Journal of Applied Linguistics and Professional Practice

Risks and responsibilities in the workplace

Annelie Ädel — 2022-08-19

This study analyses experiences with and in relation to issues of risk, responsibility and evacuation in workplace settings as discussed in four focus groups in Sweden and Swedish-language Finland. The discussions, and in particular the participants’ positionings in their ‘small stories’, are analysed from two perspectives: that of narratives, and that of interpretive repertoires. The main question under investigation is how employees at different workplaces discursively construe their sense of responsibility in the face of risk and evacuation situations. The findings show that these issues are handled very differently in different workplaces, but at all in accordance with the participants’ implicit responsibility positionings and what we see as the interpretive repertoires (organisational, instinctual, skills-based and informational) they draw on. Whereas previous studies have considered workplaces with high-stakes settings, the present study is set in workplaces where risk is not thematised on a regular basis, making the results applicable not only to workplace scenarios, but to society at large.

Starting a lesson as an interactional accomplishment

Mehmet Ali Icbay — 2022-08-19

This paper provides a detailed description of a lesson beginning in a tenth-grade (ages 15–16) history classroom in a high school in Ankara. The teacher and students in the history class accomplish starting the lesson in approximately two minutes. This is a period that involves a series of interactional practices, and the classroom members’ orientation to these practices makes available for the participants that the lesson beginning is a locally organized and sequentially produced accomplishment. The interactional practices are explored using ethnomethodological and conversation analytic principles as applied to five successive stages of the lesson beginning: (1) the recess period, (2) the teacher’s arrival, (3) the greeting exchange, (4) the teacher’s administrative tasks and (5) the tying signal. The analysis of the interactional practices in the lesson beginning shows that this is the period of establishing and re-establishing the initial two-party classroom order. The findings also demonstrate that the lesson beginning can be viewed as a form of meeting opening. Finally, the discussion on the characteristics of the lesson beginning in the history class suggests that the beginning functions as a transition between the recess and the instruction.

Alternative discourses and their evaluative power in the journalists’ coverage of a public sector workers’ strike in Botswana

Boitshwarelo Rantsudu — 2022-08-19

This paper investigates how the quotation of external voices in hard news reporting can be exploited by journalists for evaluative purposes when the same news source is quoted by different newspapers. While attribution of news content to external news sources affords journalists support in asserting the objectivity of their news reports, it has also been established that the use of attribution can function as an evaluative outlet for journalists. In this paper I examine how two newspapers selectively (de)emphasise contrasting news narratives when they quote the same external news source and report the same event, thus creating alternative discourses in their news coverage. I examine how the journalists’ indirect evaluation of the external news source as either conciliatory or confrontational is reflected in such alternative discourses, using Botswana as a case study. The news reports selected for analysis are parallel news stories from a government-owned newspaper, Daily News, and a privately owned newspaper, Mmegi, and they cover the 2011 nationwide public sector workers’ strike. The findings show that the reporting was somewhat set in implied antagonistic relations between the government and the workers’ unions.

Between professionalism and political engagement in foreign language teaching practice

Claire Kramsch — 2022-08-19

In this paper, I reflect on a project I conducted at University of California Berkeley with four colleagues teaching Chinese, Hebrew, Italian and Japanese who decided to engage their students in some of the political controversies in which the native speakers of these languages are engaged in their respective countries. These four teachers are highly educated, experienced native speakers, and they are all professional non-senate members of the faculty. Following the students’ wishes they focused respectively on the following topics: racism against Asians in the US; the Israeli–Palestinian conflict; immigrant refugees to Italy from Muslim countries; and how to remember Hiroshima. Given the low level of language proficiency of their classes, the teachers’ common professional practice was to elicit and capitalize on their students’ emotional involvement. However, while the teachers engaged the learners emotionally into seeing these conflicts from the native speakers’ perspective, they were hampered by their very professional practice from delving into the complex political meanings of the events discussed. I reflect on the reasons for this seeming lack of translingual activism and what it means for foreign language teaching as professional and political practice.

Encouraging critical and analytical skills in the classroom?

Christian W Chun — 2022-08-19

Political ideology and atonality in language and intercultural education

Fred Dervin — 2022-08-19

Some thoughts on the state we are in

John Gray — 2022-08-19

To the limits of the political in foreign language teaching

David Block — 2022-08-19

The political and the ethical in language teaching

Michael Byram — 2022-08-19

Defining the political in foreign language teaching – A response to the rejoinders

Claire Kramsch — 2022-08-19