Bilingualism and conversational understanding in young children

The purpose of the two experiments reported here was to investigate whether bilingualism confers an advantage on children’s conversational understanding. A total of 163 children aged 3 to 6 years were given a Conversational Violations Test to determine their ability to identify responses to questions as violations of Gricean maxims of conversation (to be informative and avoid redundancy, speak the truth, and be relevant and polite). Though comparatively delayed in their L2 vocabulary, children who were bilingual in Italian and Slovenian (with Slovenian as the dominant language) generally outperformed those who were either monolingual in Italian or Slovenian. We suggest that bilingualism can be accompanied by an enhanced ability to appreciate effective communicative responses

Bilingual Text Production as Task and Resource: Social Interaction in Task Oriented Student Groups

The paper attempts to highlight the bilingual nature of social interaction in task-focused groups taking place in school environments where more than one language is readily available for the purpose of everyday social affairs. Specifically, the following analysis highlights three issues, central for our understanding of bilingual group work. These are: the linguistic organization of task-oriented actions, which will lead us to specify a socially shared division of labor between the two languages the use of code-switching and related bilingual practices in the pursuit of various interactional projects the notion of pedagogic tasks as interactional resources, exploited by the participants for a range of practical purposes (clearly, this issue is not specific for bilingual groups) To illustrate the relevance of these matters, samples of bilingual talk-in-interaction from two different settings will be fleshed out in some detail, combining the task-oriented as well as interpersonal aspects of students’ actions, and treating the issue of language choice (and alternation) as an integral part of their social conduct

Living in several languages: Language, gender and identities

Living in several languages encompasses experiencing and constructing oneself differently in each language. The research study on which this article is based takes an intersectional approach to explore insider accounts of the place of language speaking in individuals’ constructions of self, family relationships and the wider context. Twenty-four research interviews and five published autobiographies were analysed using grounded theory, narrative and discursive analysis. A major finding was that learning a new language inducted individuals into somewhat ‘stereotyped’ gendered discourses and power relations within the new language, while also enabling them to view themselves differently in the context of their first language. This embodied process could be challenging and often required reflection and discursive work to negotiate the dissimilarities, discontinuities and contradictions between languages and cultures. However, the participants generally claimed that their linguistic multiplicity generated creativity. Women and men used their language differences differently to ‘perform their gender’. This was particularly evident in language use within families, which involved gendered differences in the choice of language for parenting – despite the fact that both men and women experience their first languages as conveying intimacy in their relationships with their children. The article argues that the notion of ‘mother tongue’ (rather than ‘first language’) is unhelpful in this process as well as in considering the implications of living in several languages for systemic therapy

Parentification: counselling talk on a helpline for children and young people

This chapter investigates counselling interactions where young clients talk about their experiences of taking on family responsibilities normatively associated with parental roles. In research counselling literature, practices where relationships in families operate so that there is a reversal of roles, with children managing the households and caring for parents and siblings, is described as parentification. Parentification is used in the counselling literature as a clinician/researcher term, which we ‘respecify’ (Garfinkel, 1991) the term by beginning with an investigation of young clients’ own accounts of being an adult or parent and how counsellors orient to these accounts. As well as providing understandings of how young people propose accounts of their experiences of adult-child role reversal, the chapter contributes to understanding how children and young people use the resources of counselling helplines, and how counsellors can communicate effectively with children and young people

Vocabularies of social influence: Managing the moral accountability of influencing another

While there are many definitions and conceptual accounts of ‘persuasion’ and other forms of social influence, social scientists lack empirical insight into how and when people actually use terms like ‘persuade’, ‘convince’, ‘change somebody’s mind’ – what we call the vocabularies of social influence – in actual social interaction. We collected instances of the spontaneous use of these and other social influence terms (such as ‘schmoozing’ and ‘hoodwinking’) in face-to-face and telephone conversations across multiple domestic and institutional settings. The recorded data were transcribed and analysed using discursive psychology and conversation analysis with a focus on the actions accomplished in and through the use of social influence terms. We found that when speakers use ’persuading’ – but not ’convincing’ or ’changing somebody’s mind’ – it is in the service of orienting to the moral accountability of influencing others. The specificity with which social actors deploy these terms demonstrates the continued importance of developing our understandings of the meaning of words – especially psychological ones – via their vernacular use by ordinary people in the first instance, rather than have psychologists reify, operationalize, and build an architecture for social psychology without paying attention to what people actually do with the ‘psychological thesaurus’

Bilingual practices in the process of initiating and resolving lexical problems in students' collaborative writing sessions

This study deals with the sequential organization of language choice and codeswitching between Persian as a first language and Swedish as a second language in the process of initiating and resolving a problem of understanding and producing the correct version of a lexical item. The data consist of detailed transcripts of audio tapings of two bilingual students' collaborative writing sessions within the frame of a one-year master's program in computer science in a multilingual setting at a Swedish university. The students, both Persian- speaking, are advanced speakers of Swedish as a second language. For this article, four lexical language-related episodes, where codeswitching between Persian and Swedish occurs, are analyzed. The analyzed excerpts in this article are drawn from a corpus of data consisting of language-related episodes identified and transcribed in the audio tapings. We employ a conversation analysis (CA) approach for the analysis of bilingual interaction. This means that the meaning of the codeswitching in the interaction is described in terms of both global (the conversational activity at large) and local interactional factors. In the analysis, a close step-by-step analysis of the turn-taking procedures demonstrates how the communicative meaning of the students' bilingual behavior in a lexical episode is determined in its local production in the emerging conversational context and how it can be explicated as part of the following social actions: drawing attention to a problem, seeking alliance when a problem is made explicit and confirming intersubjective understanding when the problem is resolved.</p

'I'm not going to tell you cos you need to think about this': A conversation analysis study of managing advice resistance and supporting autonomy in undergraduate supervision

This is an accepted manuscript of an article published by Springer in Postdigital Science and Education, available online at: https://doi.org/10.1007/s42438-020-00194-5 The accepted version of the publication may differ from the final published version.This article firstly, critically analyses a face-to-face supervision meeting between an undergraduate and a supervisor, exploring how the supervisor handles the twin strategies of fostering autonomy while managing resistance to advice. Conversation Analysis is used as both a theory and a method, with a focus on the use of accounts to support or resist advice. The main contribution is the demonstration of how both the supervisor and student are jointly responsible for the negotiation of advice, which is recycled and calibrated in response to the student’s resistance. The supervisor defuses complaints by normalising them, and moving his student on to practical solutions, often with humour. He lists his student’s achievements as the foundation on which she can assert agency and build the actions he recommends. Supervisor-student relationships are investigated through the lens of the affective dimensions of learning, to explore how caring or empathy may serve to reduce resistance and make advice more palatable. By juxtaposing physically present supervision with digitally-mediated encounters, while acknowledging their mutual entanglement, the postdigital debate is furthered. In the context of Covid-19, and rapid decisions by universities to bring in digital platforms to capture student-teacher interactions, the analysis presented is in itself an act of resistance against the technical control systems of the academy and algorithmic capitalism

Hälsa, vad är det? - En studie av hälsans betydelse i ämnet idrott och hälsa.

Abstract Institution Sociologiska institutionen Lärarprogrammet Författare Lars Åkerström & Mats Cromdal Titel Hälsa, vad är det? - En studie av hälsans betydelse i ämnet idrott och hälsa. Problem, syfte och frågor Syftet med detta arbete är att undersöka idrottslärarnas samt elevernas syn på vad hälsa innebär i ämnet idrott och hälsa. Vi vill ta reda på hur åsikterna fördelades och om lärarnas syn och tanke överensstämde med elevernas. Med undersökningen vill vi även se om resultaten överensstämmer med målen inom läroplanen samt kursplaner. Vi kommer dock i denna undersökning att fokusera på den del av hälsoperspektivet som har med mer teoretiska kunskaper att göra. Material, metod och analyser Denna uppsats bygger på material i form av litteratur om hälsa samt resultat från intervjuer och elevenkäter med fem idrottslärare samt deras 9: e klassare vid tre skolor i Göteborg. Studien redovisas med hjälp av diagram för att på så sätt ge en tydlig bild av resultatet. Resultat och diskussion Undersökningen visar att det finns ett stort intresse för hälsofrågor, både bland lärare och bland elever, men att det råder varierad uppfattning om svaret - vad bör ingå i begreppet hälsa och hur bör det användas i ämnet idrott och hälsa. Lärare bör lägga större vikt vid denna typ av kunskap då dessa med tiden kommer leda till en bättre folkhälsa. Vid flertalet av frågorna i enkätundersökningen ser man tydliga skillnader mellan elevernas och lärarnas svar. Exempelvis var det över 70 % av eleverna som svarade att de kunde tänka sig att få mer kunskap om hur kroppen fungerar när de utför fysisk aktivitet. Trots detta visar det sig att få av eleverna får möjlighet till utbildning inom detta område då lärarna anser att tiden inte räcker till. Nyckelord Hälsa, teori, betyg och bedömnin