The Department of Literature and the Department of English: Transforming Aspects of ‘English Studies’ in South Africa

Abstract

This article begins with a brief survey of the different manifestations of ‘English studies’ at various South African universities, demonstrating the lack of clarity regarding the roles and responsibilities of the ‘English Department’: should it teach literature in English, or should it teach the English language? Such inconsistency makes the ‘Department of English’ as it currently exists unable to contribute towards the intellectualisaton of African languages (Alexander, 2005) and the transformation of South Africa's universities, particularly with regard to the use of African languages for learning and teaching. The article thus proposes that the ‘Department of English’ and the ‘Department of Eiterature’ should be separated. The former should take its place alongside other language departments and, at English-language universities, be primarily responsible for English language teaching and support (for those students to whom English-medium instruction presents a barrier to learning). The latter should pursue literary studies – not only ‘literatures in English’, but also texts in translation – a pursuit that calls attention to the potential for dialogue between literary texts across linguistic, ethnic, and national divides.     

On ethnomethodology, feminism, and the analysis of categorial reference to gender in talk-in-interaction

This paper sets out an ethnomethodological approach to the study of gender and interaction, and demonstrates how the topic of ‘gender’ can be studied empirically via its categorial reference in talk‐in‐interaction. I begin by charting the history of ethnomethodological accounts and studies of gender, starting with Garfinkel's groundbreaking work and the subsequent ‘doing gender’ project, alongside a more general discussion of feminism's relationship to ethnomethodology. I then consider two related trajectories of research, one in conversation analysis and the other in membership categorization analysis, both of which deal with the explication of gender's relevance to interaction, but in somewhat different ways that raise different problems. Finally, drawing on data from different institutional settings, I show how ‘categorial’ phenomena such as ‘gender’ can be studied as phenomena of sequential organization using the machinery of membership categorization alongside conversation analysis. I suggest that the analysis of members' categories in their sequential environment allows language and gender researchers to see how everyday notions of gender are taken up, reformulated, or resisted, in turns of talk that accomplish conversational action; that is, how categories ‘might be relevant for the doing of some activity’ ( Sacks, 1992 vol. 1: 597).     

Methods Used with a High Ability Group

Teaching for social justice in a standards-driven social studies classroom can be challenging. However, the authors believe that there does not have to be a choice between meeting standards versus meeting the needs of students. Through semistructured interviews with four current social studies practitioners, the authors found similarities in the language the teachers used to describe the role of standards in their classrooms, teachers' perceptions of context as being important to the tension between teaching for social justice and teaching to standards, and the ways that perception impacted how they negotiated that tension. The authors offer social studies teachers an alternate conceptual frame for viewing social justice instruction in terms of methods rather than content.     

The Relevance of Interactional and Institutional Contexts for the Study of Gender Differences: A Demonstrative Case Study

Previous studies of gender differences in language and interaction have made inadequate use of the context of the language behavior being studied. In this paper, I use a single-case method to demonstrate how a conversation analytic approach to the interactional and institutional context of a mediation hearing can be informative in the search for gender differences. In the mediation hearing studied, an apparent gender difference in the mediator's address of disputants is first identified and then shown to disappear when the interactional and institutional context of the utterances are taken into account.     

Developing a Vision for the Common Core Classroom: What Does Elementary Social Studies Look Like?

In each edition of their book Doing History: Investigating with Children in Elementary and Middle Schools, Levstik and Barton (2011) encourage us to take a mental journey to imagine classrooms where students regularly “do history” (xi). The social studies experiences that many educators envision for elementary classrooms include teaching students to frame questions, read for information, and organize primary and secondary sources to share their knowledge with classmates. NCSS provides an infrastructure for social studies goals in which knowledge, skills and attitudes are developed in meaningful social studies lessons. When viewed through the lens of the Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts & Literacy in History/Social Studies, Science, and Technical Subjects (CCSS ELA), we recognize the fundamental nature of aligning social studies standards with literacy strategies for elementary teaching and learning. The purpose of this article is to examine the usefulness of CCSS ELA for teaching elementary social studies. The authors share a vision for the “common core classroom” that includes a range of literacy strategies for teaching standards-based social studies.     

Calling forth disability in the classroom

Disability theory discusses the interplay between impairment and disability as though they can be identified separately. More recently, scholars in the field have sought to move beyond the dichotomy to an interactional model. This article uses evidence from a longitudinal ethnographic case study to demonstrate how notions of interaction and relation need to be understood within context. Socio-cultural theory makes explicit a situated understanding of participation and experience and demonstrates how classroom environments ‘call forth’ disability. Findings reveal how classrooms as educational contexts mediate the experience of a student with a learning impairment. The evidence shows how a classroom draws on the wider regimes of competence at the institutional level to create particular experiences for students. The challenge for teachers and other support staff in schools is to reflect on and influence the dynamic of impairment/disability within their classroom and school context in order to support appropriate participation and learning.     

Orchestrating a Text Mediational View of Vygotsky in a College Classroom

Instruction can create zones of proximal development. One's interpretation of Vygotsky's ideas, however, would drive qualitatively different instructional strategies. A text mediational view (Wertsch & Bivens, 1992) supports the classroom as a place where the teacher orchestrates joint activities which promote dialogic texts, allowing students to use language as thinking devices to make connections between what they already know and new concepts. This study describes the author' s role in setting up such joint activities during the first few weeks of a year-long education class. An analysis of this video-taped course revealed two patterns in which the dialogic texts took place. The first pattern called 'shared knowledge scaffolding' involved individual student writing and small group discussion about what students already knew about the topic. Sharing similarities and differences in a whole class discussion, the students and teacher developed publicly shared composite theories regarding the topic. These early theories served as initial reference points as students looked for connections to new information generated during on going class activities. This pattern eventually disappeared as the semester progressed, but the resultant expanded knowledge base became "old" or "anchored" knowledge, which students could now use as mental hooks as they engaged in increasingly sophisticated activities involving application of course concepts in new contexts. The author argues that these two patterns, which underlie the joint activities, provided students with the means to achieve enhanced levels of intersubjectivity, thereby enabling students to increasingly assume responsibility for their learning.     

From Resistance to Involvement: Examining Agency and Control in a Playworld Activity

In the recent sociocultural literature, it is possible to identify at least three ways of understanding the development of individual agency in social practices: (a) through transforming the object of activity and through self-change, (b) through responsible and intentional membership, and (c) through resistance and transformation of the dominant power relations. This article puts these different perspectives in a dialogical relation to each other and examines the development of individual agency in the context of schooling. The problem of promoting student agency is that, although personal sense and motivation are crucial for learning and development, the need for control and order in classrooms often makes it hard for teachers to give space to them. To develop more meaningful educational practices, there is a need for a thorough understanding of the ways through which teachers and students deal with and momentarily overcome this contradiction in their classrooms and are able to enact or promote agency. The article introduces an empirical case study of Anton, a 7-year-old boy's participation in a joint narrative classroom practice. Anton's orientation and interest toward the narrative activity alters drastically during the spring, as does the teachers' understanding and attitude toward him. Moreover, in Anton's participation, all the three different formulations of agency just presented are visible and concurrently “in action.” The article creates conceptual and analytical tools for examining the potential that narrative learning settings provide for supporting children's engagement and development in classrooms.     

Creating safe learning environments: Developing and maintaining class cohesion

This paper reports on an Australian study that was conducted in two distinct phases. Phase One examined the belief systems of 28 experienced language teachers, while Phase Two used the theoretical framework generated by the teachers to document the social evolution of eight intensive English language classes containing adult learners from diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds. Phase One revealed that language teachers place high value on class cohesion, believing that classes that operate as cohesive groups provide safe environments for language learning. Phase Two described a range of individual and collective classroom behaviours and identified a variety of strategies used by teachers in their attempts to develop and maintain class cohesion. The study has implications for pedagogy because it foregrounds the importance of class cohesion and identifies the kinds of classroom behaviours that can enhance the development of cohesiveness in language classes. It also raises the question of the degree to which students do actually feel safe in "safe" learning environments.     

Co‐Present Conversation as “Socialized Trance”: Talk,Involvement Obligations,and Smart‐Phone Disruption

In an era where digital and co‐present involvements become entangled, the role of face‐to‐face conversation now vies with mediated communication. Applying insights provided by Erving Goffman, we explore conversational interaction and consider how engrossing face‐to‐face conversation can be understood as a form of socialized trance. We explore how this interaction represents one type of “involvement obligation” that can become disrupted and, increasingly, uniquely impacted by mediated involvements that are enabled through mobile and “smart” devices. The crux of the argument is considered in the context of a burgeoning digital era where conversation is found to become meshed together in uneven ways with mediated interaction. We highlight the efficacy of Goffman's approach with regards to the current information environment, providing insights into how engrossing conversation and its involvement obligations are impacted by mediated interactions and how breaches of conduct are experienced. A video abstract is available at https://youtu.be/ulL8mMN4oig .     

The Educational Soundscape: Participation and Perception in Japanese High School English Lessons

In this article I discuss the emergence of practices of hearing in the midst of English language learning activities. I focus on listening activities during oral English lessons at two public high schools in Tokyo, Japan. One setting is a liberal arts high school. The other is a technical high school where students are trained in specializations such as industrial chemistry and electrical engineering. The different organization of listening activities in each of the schools has consequences for the different shape, texture, and categorization of what is heard. I show how hearing, therefore, is an act not solely located the moment sound meets the ear of an individual. Rather, it is socially rationed, controlled, and imagined through the joint actions of participants before, during, and after such physiological hearing takes place. This constitutes hearing as a social act, cognitively distributed among participants and over space and time in the classroom.     

以学生为中心的主题教学模式在英语专业精读课堂的应用与分析

通过刻录光盘和问卷调查的方法,对采用“以学生为中心的主题教学模式”的英语专业精读课堂教师引导、学生交互、活动方式等方面进行系统分析。研究结果表明,与以教师为主导的传统教学方法相比,以学生为中心的主题教学模式能更充分调动学习者的主观能动性和创造性,给学习者提供更多的双向交际的机会,营造一个更好的语言习得环境,因而更有利于英语专业学生的语言习得,提高语言综合应用的实践能力。     

Identifying units in interaction: Reactive tokens in Korean and English conversations

Reactive tokens are conversational resources by which a listener co‐constructs a speaker's turn at talk. The resources that are available include the forms of the reactive tokens themselves, their duration, and their placement by the listener in the current speaker's turn. The present paper is a contrastive study of the use of these resources by Americans in English, and by Koreans in their native language and in English, and in it we show the ecological relationship between the resources that a language provides and their use in constructing active listenership. Although previous research on English has found listeners use reactive tokens to pass up the opportunity for a full turn at talk, we show that, in Korean, reactive tokens are often elicited by the current speaker and the listener is obligated to provide them. We present evidence that Korean bilinguals transfer some conversational resources from their native language when they take part in conversation in English.     

Community,Voice, and Inquiry: Teaching Global History for English Language Learners

This in-depth qualitative case study explores how one social studies teacher implemented teaching Global History for Latino/a English Language Learners (ELLs) in an urban newcomer high school. Using a framework for culturally and linguistically relevant citizenship education, this article seeks to highlight how the teacher discussed, designed, enacted, and reflected on their Global History curricula through observing, interviewing, and gathering artifacts in a social studies classroom. Findings reveal that although the teacher faced great pressures and demands of implementing a high stakes, standards-based curriculum, he was able to enact a curriculum that focused on accessing and building upon ELL students' cultural, linguistic, and civic assets and experiences. This article explores the curricular and instructional design implemented by the social studies teacher, and aims to provide readers with an example of and insight into how best to meet the needs of ELLs in the social studies classroom. Various examples of social studies teaching strategies and English language learning techniques are discussed, including: experiential learning, writing and revision, inquiry-based learning, discussion, group work, and social studies concept formation.     

The discursive construction of learning in a multiethnic school: perspectives from non‐immigrant students

This paper provides data from individual interviews conducted with 15 and 16 year‐old non‐immigrant students from a highly multiethnic secondary urban school in Barcelona, Spain. In this school, mixed classrooms (immigrant and local) and small linguistically heterogeneous working groups are frequent in the mathematics lessons. The focus is on the non‐immigrant students’ perspectives on the notion of learning. Findings show that these students interpret certain whole‐class and small‐group interactions among local and immigrant students as not constitutive of learning. In particular, I explore some of the meanings associated with the representation of the multiethnic classroom as a conflictive place for learning.     

Interactions among future study abroad students: exploring potential intercultural learning sequences

The study presented in this article aims to explore if and how intercultural learning may take place in students’ class interaction. It is grounded in the assumption that interculturality is not a clear-cut feature inherent to interactions occurring when individuals with presumed different linguistic and cultural/national backgrounds talk to each other, but that interculturality is co-constructed during interaction. In other words, every ‘interdiscourse interaction’ is potentially intercultural. We have assumed this perspective while investigating student–student class interactions that took place in an intercultural education course aimed at enhancing students’ intercultural learning in view of their sojourn abroad. Interactional data were analysed from the perspective of conversation analysis. Then, drawing on the notion of séquence potentiellement acquisitionelle as well as on a constructivist approach to intercultural learning, we conclude that, in interaction with their peers, learners can co-construct ‘potential intercultural learning sequences’ (PILS), which present recognisable interactional and discursive features.     

Foreign students’ attitudes in Portuguese language classrooms: an exploratory study

This exploratory study aims to investigate the attitudes and motivation of four English‐speaking students in two Portuguese public schools towards their Portuguese and English language classes. Our research revealed that that the needs of these students were not met in their Portuguese language classes nor their English language classes. This can be attributed to various factors, including traditional teaching methods and classroom environments that largely ignored the fact that foreign students were sharing the classroom.