Speakers - Session 3 - 2021

Disclosing the virtus in virtual learning: power shifts in EMI classroom discourse

Some unintended consequences resulting from COVID-19 are likely to evolve over time, such as the intersection of two trends in international higher education (Querol-Julián & Crawford Camiciottoli, 2019): English-Medium Instruction (EMI) and online learning. Italian EMI lecturers, in particular, who were already struggling to cope with language and pedagogical issues, had to adjust to the new media which is characterized by the co-occurrence of different literacy practices (Gee & Hayes, 2011). Surprisingly, this might prove to be a blessing in disguise for the internationalisation of higher education. This experimental study examined the effects of computer-mediated instruction on lecturer-students interaction occurring in synchronous-video lectures in an English-mediated academic course at an Italian university. The preliminary findings of the study draw upon empirical material that consists of 15 teacher-led lectures delivered in both conventional and online settings, with approximately 30 hours of interaction material. Our interests here relate to accounting for how the positioning of the participants in classroom discourse varies across the two learning environments by particularly focusing on turn-taking and linguistic stance. In particular this study illustrates how technology mediated multimodal communication affects power shift between teacher – student interaction as reflected by discourse moves in the EMI classroom. The study investigates classroom discourse from a discursive analytical perspective with a view to measuring and comparing turn-taking and linguistic stance as detectors of lecturer-student power asymmetry shifts. This, in turn, might provide some clues as to whether technology enhances or hinders communication in EMI classrooms. Preliminary findings show that the lecturers who actively use different modes as text chat, whiteboard, audio and video tend to position themselves more as facilitators than leaders in the classroom dialogical space, thus engendering a power shifts which promote students’ engagement and increase “the[ir] responsibility over the learning process” (Viberg & Messina Dahlberg, 2011: 131). Similarly, even lecturers less likely to adapt to the new artifacts available in the online environment seem nonetheless to profit from it, particularly as regards clarity and understandability in oral speech. The findings of this study have implications for designing training programs to enhance lecturers’ communication efficacy in the EMI classroom, crossing the border which separates language and pedagogical competence.

Website of Mariangela Picciuolo

Inclusion of the Tjwao language in the Constitution of Zimbabwe: Tjwa Expectations versus Reality

For decades, the Tjwa people, who are believed to be the first inhabitants of Zimbabwe have experienced, among other injustices, lack of recognition by both colonial and post-colonial governments. The present government only recognised their language, Tjwao, in the Constitution of 2013, Chapter 1, Section 6 (1) which is erroneously captured as Khoisan. The Tjwao is left with less than 3000 members of whom less than 250 are active speakers. Almost ten years after the 2013 Constitution, Tjwao is still threatened with extinction; remain underdeveloped except for limited efforts by independent anthropologists and linguists. This paper discusses Tjwa expectations following their inclusion in the Constitution versus the reality on the ground. Using qualitative methodology, open-ended interviews were administered with two Tjwao linguist activists and twenty (20) Tjwa people in the Tholotsho District of northwestern Zimbabwe where they are located. This was done in order to establish their expectations versus reality of their situation. Data gathered during this study revealed that the Tjwa feel that the recognition they were accorded by the 2013 Constitution was not only erroneous but never implemented. The research participants for the study reported that the Zimbabwean Government did not, in any way, attempted to improve the linguistic situation of the Tjwa people. They expected the constitutional recognition of their language to open avenues and enhance access to education for their children which in turn would improve their livelihoods, inclusion in development issues and access to opportunities. Besides, they expected their language to be rescued from “language shift” which they say are forced into, in order to increase chances of getting menial jobs employment for basic survival needs from the dominant Ndebele people whom they live in contact with in northwestern Zimbabwe. The paper argues there is linguistic exclusion of the Tjwa people in Zimbabwe and concludes that their plight must be seriously considered by the government of Zimbabwe.

Post-monolingual commons

There has been a considerable amount of critical sociolinguistic work identifying the construction, imposition and territorialisation of a standardised national language as a key technology of empire (Phillipson 2010; Schwarz 1997). In this talk, I propose to engage more thoroughly with the ‘people’ element of this so-called ‘one-nation, one-language, one-people’ imaginary, specifically with regards to how that people – and their linguistic expression – come to be racialised in relation to a set of nation-state borders. My argument is not that certain languages are tainted by the moral baggage of a colonial past, nor that language practices and ideologies are shaped by empire and nation alone. Rather, I will suggest that as part of a complex colonial apparatus of language, race and power, the construct of standardised and territorially bounded national languages cannot be fully extricated from ongoing processes of racialisation and colonisation. I will further suggest that this ongoing ‘coloniality of language’ (Veronelli 2015), through which raciolinguistic ideologies of ‘languagelessness’ (Rosa 2016) are inextricable from the colonial construct of national monolingualism (Yildiz 2012), rests upon an understanding of language (and identity and culture more broadly) as property. Through considering James Trafford’s proposal that the ‘foundations of private property lie in ideologies of labour and improvement, providing the means for transforming nature as waste into nature as property’ (2021: 25) from a sociolinguistic perspective, I suggest the alternative of the collaborative meaning-making labour of translation as a move towards a post-monolingual commons.

Website of Eleanor Chapman