Course:ISFC-AppliableDiscourseAnalysis/Students
Students in ISFC - Appliable Discourse Analysis
- Diane Potts
I'm a recent graduate from UBC's Department of Language and Literacy (LLED) with a major in TESL, and currently working as a Sessional Instructor in the department and in the Ritsumeikan Programme, a UBC-Ritsumeikan study abroad program now entering its twentieth year. Although my earlier research had focused more specifically on computer-mediated communication, the thesis was a theorization of knowledge mobilization as a practice of recontextualization, and it drew extensively on Bernstein's sociology of pedagogy and the pedagogic device as well as SFL and Kress/Kress and van Leeuwen's work on the visual. I'm currently involved in a two research projects: a case study exploring development of metalinguistic awareness through bilingual novel studies and the Ritsumeikan writing project.
Research interests: knowledge mobilization, discourse analysis, social semiotics/multimodality/SFL, academic/professional communication, English as an additional/foreign language.
I'm a professor in TESL/applied linguistics at Iowa State University. I work on issues in technology for second language learning and assessment and in particular methods for evaluation of learning activities and assessments (i.e., validation of the latter), particularly for academic English. I would like to be able to use SFL discourse analysis in a validity argument in language assessment. I am also studying French.
- Dejan Ivković
I am a third year doctoral candidate in Education and Linguistics at York University, Toronto. For my doctoral thesis, I look into cyberspace as a locus of language contact by reconceptualizing and extending the current sociolinguistic discussion of the Linguistic Landscape (LL) to the domain of New Media, and conceptualizing the Virtual Linguisti Landscape (VLL) http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~content=a908693135~db=all~order=page. My approach to the VLL is transdisciplinary and includes (socio)linguistics, semiotics and cyberculture studies. My educational background is in linguistics and computer science. In my previous incarnation I worked as a software developer for almost 10 years.
All my research interests are in some respect related to language, linguistics and linguistic diversity: Semiotics and multilingual communication; theory of the multilingual sign (my term is linguistic semiograph); multilingualism and multimodality; language policy and language planning; language attitudes; philosophy of language; political linguistics; translation; language and technology; language constellations and systems theory
- Anna Sahlée
I am teacher – and a student, a first year graduate student. I’m no longer working as a teacher, but my doctoral studies do very much concern that profession and one of my subjects: Swedish as a second language. My main research question is (to learn more about) how and why as many as 20–25 % of the students in Swedish as a second language fail each year (year 9).
In order to specify what I’m doing right now, I would like to allude to (or borrow) the well formed title of a reference I saw on our course page (under “context-based text typology>recreating>stories”), Fries, Peter H:s “How does a story mean what it does? A partial answer”. My work could be described with something like: “How come their stories don’t mean what they are expected to mean? A partial answer”. I’ve elicited texts (expected-to-be stories) from the national test in Swedish and Swedish as a second language, those who don’t meet the expectations (“fail”) and those who are assumed to match the expectations (marked with the highest grade). At the moment I’m studying how the texts unfolds (which also means I’m working on how to best describe this process in my material, making it comparable). Later on I will study their oral performances and reading abilities, this also within the national test. I’m located at the Department of Scandinavian Languages, Uppsala University, Sweden, where all tests are archived.
My research interests are: first and second language learning, language teaching and testing, text analysis, psycholinguistics and of course SFG.
- Esther Tong
I am a third-year part-time doctoral student at the Faculty of Education, The University of Hong Kong. My areas of interest include: bilingualism; teaching English as a second language (TESL); applied and functional linguistics; and multimedia teaching and learning technologies.
Inspired by Dr Mohan who supervised my MA research which examined the relation between ESL learners’ language production of scientific classification discourse in Chinese and in English, I am interested in researching the roles of learners’ bilingual resources (Cantonese and English) in mediating L2 academic discourse in a core marketing course which requires them to prepare a written report (a marketing plan) and an oral presentation of their report in an English-medium post-secondary institution in Hong Kong. I will examine the spoken and written discourses produced by 4-6 project groups in out-of-classroom discussions, the written reports, and the oral presentations of their reports. To supplement the discourse data, I have also collected the course documents (e.g. the course syllabus, teaching plan and assessment descriptions) and interviewed the project groups as well as their lecturers. Hopefully, my study can help to inform content and language teachers a little more about how the semantic processes of a project students need to engage in are realised in Chinese and English discourses at various stages of the project, and subsequently, help them develop more relevant materials and guidelines for aiding ESL students’ learning in content subjects through projects.
In addition to being a student who is struggling with my data analysis, I am also the mom of a 4-year-old little monster and Senior Lecturer of the Hong Kong Community College, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University.