Keynote speakers:
Prof. Dr Ulla Haselstein, Freie Universität Berlin, Germany
Braiding the Strands: Contemporary Indigenous Literature
The present lecture will address contemporary American indigenous fiction, which has moved away from the earlier paradigms of the Native American Renaissance (tribal traditions, "homing in") to focus on Urban Indians, poverty and the dissolution of social bonds. There is a growing sense that contemporary Native American identity is built on a catastrophic history for which the concept of trauma is not sufficient, given the fact of the repetition of war, expropriation, expulsion over centuries.
Dr Sue-Ann Harding, Queen’s University Belfast, UK
Walking, Breathing, Knowing: Insights from Anthropology for Practising Interdisciplinarity
This presentation uses key concepts developed in the work of anthropologist Tim Ingold - lines, knots, pathmaking, wayfaring – to rethink conventional notions of boundaries and ‘in-between’. Drawing also on narrative theory, and with examples from my own collaborative work with scholars beyond my own field of Translation Studies, the paper invites critical reflection on how we forge new paths of interdisciplinary and intercultural knowledge for others to follow.
Prof. Greg Myers, Lancaster University, UK
How Interviewees and Interviewers Shape Stories for Oral History
History as a discipline has traditionally relied on written documents. In the late fifty years, some historians and other social scientists have explored the possibilities of using recorded speech as a basis for understanding events. Studies focused on, for instance, a generation, an occupation, a community, a political movement, an organization, or a scientific discovery have collected interviews that now form a rich and growing archive.
In early guides to oral history, and in some contemporary practice, the interviewer is urged to keep themselves out of the interview. Usually, when the interviewee is quoted, in a study, or a film, or in a display at a museum, we only hear the answer, not the question, so the interviewee seems to be engaged in a monologue. But, as researchers across social science have shown, the research interview is an interaction, not just as a textual source from which topics and comments can be excerpted and abstracted. How interviewees say things can be as important was what they say.
One important aspect of this interaction in many projects is interviewees’ use of stories. In this talk, drawing on my work with Sofia Lampropoulou (English, University of Liverpool), I argue that both interviewee and interviewer frame their stories in ways that make them usable for oral history. In doing this, they bring out tensions within oral history as a research method: between treating responses as factual reports and as constructed stories, between time as habitual or as unrepeatable moments, between interviewer identity as representative character and as individual voice, and between interviewee as the archive of responses and as active listener. Beginnings and ends of stories show how the participants frame potential meanings for this interview. The discussion could be of interest to anyone working on interview data, on everyday conversation, or on story structure.
Dr Olcay Sert, Mälardalen University, Sweden
Breaking the Boundaries, or Redrawing Them?
Multimodal Conversation Analysis in EFL Classroom Interaction Research
The last decade has witnessed the emergence of a new field of inquiry within Applied Linguistics: Conversation Analysis for Second Language Acquisition (CA-for-SLA). Researchers in the field of CA-for-SLA use (multimodal) CA to describe and explore interactional practices in classrooms and in ‘the wild’. Among the languages explored, English has been, by far, the most researched language, especially within the domain of L2 (second/foreign/additional language) Classroom Discourse. Scholars have focused on a variety of interactional and pedagogical phenomena, including the type of questions teachers and students ask, teachers’ instruction giving sequences, and the use of gestures in grammar and vocabulary explanations. Furthermore, mainstream constructs in SLA research have been given a shake-up through the use of multimodal CA, including ‘motivation’ (Burch 2016), ‘willingness to communicate’ (Sert 2015; Evnitskaya and Berger 2017), and ‘noticing’ (Kunitz 2018). Drawing on empirically grounded sequential, micro-analytic, and multimodal research into L2 English (classroom) interaction databases from various European settings, this talk will showcase the ways a multimodal CA approach to L2 English language classroom interaction has broken traditional methodological and conceptual boundaries, while also redrawing these boundaries with CA’s exceptional power in describing social phenomena. Implications for research on English language learning and teaching as well as English language teacher education will be given.
References
Burch, A. R. (2016). Motivation in interaction: A conversation-analytic perspective. Doctoral dissertation, University of Hawai'i at Manoa.
Evnitskaya, N., & Berger, E. (2017). Learners’ multimodal displays of willingness to participate in classroom interaction in the L2 and CLIL contexts. Classroom Discourse, 8(1), 71-94.
Kunitz, S. (2018). Collaborative attention work on gender agreement in Italian as a foreign language. The Modern Language Journal, 102, 64-81.
Sert, O. (2015). Social interaction and L2 classroom discourse. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.