September 28th, 2007 (ED3025)
"I am not an American girl!" Resisting discourses of patriotism, child innocence, and agency
Karen Wohlwend, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Language Education, Indiana University
This presentation describes an incident from a year-long ethnographic study of children's classroom interaction in which Hanan, a young Arab-American girl in my first grade class, engaged in frequent conflicts with peers over issues of identity that spilled out onto the playground as she struggled against the united front of innocence, patriotism, and peer culture in post-9/11 America. Analysis of her writings, language interactions, and play reveals how Hanan asserted an ethnic identity and resisted interpellation as an American as she coped with ritualized patriotism in the school culture and in the peer culture. Critical discourse analysis problematized democratic teaching practice and explored the tensions between discourses of child agency, innocence, and nationalism in school structures and child-centered teaching.
A Corpus-based Analysis of the ESL Learners' Responses to Political News Articles
Daehyeon Nam, Ph.D. Candidate, Language Education, Indiana University.
Current pilot study explores how the English as a second language users read two English news articles with different political positions. Taiwanese high school students who use English as a second language read news articles through the Critical Web Reader, a comprehensive set of literacy and technology tool designed to guide readers to engage with the web articles.
The responses on the news articles are analyzed with the corpus-based discourse-analytic methods to answer the following questions: (1) "what do Taiwanese ESL users find about the news articles?" and (2) "how do Taiwanese ESL users position themselves in a delicate political situation through their written responses?"
Are Teachers Ready?: Pre-service teacher education in Korea
Mun Woo Lee & Seonmin Huh, Ph.D. Students, Language Education, Indiana University.
Asian 'English fever' did make a significant impact in Korean English education. The seventh national curriculum reform for English education in Korea emphasized developing communicative competence; however, we have to ask whether pre-service teachers are actually ready for the change. This study tries to get a concrete picture of how pre-service teacher education programs reflect the major principles of the new curriculum, and to discuss the new directions for teacher education and curriculum design.