner London and the animation of an instructed foreign language.' Journal of Sociolinguistics 3 (4): 480-504.

Rampton, B (2001) 'Critique in interaction.' Critique of Anthropology 21 (1). 2001.

Name: Massimiliano Spotti 

Institution: Goldsmith's College, University of London 

Email: massimilianospotti@hotmail.com

Research Interests 

My research interests fall in the following areas: comparative ethnography of language education in multicultural primary classrooms; linguistic ethnography with particular focus on language legitimisation - during both mother tongue teaching as well as core subject teaching through the medium of the mother tongue; language standardisation and identity development in the multicultural learning environment.

MPhil/PhD Research Proposal: Reality and Ambiguity of Multicultural Education: a European perspective

This thesis is an ethnographic study of the discourse of young, monolingual teachers and of their linguistically and culturally heterogeneous pupils. It investigates the processes of formation and maintenance of socio-cultural identities in six upper junior primary classrooms across three EU State members - the Netherlands, Belgium (Flanderen) and Italy (Gogolin & Kroon: 2000; Pavan & De Gregorio: 1990; Phales et al.: 2002).

This investigation is informed by the works of Alund & Granqwist (1995), Hall (1996), Du Gay et al. (2000) in the field of cultural studies and the work of Harris (1997) in the field of socio-linguistics. It approaches the multicultural classroom as a community of practice (Toohey: 2000) viewing social practices as sources of continuity and of change in the agents identities "inheriting the texture of practice" (Wenger: 1998: p.163). Social practices are understood as "habitualised ways, tied to particular times and places, in which people apply resources (material or symbolic) to act together in the world" (Chouliaraki and Fairclough 1999: 21), while identity is understood as "a sense of self in relation to others" (Weis: 1990, p.1) creative of and created by agents' responses to social forces in the community under investigation.

In this thesis, teachers' discourse is gathered through a series of long open ended interviews (McCracken: 1988) analysed following the approach to socio-culturally rooted discourse analysis (Gee: 1999). Further, data on pupils' cultural and linguistic allegiances are gathered through a language survey (Broeder & Extra: 1999), a 'socio-cultural vitality' questionnaire and a written project, employing as stimulus the all class reading of the picture book 'Kikker is Kikker' (Velthuijs: 1996). By using the picture book's main character as the addressee of their short essays, children report on themselves, their socio-cultural affiliation to a group/s and to a language/s both in and out of the classroom. These responses are then analysed through a grounded theory approach (Hayes: 2000) and the results drawn are presented back to the children in focused group discussions. Finally, classroom observation and audio tapings of teaching events, analysed through the key unit identification approach (Gee & Green: 1998), are used as triangulating evidence of the matching (or lack thereof) among pupils' and teachers' discourse.

Further, the cross-national perspective embraced in this work examines patterns of discourse both within and across the six EU educational sites under investigation. This, in turn, will contribute to enriching the debated issue of whether immigrant minority children and their languages and cultures are a core element in the current process of building a 'European identity' idea (l) (Goddard et al.: 1996; Padoa Schioppa: 2001).

References 

Alund, A. & R. Granqwist (1995). Negotiating Identities - Essays on Immigration and Culture in Present Day Europe. Amsterdam: Rodopi.

Broeder, P. & G. Extra (1999). Language, Ethnicity and Education. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.

Chouliaraki, L. & N. Fairclough (1999). Discourse in late Modernity: rethinking critical discourse analysis. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Du Gay, P., Evans, J. & P. Redman (2000). Identity: a reader. London: Sage/Open University.

Gee, J. & J. Green (1998). 'Discourse Analysis and Social Practice: A Methodological Study.' In Review of Research in Education 23, pp. 119-169.

Gee, J. (1999). An Introduction to Discourse Analysis: Theory and Method. London: Routledge.

Goddard, V., Llobera, J. & C. Shore (1996). The anthropology of Europe: identity and boundaries in conflict. Oxford: Berg.

Gogolin, I. & S. Kroon (2000). Interkulturelle Bildungsforschumg. Munster: Waxman.

Hall, S. (1996). New Ethnicities in Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies. London: Routledge.

Harris, R. (1997). 'Romantic Bilingualism: time for a change?' In Leung, C. & D. Cable (eds.) English as an Additional Language: Changing Perspectives. Watford: NALDIC.

Hayes, N. (2000). Doing Psychological Research. Buckingham: Open University Press.

McCracken, G. (1988). The Long Interview. London: Sage.

Padoa-Schioppa, G. (2001). Europa Forza Gentile. Firenze: Il Mulino.

Pavan - De Gregorio, G. (1990). 'The Italian Case Study in the CPBIN Project.' In Haueis, E. & A. Frohlich (Eds.) Ludwigsburg im Herbst '90: Internationale IMEN-konferenz vom 8 bis 12 Oktober. Ludwisburg: Pedagogische Hocschule: Mimeo.

Phales, K. & M. Swyngedouw (2002). National Identities and the Representation of Citizenship. A comparison of Turks, Moroccan and working-class Belgians in Brussels. Brussels: Center for Interdisciplinary Studies.

Toohey, K. (2000). Learning English at School: Identity, Social Relations and Classroom Practice. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.

Velthuijs, M. (1999). Kikker is Kikker. Amsterdam: Leopold.

Weis, L. (1990). Working Class without work: High school students in a de-industrialising economy. New York: Routledge.

Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning and Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Name: Christopher Stone 

Institution: Centre for Deaf Studies, University of Bristol 

Email: chris.stone@bris.ac.uk

My research examines the language output of Deaf and hearing interpreters working from English into British Sign Language (BSL), specifically when interpreting television news broadcasts. To date, this has been achieved (a) by carrying out semi-structured interviews with Deaf interpreters who interpret television news and (b) by recording the broadcast work of both Deaf and hearing interpreters.

My main interests are exploring the translation style(s) that are idealised and adopted by Deaf interpreters as community members and examining whether these are similar or different. Identifying the role of community membership in the types of pragmatic enrichments and impoverishments that occur between the source and target language by analysing the accounts of Deaf interpreters and the BSL target language of the Deaf (native) and hearing (non-native) interpreters. Also identifying the emergent political acts of reclamation and post-colonial defiance when interpreting mainstream news broadcast for a minority language audience. I am also interested in the translation of written to unwritten languages and how the performance element influences the translation process.

Name: Karin Tusting

Institution: Literacy Research Centre, Lancaster University

Email: k.tusting@lancaster.ac.uk

I am a Research Associate at the Literacy Research Centre, Lancaster University, currently working on a project called Adult Learners' Lives funded by the National Research and Development Centre for Adult Literacy and Numeracy. This is an ethnographic study of adult learners of literacy, numeracy and ESOL looking at the meaning of this learning in the broader contexts of their lives as a whole and relating this back to what happens in the classroom. As part of this project we have been working with ESOL learners where issues of translation, interpretation and representation are already becoming significant.

My research interests more generally lie in looking at people's constructions of meaning and identity through participating in communities of practice; developing ways of studying and understanding the social world in terms of multiple overlapping complex open systems; and analysing the significance of material semiotic representations (including written texts) and activities around these in processes of interaction.

Site created and maintained by Karin Tusting, k.tusting@lancaster.ac.uk.  Last updated 09/01/2007