Event: Language in Context Seminar
Organisers: Language in Context
Contact: linc@ed.ac.uk
Date: 2nd April, 2021
Time: 15:10-16:30
Venue: Zoom (please e-mail linc@ed.ac.uk for joining information)
Speaker: Ali Almuhayya (Linguistics and English Language, University of Edinburgh)
Speaker bio: Ali Almuhayya is a fourth-year PhD student in Linguistics and English Language. He is also a lecturer at Majmaah University, Saudi Arabia. He earned his MA ( in Applied Linguistics) from Southern Illinois University - Carbondale, IL USA in 2015. He was awarded a full scholarship from Majmaah University to pursue an MA and PhD in Linguistics, the latter of which he is undertaking at the University of Edinburgh. His interests include Sociolinguistics, Discourse analysis, Language contact and Language policy.
Title of talk: The medium of interaction in informal written texts: A researcher's perspective
Abstract:
This presentation is about initial results for ongoing research that investigate language choice and code-switching in informal written practices as, so far, little attention has been paid to them. (see Sebba, Mahootian and Johnson, 2012). Data collection are informal notes written in students’ notebooks and complemented by observational data collected in classrooms and interview data obtained from a sample of students.
As two languages, namely English (the declared medium of instruction) and Arabic (students’ ordinary language) are available, two main research questions were addressed: (a) which of these two languages can be seen as the ‘medium’ (Gafaranga, 2007) of these practices? (b) are there any specifiable motivation for deviating from the medium, i.e. for using the other language?
Results reveal that although the majority of written practices were in English, the medium is not this choice. This claim was based on the notion of two categories of speech representations (Leech &Short, (1981). The motivation for deviating to use English found on students’ direct speech while their speech reporting can be in both languages’ choices (Arabic and English).
References:
Garafanga, J. (2007). Code-switching as a conversational strategy. In P. Auer & L. Wei (Eds.), Handbook of multilingualism and multilingual communication (pp. 279–314). New York, NY: Mouton de Gruyter.
Sebba, M., Mahootian, S., & Jonsson, C. (2012). Language Mixing and Code-Switching in Writing: Approaches to Mixed-Language Written Discourse (Routledge Critical Studies in Multilingualism). Taylor and Francis.
Leech, G., Short, M. (1981). Stile in fiction: A linguistic introduction to English fictional prose. London: Longman.