Language(s) in Contact Zones: Negotiating Meanings through Multiple Resources
Friday, February 17, 2017
Section I: [Faculty Talk] Making a Critical Turn Toward the Study of Language-in-Use
Dr. Jessica Nina Lester
Assistant Professor, Inquiry Methodology, Department of Counseling and Educational Psychology
Indiana University School of Education
Lester teaches qualitative research methods courses and also focuses much of her research on the study and development of qualitative methodologies. She situates much of her research within discourse studies and disability studies, with a particular focus on education and mental health contexts.
In this presentation, I begin by offering a general overview of the methodological implications of the linguistic turn. Then, I provide an overview of some of the language-based methodologies that attend to the performativity of language. Finally, I discuss the theoretical reasons for studying language-in-use and highlight the methodological implications of such an orientation.
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Section II: Survey Development Process of Translingual Graduate Writers’ Inventory of Strengths
G Yeon Park
PhD Candidate, Literacy, Culture, & Language Education
Indiana University School of Education
The purpose of this study is to investigate international graduate students’ processes of learning English academic writing in the U.S. by conducting a survey research by employing the newly designed Translingual Graduate Writers’ Inventory of Strengths (TGWIS) survey. The purpose of this study is to develop the TGWIS survey and test its reliability and validity as a tool to determine the positive features and strengths of translingual graduate writers. In line with recent research on academic writing as the social act of an embodied self, this study will emphasize the importance of diversity among multilingual and transnational graduate students and scholarly writers from two perspectives: (1) “translingual practice” (Canagarajah, 2013) of the “embodied self” (Kramsch, 2009) from the “social interactionist perspective” (Canagarajah, 2013); and (2) positive psychology as a theoretical and methodological framework (Nakamura & Csíkszentmihályi, 2002, 2009; Seligman, 2002; Wong, 2006) in the process of developing the survey items with eight principle constructs in the sixth version. The online survey of the first draft of the full survey of the TGWIS (Version 1.) with seven principle constructs was distributed to three groups of expected survey respondents—1) Korean graduate students; 2) international graduate students other than Koreans in the U.S. universities; and 3) American graduate students, who identify themselves as native speakers of English to test the survey result as ANCOVA (Cohen, 1988). Five covariates of age, gender, early English experience, and two graduate degree goals of master and doctorates were considered. The main purpose of this pilot study was to test the reliability of the TGWIS (Version 1.), which I found to be highly reliable (49 items; α = .97). I also wanted to test the validity of the measurement, which was not feasible due to the small number of pilot study participants. By examining the pattern matrix with varimax rotation and eigenvalue 1.3, I found that 28 out of 49 items loaded on the hypothesized factors.
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Section III: A Translingual Practice Approach to Korean Pop Culture
Jae-hyun Im
PhD student, Literacy, Culture, & Language Education
Indiana University School of Education
The increasing transnational and transcultural social interactions in the globalized era have promoted new multimodal meaning-making processes, and K-pop (Korean popular culture) as a ‘D’iscourse (Gee, 1989) has provided a ‘safe house’ (Pratt, 1991) in the contact zones. Until recently, however, K-pop has been less discussed in the literacy field. This study, thus, approaches K-pop in a light of translingual practice (Canagarajah, 2012; 2013) that is interested in how available resources gain meaning through situated socio-cultural interactions. Analyzing four K-pop songs by the framework of ‘negotiation strategies’ (envoicing, recontextualization, interactional, and entextualization) (Canagarajah, 2012), it aimed to make visible the ways K-pop innovatively codemeshes different rhetoric (e.g, Young, 2004) and originally creates new meanings with culturally specific or shared resources. The results showed that K-pop not only employs different characteristics of music genres and languages, but also mixes and matches Korean and foreign cultures in order to maximize their voice.
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30th SLED Symposium Team
- Dr. Martha Nyikos (SLED Faculty Advisor)
- Hajar Al Sultan (Chair)
- Pengtong Qu
- Natalia Ramírez
- Youngjoo Seo
- Suparna Bose
- Weejeong Jeong
- Ebrahim Bamanger
- Amani Gashan
- Chaihui Park
- Ying Luo
