Building rapport and a sense of communal identity through play in a second language classroom

Many teachers would recognize that a certain amount of laughter and play in a classroom is one of the signs of a socially cohesive and contented group of learners. However, on the face of it, language play in a multinational second language classroom would seem to be highly constrained by an apparent lack of common cultural reference points and, at the lower end of the proficiency spectrum, by the linguistic abilities of the learners. This paper features an investigation into language play consisting of a teacher and two low-proficiency adult learners from different professional fields and nationalities, enrolled on an intensive Business English course. The analysis is informed by Goffman’s concept of frame, by Bakhtin’s ideas about the heteroglossic and dialogical nature of language, and by Bauman and Briggs’s notion of recontextualization. It shows how the learners build a common pool of prior talk and reference points, alluding to them humorously. The data consists of a series of short episodes which together trace the development of one such shared reference point. Over two days, the learners transform an incident which highlights their shortcomings in the language into a celebratory resource that they playfully use to build rapport and to help in the construction of a shared sense of identity and culture. I argue in this paper that the language play found in the featured data is very similar in kind to that in native speaker interactions

Book Review: LGBT Families

LGBT Families, by Nancy J. Mezey. Los Angeles, CA: Sage, 2015. 213 pp., $31.98 (paperback)

Table of Contents and Editorial Remarks

Cover, Title Page, Table of Contents, Dedication: In Memory of Nancy Johnson , and Editorial Re(Mark)!: The Question of Voices by Jan Jagodzinski

Constitutivism

A brief explanation and overview of constitutivism

Sense, existence and justice, or, how to live in a secular world?

It has been taken for granted that in western modernity we are dealing with a secularised world, an atheistic world where religion is no longer reigning the public sphere. In other words: a world where sense lies outside the world towards a world where sense is situated within it. If we follow the line of thought French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy sets out in his books The Sense of the World and Dis-closure, we have to think world not as what has its sense within itself, but as what is sense itself. To live in a secular world, means to live in a world which is sense, a world that has become responsible for itself but never closes in itself. Nancy, thereby inspired by Martin Heidegger, claims that in a secularised world it is no longer a question of whether the world has sense, but that the world is sense. If we want to be atheists today, Nancy concludes, we no longer have to do with the question, “why is there something in general?” but with the answer, “there is something, and that alone makes sense

Sonnets

Poems include: The Runner by Nancy Hendricks and The Modern Atlas by Ina Marshall

The local agricultural community exchange: outcomes and lessons learned from a public-private initiative to revitalize a downtown community

This brief describes a revitalization project in Barre, Vermont, led by a public-private partnership involving the Agricultural Community Exchange, the Central Vermont Community Action Council, and the private businesses that operated out of the storefront. The Nancy Nye Fellowship, through the Carsey Institute at the University of New Hampshire, supported the evaluation of the project from 2007 to 2010. After four years of operation, the market, café, and Gallery closed due to economic hardship. Author Michele Schmidt, the 2008 recipient of the Nancy Nye Fellowship, examines the impact the initiative had on community revitalization and economic development, and she cites the recommendations offered by the staff and vendors

Volume 50 - April 1970

Volume 50 - April 1970. 45 pages including covers and advertisements. POETRY DUCLOS, STEPHEN A SUNDAY IN MARCH BURNET, JAMES AMPLE APPLE McINTYRE, ROBERT (printed by Nancy Clark) BELOVED KOUNTRY CHILDREN FROM JAMES L. McGUIRE ELEMENTARY SCHOOL and SHAW JUNIOR HIGH SCHOOL, CHILDREN\u27S POETRY PARILLO, J.A. CRYSTAL FANTASY KELLY, ROBERT DUCK CLARK, ROY PETER ECOLOGY (to mother earth) MAAIA, WILLIAM GARBAGE MEN MERLUZZO, PAUL IMPROVISATION #34 TO SISERO MOCKAITIS, JOSEPH ON THE OCCASION OF THE HORSE PARTRIDGE, T.L. OUT OF ORDER GOODHUE, JIM RAMBLE MERLUZZO, PAUL URCHIN PAUL, MICHAEL WORK PROSE CHARPENTIER, ROBERT L. THE BOOK OF PEACE BISCONE, DEBBI INK STAINS UPON A SOGGY BLOTTER DiGIOVANNI, NICHOLAS MOBY DICK McDONALD, WAY SAINT CAROLINA ART CLARK, NANCY COVE

Book Review: Hewitt, Nancy A. Women\u27s Activism And Social Change: Rochester, New York, 1822-1872

Scholar Nancy A. Hewitt analyzes the lives of women in antebellum Rochester, New York, focusing how they adapted to a wide variety of changes during a turbulent period in American history