Museums as disseminators of niche knowledge: Universality in accessibility for all

Accessibility has faced several challenges within audiovisual translation Studies and gained great opportunities for its establishment as a methodologically and theoretically well-founded discipline. Initially conceived as a set of services and practices that provides access to audiovisual media content for persons with sensory impairment, today accessibility can be viewed as a concept involving more and more universality thanks to its contribution to the dissemination of audiovisual products on the topic of marginalisation. Against this theoretical backdrop, accessibility is scrutinised from the perspective of aesthetics of migration and minorities within the field of the visual arts in museum settings. These aesthetic narrative forms act as modalities that encourage the diffusion of ‘niche’ knowledge, where processes of translation and interpretation provide access to all knowledge as counter discourse. Within this framework, the ways in which language is used can be considered the beginning of a type of local grammar in English as lingua franca for interlingual translation and subtitling, both of which ensure access to knowledge for all citizens as a human rights principle and regardless of cultural and social differences. Accessibility is thus gaining momentum as an agent for the democratisation and transparency of information against media discourse distortions and oversimplifications

Interculturality in the additional language classroom: unveiling narrated and enacted pedagogic practices

Dissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Centro de Comunicação e Expressão, Programa de Pós-Graduação em Inglês: Estudos Linguísticos e Literários, Florianópolis, 2015.Abstract : A great deal has been discussed and written about the relevance of interculturality in the additional language teaching and learning (Kramsch, 1993; Byram, 2002; Liddicoat and Scarino, 2013). According to Kramsch (1993), the teaching of an additional language, from an intercultural perspective, works as an experience that involves learners in de-constructing their perceptions about the world and the communities where they belong to. In such experience, the learner is interactively involved in practices of meaning making, which results from multiple interpretations of their own and other s cultures. However, despite the wide range of theoretical studies developed so far, there is not much empirical research conducted in real classrooms to investigate how interculturality can be constructed through the interaction between learners, teachers and texts. Therefore, this qualitative study aimed at understanding how three English teachers from a public school in Florianópolis deal with language and culture in the additional language classroom, analysing their perceptions of interculturality throughout their narrated and enacted pedagogic practices. Different data collection procedures were adopted so as to triangulate the data. The corpus of this study is composed of open-ended questionnaires, classes recorded in video, field notes, as well as transcriptions from classroom observations. The findings suggest that although the teachers recognize the relevance of interculturality in their classrooms, many are the difficulties when it comes to the enactment of such perspective. However, despite all the difficulties observed, when intercultural moments were managed to be constructed, the benefits were clearly noticed: students engaged in discussions, they were instigated to participate more, they could relate what was being taught to their realities outside the school, and indeed, this experience fostered them to understand the English class not only as a space of transmission of information about the language or customs of different cultures, but as a context of reflection where they could become more critical as students and citizens of world.Muito se tem falado e escrito sobre a relevância da interculturalidade no ensino e aprendizagem de línguas adicionais (Kramsch, 1993; Byram, 2002; Liddicoat e Scarino, 2013). Segundo Kramsch (1993), o ensino de uma língua adicional, a partir de uma perspectiva intercultural, funciona como uma experiência que envolve os aprendizes na desconstrução de suas percepções sobre o mundo e as comunidades a que pertencem. Nesse tipo de experiência, o aprendiz é interativamente envolvido em práticas de construção de significados, que resultam de múltiplas interpretações de sua própria cultura e da cultura de outros. No entanto, apesar da vasta gama de estudos teóricos desenvolvidos até o momento, há poucas pesquisas empíricas realizadas em salas de aula reais para que se possa investigar como a interculturalidade pode ser construída através da interação entre alunos, professores e textos. Portanto, este estudo qualitativo teve como objetivo compreender como três professores de inglês de uma escola pública em Florianópolis lidam com língua e cultura na sala de aula de língua adicional, buscando analisar suas percepções de interculturalidade ao longo de suas práticas pedagógicas narradas e atuadas. Foram adotados diferentes procedimentos de coleta de dados, a fim de se garantir a triangulação dos dados. O corpus deste estudo é composto de questionários abertos, aulas gravadas em vídeo, notas de campo, assim como transcrições de observações em sala de aula. Os resultados sugerem que, embora os professores reconheçam a importância da interculturalidade para suas aulas, muitas são as dificuldades quando se trata da atuação dentro de tal perspectiva. No entanto, apesar de todas as dificuldades observadas, quando momentos interculturais foram construídos, os benefícios foram claramente notados: os alunos foram envolvidos nas discussões, instigados a participar mais, puderam associar o que estava sendo ensinado com suas realidades fora da escola, e de fato, essa experiência os encorajou a compreender a aula de inglês, não somente como um espaço de transmissão de informações sobre a língua ou os costumes de diferentes povos, mas como um contexto de reflexão, onde eles poderiam se tornar mais críticos como estudantes e cidadãos do mundo

Spectators’ aesthetic experiences of sound and movement in dance performance

In this paper we present a study of spectators’ aesthetic experiences of sound and movement in live dance performance. A multidisciplinary team comprising a choreographer, neuroscientists and qualitative researchers investigated the effects of different sound scores on dance spectators. What would be the impact of auditory stimulation on kinesthetic experience and/or aesthetic appreciation of the dance? What would be the effect of removing music altogether, so that spectators watched dance while hearing only the performers’ breathing and footfalls? We investigated audience experience through qualitative research, using post-performance focus groups, while a separately conducted functional brain imaging (fMRI) study measured the synchrony in brain activity across spectators when they watched dance with sound or breathing only. When audiences watched dance accompanied by music the fMRI data revealed evidence of greater intersubject synchronisation in a brain region consistent with complex auditory processing. The audience research found that some spectators derived pleasure from finding convergences between two complex stimuli (dance and music). The removal of music and the resulting audibility of the performers’ breathing had a significant impact on spectators’ aesthetic experience. The fMRI analysis showed increased synchronisation among observers, suggesting greater influence of the body when interpreting the dance stimuli. The audience research found evidence of similar corporeally focused experience. The paper discusses possible connections between the findings of our different approaches, and considers the implications of this study for interdisciplinary research collaborations between arts and sciences

Critical Literacy and Identities in World Language Education: Telling Reflective Stories of Digital Storytelling

This paper explores a digital storytelling project in world language education conducted as critical literacy (Janks, 1991; 2000). Digital storytelling here entails the analysis and production of short videos (called digital stories) that tell a storyteller\u27s personally significant experience by digitally combining a voice-over, images, and music. In other words, this study theorizes digital storytelling in a world language as pedagogical opportunities to examine the effects of language in use and to transform their relations to language through the production of and reflection on identity text (Cummins et al., 2005). Two areas of guiding questions were: the design process and the range of identity options that the storytelling and its reflection makes possible. This study took a narrative case study of seven students who participated in a digital storytelling project in a low intermediate college Japanese course in the U.S. where the author was the instructor. The two primary data sources are the participants\u27 digital stories and reflective narratives. Additional data sources include instructional materials and the participants\u27 in-process drafts and reflective writings. Two methods of data analysis were used: inductive content analysis for the recurrent themes and discourse positioning analysis for the interactional achievements (Davies & Harré, 1990; Wortham, 2001). The analysis indicated the purpose-driven use of various resources in different stages of digital storytelling, such as different aspects of the sample stories that matched their personal investment in storytelling. Academic literacy in other languages, meta-linguistic awareness, and media awareness also affected their design processes. They reported the use of iconic and symbolic images with different intents and effects respectively. These multimodal resources afforded multi-sensory engagement. The analysis also indicated the participants\u27 positionings of other characters to create identity positions for their old selves in the digital stories. The participants’ shifting relations to the digital storytelling project were observed in their interview tellings as a series of assigned tasks and an owned project revealing the sense of agency. However, participants had different range of positions, suggesting the need to further consider the multiple layers of discourses that participants engaged. This adds to our understanding of shifting identity affordances

Developing a Learning Identity: A Narrative Study of Algerian Women EFL Students

This research aims to understand how English as a foreign language (EFL) learners develop their learning identities. While there has been interest on second language (L2) Self in immigrant contexts, not much has been investigated in EFL contexts. This research is conducted with a group of ten women who are second year bachelor students in Tlemcen University, Algeria. The students’ learning process: their past, and present learning experiences, and their future imagined identity. This research investigates how they have been influenced by their sociocultural backgrounds, and how the social factors contributed to the development of their learning identities, hence how these factors helped them reshape their EFL learning identity. This thesis discusses the key theoretical perspectives on identity through the sociocultural theory. The literature gives a theoretical understanding of narrative, which informs about the key concepts in language learning: identity, agency, investment and imagined identity. A narrative perspective is merged with a broad meaning of experiential learning, scaffolding, and ‘process writing’ to engage the students in a reflective narrative activity. A narrative approach has been used in two ways: (1) the narrative was used as a methodology, within which a narrative model was designed to assist the students to reflect on their learning experiences in the mentioned periods. (2) Students’ written narratives were collected for data analysis. Focus group discussion is employed as a method to further investigate the themes which emerged from the narratives. My original contribution to the methodology is the applicability of process writing with narrative writing. The results of this research provide insights into the social factors which are presented as ‘mentors’ and ‘marks’. My original contribution to the theory is the representation of ‘mentors’ and ‘marks’ as socio-cultural influencing factors which contributed to the emergence of students’ learning agency in their early learning. This means that agency pre-existed in the past learning experiences, and it is expanded on in the present through language learning. Students’ agency is also discussed as a process of continuity and change. These social factors enable them to develop new self-images. The future is discussed in relation to both the past and the present experiences, and it reveals the students’ ability to imagine their future identities when they will become teachers. Experiences of the past have not constrained the students’ agency, but they have created a salient impact which involved multiple social identities: learning identity, religious identity, language identity, and future imagined/teaching identity

Corpus‐based analysis of spoken narratives. Introducing a corpus and a search tool

This paper is concerned with the development of a synchronic corpus containing Serbian spoken narratives and its use for narrative analysis. The corpus (CRONUS – Corpus for the Research On Narratives and their Use in Speech) is optimised to study the structure and use of this discourse genre. First, data sources are presented, followed by corpus creation and access. The semi-spontaneous spoken narratives were orthographically transcribed, and the corpus deeply annotated, with special emphasis on the annotation of narrative sections following Labov’s approach and the annotation of argument structure constructions in the sense of Construction Grammar. Three case studies demonstrate how morphological and constructional annotation can be effective for the exploration of narratives

Youth Bilingualism, Identity And Quechua Language Planning And Policy In The Urban Peruvian Andes

Quechua language education and research has long been relegated to rural areas and elementary schools of the Andes. Nonetheless, current language policy in the southern Peruvian region of Cusco has opened new opportunities for Quechua, a minoritized Indigenous language, to be taught in cities and towns and in high schools. In this sociolinguistic context, this dissertation explores what it means for youth in the contemporary urban Andes to be speakers and learners of Quechua, as well as how youth influence the maintenance of Quechua in contexts of ongoing language shift to Spanish. Through a 20-month long ethnographic and participatory study in Urubamba, a provincial capital of the region of Cusco, and its surrounding areas, I examine youth bilingualism and identity positionings spanning school and out-of- school experiences. Using a sociolinguistic and linguistic anthropological framework, this study contributes to educational research and practice on language planning and policy (LPP) in the Andes and other Indigenous contexts. Throughout the dissertation, I describe youth Quechua language learning trajectories and repertoires, highlighting similarities and differences among three groups of youth: altura, valley and non-Quechua speaker youth. Youth repertoires are heterogeneous and dynamic and their language trajectories are intimately linked to social relationships, identity positionings, racialized trajectories, language ideologies and institutions. Varying access to language learning opportunities, raciolinguistic hierarchies, and ideologies which question and invisibilize youth proficiency and interest in Quechua, as evidenced in school and family practices, are some of the forces which youth at times reproduce, question and above all negotiate on an everyday basis. How youth understand themselves as learners and/or speakers of Quechua is characterized by complexity and ambivalence, grounded in a context of (growing) Quechua LPP activities, symbolic and utilitarian recognition of Quechua, as well as ongoing inequality and discrimination. There are, and will probably continue to be, many painful and deep-seated societal and local forces which work against many of youth’s interests in Quechua language maintenance. Considering youth perspectives reminds us of the importance of continuing to imagine and create better conditions for current and future Indigenous language speakers and learners to pursue their dreams, hopes and aspirations