1,721,135 research outputs found
Academic networking face-to-face: What it looks like and what it can tell us about research collaboration
Full text linkThis paper draws on the tools of conversation analysis and network theory to investigate how academic networking takes place face-to-face in academic presentations. An analysis of 176 presentations made to interdisciplinary peer audiences by early-career scholars participating in an EU-funded postdoctoral programme reveals five functions of mentioning individual audience members (procedural, deictic anchoring of examples, contextualizing, co-membershipping, ‘fishing’ for research collaboration); it also highlights typical patterns of intertextual chaining. The study documents variation in the use of individual mentions by scholars from different disciplines; it also shows that the order in which scholars present influences the chances of their being mentioned by others. A follow-up questionnaire designed to probe how the patterns identified relate to subsequent collaboration shows that the scholars who mentioned others were more likely to maintain contact and co-author with members of their cohort. Implications of the study for a better understanding of the dynamics of research collaboration and for training for academic practice are discussed.
KEY WORDS: academic presentations, academic publishing, audience mention, research collaboration, co-authoring, conversation analysis, network theory, macro-micro lin
Publishing strategies of young, highly mobile academics : the question of language in the European context
No full textSpecial issue: Participating in academic publishing : consequences of linguistic policies and practicesThis paper examines links between publishing strategies and academic mobility of multilingual entry-level scholars in the European context against the backdrop of European Union (EU) policies and research on academic labor market characteristics, skilled migration and scholarly publishing. An analysis of language of publication, patterns of co-authorship and mode of publication in the publishing records of 157 former fellows from a highly selective EU-supported post-doctoral program in economics, social and political science, history and law, indicates considerable disciplinary variation (e.g. ‘English-only’ co-authoring in economics; substantial multilingual publishing in the other disciplines). On the basis of semi-structured interviews with fellows publishing in from two to four languages, policy forces influencing language choice are identified and three patterns of multilingual publishing linked to projected and actual career trajectories are described. The study provides evidence of the impact of national and EU-level policies and practices on publishing choices during the doctoral and post-doctoral phases, while also highlighting the role of disciplinary identity and related social practices. It also underlines the need to assume a critical perspective on the equation often drawn between English-language publishing and ‘internationality’
Membership categorisation in oral academic discourse: strategies for addressing international, multidisciplinary audiences in English as a lingua franca
No full textThis contribution investigates how disciplinary identities are made relevant in research presentations addressed to a multidisciplinary
audience using English as an academic lingua franca. The analysis is based on a corpus of 176 presentations given by international research fellows
within an EU-funded programme for postdoctoral studies. It draws on Membership Categorisation Analysis (Sacks 1992) and on the notion of
‘altercasting’ (Weinstein and Deutschberger 1963) in order to identify the primary functions of explicit mention of self and of audience members
in conjunction with academic categories. The analysis reveals that selfcategorisation using ‘I’ involves explicit membershipping along the vertical
axis of generalisation/specification and horizontal axis of contrast/cocategorisation (Bilmes 2009). Altercasting of the audience using ‘we’ (to co-categorise the speaker with part or with all of the audience) or ‘you’ (to address the whole audience or a part thereof) serves two main goals: a)
signalling preceding or upcoming talk as addressed to a specific audience segment; b) establishing interdisciplinary ties/networks. Results indicate
that membership categorisation devices contribute to recipient-designing talk for a multidisciplinary audience by invoking both disciplinary
definitions and boundaries and locally relevant “relational pairs” (Sacks 1972b). A systematic use of such devices co-implicates the audience’s
perspectives in what is being said and done, thus conferring an interactive dimension on what may at first glance appear a relatively monologic genre
Code-switching and Coordination in Interpreter-mediated Interaction
No full textThis chapter describes and compares code-switching (CS) by lay participants and institutional representatives in data involving English-speaking migrants from West Africa (Nigeria, Ghana) collected in legal and healthcare settings in Northern Italy. In both settings CS by foreign end-users is found to be relatively common in sequentially ‘reactive’ positions; with the exception of nonce borrowings, lay participants take the initiative in CS more rarely, mainly when pressing personal concerns are at issue. CS by institutional representatives shows a functional sensitivity both to broad institutional aims and to the specific sub-aims of the various phases of the encounter; its greater prevalence in the healthcare setting can, it is argued, be traced to the need to create a collaborative relationship in order to successfully diagnose and treat the patient. Implications of the results for theories of mediated interaction and for the training of community interpreters and court interpreters dealing with migrant populations are discussed
Talking in a threesome: Person deixis and recipient design in conjoint therapeutic discourse
No full textAnalysis of role of person deixis and other aspects of recipient design in triadic interaction based on an audio-recorded corpus of conjoint marital therapy (Playback corpus, collected by David Fanshel, New York City) involving an interracial couple, using concepts of participation framework and recipient design drawing on work by E. Goffman and S. Levinson and tools of conversation analysis
Standards of acceptability in English as an academic lingua franca: Evidence from a corpus of peer-reviewed working papers by international scholars
No full textThis paper probes the issue of standards of acceptability in English as an academic lingua franca (academic ELF) by investigating selected patterns of variation in a corpus of working papers produced by international scholars in a unique multilingual context: the EU-funded European University Institute (Florence, Italy). Analysis of video-recorded oral presentations and participant observation over a one-year period revealed that oral language use in this setting frequently diverges in certain areas of the lexico-grammar and syntax of English from native-speaker norms. Such divergences were rarely commented on as inaccurate, however, by either ‘native’ (NS) or non-native (NNS) members of the Institute. Based on these observations, it was hypothesized that similar 'pluralistic' notions of acceptability (cf. Dewey 2007) may also be operating in the written production of established international scholars.
To investigate this hypothesis, rater evaluation and corpus linguistics techniques were used to investigate lexico-grammatical variability in a corpus of peer-reviewed (but not officially language-edited) working papers published in the same setting (henceforth, WP Corpus: 75 papers; 847,234 words; average length per paper 11,296 words). Five areas frequently mentioned in ELF literature and in which deviation had been identified in at least 25% of a sample of 40 oral presentations were investigated: (1) preposition choice in 'fixed' expressions; (2) word order in reported (indirect) questions; (3) positioning of adverbs; (4) use of definite and indefinite articles; and (5) functional range of the present perfect tense. To investigate rater evaluations (and hence possible ‘gate-keeping’ to which said production would be subject if presented to international English-language journals), three raters representing different geographical varieties of L1 English (US, GB, New Zealand) were asked to identify and classify all segments the first 4 pages of each paper which they considered deviant. Variability was also investigated by using concordance tools (Wordsmith Tools 4, AntConc) in order to compare the WP Corpus with a corpus of research articles in similar disciplines published in peer-reviewed, copy-edited international journals (RA corpus: 1,221 articles, for a total of 12,861,501 words; average length per paper: 10,534 words).
Divergence from NS norms in the WP corpus (at least one divergent form identified by at least two raters in the paper in question) was found to range from a high of 57% for the use of articles to a low of 5% in for embedded questions. Sections 4.1 to 4.5 of the paper present comparative analyses of the WP and RA corpora in order to illustrate and discuss the principal patterns of variability. Among the tendencies identified were shifts in the functional distribution of certain pairs of prepositions between/among; on/over; in/into; under/below, with the former term used more extensively in the WP corpus in certain colligations. Divergences in the WP corpus from ‘NS’ norms were also present in areas in which both descriptive and pedagogical grammars traditionally contemplate some margin for authorial ‘manoeuvre’, such as patterns involving sentence-initial also. Differences in the functional range of the present perfect were also observed (over-extension).
The study contributes to the ELF literature by documenting, for selected areas of the lexico-grammar, ways in which English as an academic lingua franca may be moving towards greater endo-normativity; it also illustrates how data triangulization (combining rater evaluations and corpus linguistics techniques) can provide insights into how variability is assessed by NS language professionals and hence, potentially, into processes of ‘linguistic gatekeeping’ in academic publishing
A scholar’s guide to getting published in English: Critical choices and practical strategies by Mary Jane Curry and Theresa Lillis (Bristol: Multilingual Matters, 2013)
No full textReview of recent book on writing for publishing in international journal written by Theresa Lillis (Open University, UK) and Mary Jane Curry (University of Rochester, US) and entitled A Scholar’s Guide to Getting Published in English: Critical Choices and Practical Strategies (Multilingual Matters, 2013
Gatekeeping and international mobility: Institutional features of interaction in panel selection interviews
No full textThis contribution focuses on the structure of interaction in panel selection intervews related to student participation in higher education international mobility schemes. 24 panel interviews of Italian students interested in participating in Erasmus exchanges in the U.K. were recorded and transcribed; they were then analyzed using conversational analysis techniques. Both the type of assessment required for participation and the collective nature of the assessment procedure were found to influence the structure of interaction. In particular, the presence of more than one examiner was found to contribute to the institutional character of these encounters while at the same time creating opportunities for candidates to display linguistic and/or pragmatic (in)competence in English. Specific sequential patterns allowing the panel to construct itself as an 'institutional collectivity' are also detailed and implications for the study of multiparty interaction in institutional contexts are discussed
Differences between spoken and written language
No full textComprehensive review of work in English on differences between written and spoken discourse from 1980-1990, proposing 4 parameters along which genres belonging to the two modes can be seen to differ
Information management in non-cooperative talk
No full textThis paper contributes to an understanding of the pragmatics of political discourse in conflict situations through an in-depth analysis of selected aspects of reference and meta-reference in two transcripts belonging to a larger corpus of political discussion programmes recorded during the British general elections in 1997. The first interview is with Donald Dewer, at the time Shadow Chief Whip; it focuses on Labour’s proposal for constitutional reform, in particular on the question of devolution (the establishment of parliaments for Scotland and Wales, assemblies for English regions, etc.). The second interview is with Martin McGuinness, spokesman for Sinn Fein, widely regarded as the political wing of the IRA; the interview in question focuses on the conditions needed to achieve a cease-fire in Northern Ireland and to bring the various parties involved in the conflict to the negotiating table. The Dewer interview is representative of the interaction that typically takes place in this talk show context between the audience, moderator and exponents of recognised political forces (members of the Conservative, Labour and Liberal Democrat parties). The McGuinness interview, instead, although taking place within the same setting and thus subject to similar expectations about the norms governing interaction, presents itself as a highly charged instance of “inter-institutional/inter-cultural” talk
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