The Society of Applied Linguistics and Discourse Studies (SALaDS) presents:

11thAnnual Graduate Symposium

Language, Learning, and Society

March 04, 2016

3:00 pm – 5:00 pm

St Patrick’s Building, Room 303

About SALaDS

The Society for Applied Linguistics and Discourse Studies

(SALaDS) is run by and for graduate students in Carleton

University’s School of Linguistics and Language Studies

(SLaLS) doctoral and masters’ program, Applied Linguistics and

Discourse Studies (ALDS).

Through the ongoing dedicated efforts of volunteers, SALaDS

represents ALDS graduate students in SLaLS graduate committee

meetings, the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Affairs, and

the Graduate Student Association. SALaDS also hosts a series of

events (the annual Symposium as well as various academic and

social events).

Since 2005, SALaDS main-stay event, the Annual Graduate

Symposium, has been a friendly, collegial environment for

students in ALDS to showcase their research. Students typically

present posters on theses/dissertations or term papers that are

either works-in-progress or completed studies. In most cases,

SLaLS faculty have been invited to deliver a keynote talk on an

area of research in their field related to the annual theme.

SALaDS is always seeking interested graduate students in ALDS

to get involved.

E-mail us at salads.carleton@gmail.com!

Follow SALaDS on twitter: @SALaDS_Carleton

Event Schedule

Opening Address

Dr. Randall Gess, Director of SLaLS

3:05 PM – 3:10 PM

Keynote Address with Q&A

Dr. Kristin Snoddon

“Developing a parent ASL curriculum”

(ASL interpreters to translate presentation)

3:10 PM – 3:50 PM

Interactive Poster Session

Featuring over 20 Presenters of Research in

Applied Linguistics and Discourse Studies

3:50 PM – 5:00 PM

Light refreshments will be served

Teachers’ perceptions of the impact of professional development programmes on their classroom practices

Nwara Abdulhamid (PhD Student)

The mixed method study explores the perceived impact of professional development programmes (PDP) on English language teachers in one Canadian context. Data consisted of 12 participants’ responses to questionnaires and interviews. Data analysis included, a constructivist grounded theory approach for the qualitative component and descriptive and inferential statistics were used to test and validate the results of the qualitative component. The results of the study challenge some of the existing literature that argues teachers do not change as a result of their participation in PDP. The study reveals that language teachers perceived PDP to have a meaningful and substantive impact on their current classroom practices, as it enhanced teachers’ understanding of how to implement new ideas and practices, changed their beliefs about teaching and learning, and increased their self-confidence. However, language teachers reported that impediments existed during the implementation of innovative pedagogical approaches. Despite the impediments, findings suggest that a change in teachers’ beliefs about teaching and learning, adjustment and refinement in their classroom practices, and increase in self-confidence may be seen as the by-products of PDP. In addition, the analysis of language teachers’ perceptions of the impact of PDP suggests that PDP may lead to improvements and change in instructional practices, and may be essential for institutional change. The study offers some recommendations on how language teachers can deal with impediments during the implementation of innovative pedagogical approaches.

Sexual harassment mythology in bar discourse: A critical discourse analysis Lisa Armstrong (MA Student)

There has been an abundance of research about workplace sexual harassment in a variety of fields such as Sociology (Uggen & Blackstone, 2004), Organization Studies (Folgerø & Fjeldstad, 1995), and Hospitality Management (Poulston, 2008), but few studies have been focused on the sexual harassment of bartenders by their customers. Those studies that did, have looked at the prevalence of sexual harassment in bars, the possible reasons for that prevalence and, most relevant to the present purposes, the possible reasons as to why bartenders do not perceive themselves to be sexually harassed. However, none of these studies have looked specifically at discourse. From the perspective of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), language simultaneously shapes and is shaped by social practice (Blommaert & Bulcaen, 2000; Fairclough, 1993); as such, it is imperative that linguistic analysis is considered when investigating social problems. This paper—part of a larger project which addresses the issue of the role language plays in serving to naturalize sexually harassing behaviour in the hospitality industry—looks at the lexical choices bartenders make that (might) reinforce sexual harassment myths by using data gathered from the social media website Reddit and from three semi-structured interviews with bartenders and through the analytical framework of CDA. Preliminary findings suggest that bartenders themselves are complicit in normalizing sexual harassment in their workplace, primarily through their discourse. This might explain in part both why sexual harassment is so prevalent in the industry, and why bartenders do not self-identify as targets of sexual harassment.

Closed-captioning and sign language in public broadcasting policy: A critical discourse analysis

Paula Bath (PhD Student)

Canadian broadcasting serves to inform, entertain, and provide a platform for social participation. Researchers are drawing attention to the importance of critical policy analysis to better understand the complexities of social structures, issues, and to instigate social change. Current Canadian broadcasting policy states that 100% of programming must be closed-captioned. There is no policy requiring sign language programming or translation. There are, however, 350,000 Canadians with a signed language as their mother tongue and 2 very active, and culturally distinct, sign language communities in Canada. A number of countries have begun to include sign language in public broadcasting policy, such as the United Kingdom. And, in 2011 Canada’s national broadcasting regulator (CRTC) re-examined their policies and added sign language translation as a best practice for emergency broadcasting. This paper explores the possibilities of a discourse shift occurring in public broadcasting policy in regard to the concept of “access” for deaf and hard of hearing persons in Canada. The data for this study is generated from five policy documents: Canadian broadcasting legislation 1991, UK broadcasting legislation 1996, CRTC accessibility policy, and two policy reports made by French and English closed captioning working groups. Data analysis is informed by a critical discourse analytic approach that uses Fairclough’s recent work as a framework to examine both the social and semiotic aspects of discourse as well as, adopts Fulcher’s ‘policy as struggle’ model to pay particular attention to discursive strategies of struggle over meaning and linguistic indications of a ‘naturalized’ social order.

An ESP and RGS genre analysis of the pre-constructed ESL lesson plan

Susan Chabot, Beth Mekitiak, Stephanie Page (MA Students)

The genre of the ESL Lesson plan has been given very little attention. There has been almost no research dedicated to determining its role in facilitating the professional and pedagogical practices of ESL teachers. This study aims to reveal insights into the pre-constructed lesson plan as it relates the social action of organizing and teaching an ESL lesson. “Pre-constructed” lesson plans are those which are not created by ESL teachers for their own specific classes, but are previously constructed and made available to teachers online or in teacher’s manuals as complete texts. Our analysis includes both a move/step analysis (Swales, 1990) of a small corpus of 6 texts, as well as an RGS analysis (Devitt, Reiff, & Bawarshi, 2004; Miller, 1984) through which we ask current ESL teachers to respond to a questionnaire pertaining to their use of pre-constructed lesson plans in their own teaching practices. Upon our analysis of their responses, it was determined that teachers in our sample did not readily admit to the use of pre-constructed lesson plans, which led to some interesting conclusions concerning the dual nature of the lesson plan as both a pedagogical and workplace genre. These insights demonstrated some of the tensions between workplace and classroom expectations, as well as raising questions about how teachers think about their own teaching. Through our investigation of the problematic nature of this text, major themes are explored such as genre innovation (Tardy, 2015) and the role of genre pedagogy in lesson planning (Devitt, 2009).

Lexical bundles in first- and second-year electrical engineering textbooks

Lin Chen (PhD Student)

Academic writers use lexical bundles to present disciplinary content, organize discourse flow, express stances and engage readers (Cortes, 2004; Hyland, 2008). In my study, I will explore and compare use of lexical bundles in first- and second-year electrical engineering textbooks. I will use the frequency- and distribution-based method (Biber et al., 2004) to identify the lexical bundles and then examine use of the bundles along three dimensions: 1) grammatical structures of the bundles, 2) discourse functions of the bundles, and 3) positions and distribution of the bundles in vocabulary-based discourse units (VBDUs). VBDUs, subtopics coherently contained in a text, are associated with particular communicative purposes (Csomay, 2013). A description and comparison of the use of lexical bundles in first- and second-year electrical engineering textbooks will inform us how the bundles are used differently in the initial two years of the program and thus indicate how knowledge is constructed at different stages of the lower division of the undergraduate program. Integrating the findings of this project with EAP programs can create EAP course materials that will provide L2 learners exposure to lexical bundles in first- and second-year electrical engineering textbooks, increase L2 learners’ awareness of how lexical bundles are used in disciplinary textbooks, and help the learners’ better deal with their reading and writing.

Which one? An analysis of Japanese language textbooks in university settings

Toni Collette (MA Student)

Japanese textbooks are used intensively in university-level classrooms. With the wide range of textbooks available, teachers have many materials to choose from. This paper is an analysis of ten different textbooks and their use in the classroom. The main focus of analysis is grammar, and how grammar points build from one another, seeking to find patterns of which points are taught together. The five stages of Pienemann’s Processability Theory (PT) are the basis of the analysis, focusing on materials development, and whether the textbook’s progression is appropriate to PT. Four Japanese instructors participated in a semi-structured interview concerning their views and opinions on how grammar is presented in the textbooks they have used. Their opinions of the various textbook are also discussed, and implication for instructors are emphasized. The results of the analysis indicate consistency across the textbooks and the instructors’ views and opinions. Discussion of future research possibilities will be mentioned regarding different ways the data can be analyzed and applied to Japanese materials development.

Unpacking the “one size fits all” approach to plagiarism: A rhetorical perspective on defining plagiarism in an academic context

Lindsay Cowley (MA Student)

Over the past 20 years, researchers have investigated how the concept of plagiarism is discursively constructed within academic contexts and what pedagogical challenges result from its multiple interpretations (e.g., Borg, 2009; Howard, 1995). However, the relationship between the discursive construction of plagiarism provided in the institutional academic integrity policy (AIP) and its uptake (Freadman, 2002) by professors remains under-explored. Drawing on rhetorical move/step analysis (Swales, 1990) and rhetorical genre studies (e.g., Bakhtin, 1986; Miller, 1984), my study addresses this research gap by exploring how plagiarism is constructed at multiple levels within a Canadian educational institution. Rhetorical move/step analysis is used to investigate how the concept of plagiarism is rhetorically constructed in the AIP and how it is (re)constructed in course outlines from two disciplines, Education and Life Sciences. The study further investigates how professors from different disciplinary discourse communities (Swales, 1990) take up the institutional definition of plagiarism by either adopting it in its entirety or by adapting it to suit their pedagogical needs. Analysis indicates that the AIP constructs plagiarism as a static binary concept (i.e., plagiarized versus not plagiarized), while professors tend to take up the policy and (re)construct plagiarism on a continuum influenced by many factors. The findings of the study suggest that there is tension between the different constructions of plagiarism, indicating that the “one size” institutional policy does not “fit all”.

Profiling Canada’s postsecondary sign language programs

Nina Doré (PhD Student)

More than thirty Canadian colleges and universities offer courses in American Sign Language (ASL), one of the fastest growing languages for study in North American postsecondary institutions (Modern Language Association, 2015). The rapidity of ASL’s growth has caused concern that its teachers are hired with “loose qualifications” and limited systematic linguistic and pedagogical knowledge (Cooper et al., 2008, p. 79). Research about ASL teachers is overall limited (Kelly, 2001; Quinto-Pozos, 2011) and the author argues that Canadian practitioners are particularly overlooked. Furthermore, in Canada to date there are no regulatory bodies for ASL instruction and teacher education opportunities are limited. The national sign language teachers’ association, the Sign Language Instructors of Canada (SLIC), has expressed doubt that their professional development programme is sufficient to meet teachers’ growing needs. This mixed methods study thus explores the professional wants and needs of Canadian ASL teachers. Fifty-one teachers completed an online English-ASL survey, and eight participated in follow-up interviews. Qualitative coding of interview transcripts supported descriptive and nonparametric statistical analysis of survey results. Findings show that despite teachers having a wealth of experience -over 40% have been teaching ASL for 20 or more years- there is an overwhelming demand for more frequent and more accessible professional development opportunities that are tailored to the Canadian ASL context. Additionally, there is a call for more collaborative professional development opportunities (e.g., mentorship, peer observation) within and between programs. This study will inform SLIC’s development of new and existing professional development programs for ASL instructors in Canada.

Punctuated by stillness: An investigation of gestural silence in undergraduate mathematics lecturing

Chloe Grace Fogarty-Bourget (PhD Student)

First-year mathematics courses are described as “gatekeepers” for students pursuing careers in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) (Tobias, 1990, p. 11). Some scholars have attributed this to the disciplinary ways of teaching and learning undergraduate mathematics (e.g., Gasiewski et al., 2012; Yusof & Tall, 1998), however, there remains little research dedicated to investigating the typified embodied way mathematics is taught in university, referred to as “chalk talk” (Fox & Artemeva, 2011, p. 22). This presentation focuses on the embodied nature of “chalk talk”, specifically instances in lectures that are punctuated by the instructors' hands being at rest (not gesturing), or “gestural silences” (Fogarty-Bourget, 2015; Huckin, 2002). To investigate this phenomenon, a preliminary taxonomy of gestural silences was developed and applied to the "chalk talk" performances of six university mathematics instructors teaching in different universities in North America. The study is informed by Rhetorical Genre Studies (RGS) (e.g., Miller, 1984) which sees genres as typified and recurrent social actions and, thus, allows for "chalk talk" to be interpreted as a genre of teaching university mathematics. Drawing also on gesture theories (e.g., Bavelas, Coates, & Johnson, 2002; Kendon, 2004) and multimodal analysis (Norris, 2011), the study suggests that instructors' hands at rest during "chalk talk" carry a specific communicative meaning (cf. Kendon, 2004) and are, therefore, gestures in themselves. The study has important implications for future research of the role of instructors' gestures in students' engagement, gestural rest positions, and the phenomenon of gestural silence.

(Re)Constructing personhood: Non-human species and the law

Renee Fontenelle (PhD Student)

This presentation investigates the notion of personhood and its discursive re-construction in courts of law where attempts are being made to gain legal personhood status for chimpanzees. The Non-Human Rights Project, an American civil rights organization which aims to achieve legal rights for nonhuman species, has brought three suits to New York courts on behalf of four captive chimpanzees in efforts to change their statuses from things to persons; one case is ongoing and the remaining two were recently concluded. Drawing on these two appellate court judicial decisions, this presentation seeks to understand how language is used to shape and define who gets to be constructed as a legal person and who does not. Social constructionist theory frames this inquiry, and Bakhtinian concepts of intertextuality are employed as constructs relevant to the understanding of judicial writing. Initial findings indicate that while a range of arguments are employed in the denial of personhood, political and social arguments evoking the social contract are prioritized. It is anticipated that findings will demonstrate the social contract argument as constructed along multiple dimensions, as the cornerstone of government, and as central to Western ideals of democracy and freedom - thus suggesting that the admission of chimpanzees to the status of personhood risks these constructs and the ideals upon which they are built. Insights into re-constructions of personhood may provide guidance in addressing new challenges to personhood, such as the genetic challenge posed by stem-cell harvesting and the cognitive challenge posed by artificial intelligence.

A linguistic analysis of Iroquoian place names Rebekah R. Ingram (PhD Student)

According to Warrick (2007), prior to Cartier’s contact with indigenous peoples in 1534, the St. Lawrence River valley and north shore of Lake Ontario were inhabited by an Iroquoian population numbering approximately 60,000 comprised of 50-60 villages. This area was mapped extensively by the major colonial entities ostensibly from the time of the Basque fishery predating Columbus’ voyage throughout the process of colonization; subsequently, the resulting maps included many of the original indigenous place names. Despite this documentation, as of yet these maps have not been used to reconstruct the historical Iroquoian place names within the indigenous languages themselves despite recent progress in the reconstruction of the Iroquoian languages. This paper examines French and English representations of indigenous place names in cartographic discourse and attempts to filter out layers of colonization by exploring the underlying linguistic structure of these names in the source languages. Through the systematic examination of their representations on these maps, several common Iroquoian place-related words and affixes will be isolated and reconstructed in an approximation of the original forms in which they were transmitted to non-indigenous peoples. It will also be demonstrated that 1) these morphemes were recorded with relative accuracy in French due to the overlap in phonemic inventory of the languages, 2) an anglicized reading of the French names is mainly responsible for the present-day pronunciation of these place names, and 3) these factors have led to confusion arising from the similarity between Iroquoian and Algonquian place morphemes (Iroquoian gʌ ̃v. Algonquian ko).

Marketing public education: Ontario's renewed vision for the future of education

Codie Fortin Lalonde (MA Student)

Growing research suggests that the ideologies and culture(s) of industrialism, capitalism, and neoliberalism are often initiators of educational movements and reforms, which may put economic goals above others, such as humanistic goals (Fairclough, 1993; Lemke, 2007; Angus, 2004). There has been more focused research and discourse on the "marketization of public discourse" (Fairclough, 1993; Fairclough & Fairclough, 2012) and the adoption of business models with regard to higher education. However, there has yet to be much explicit discourse in the Canadian context about the infiltration of marketization and adoption of business models into secondary and elementary schools. In response, I am employing Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) as a framework to analyse the Ontario Ministry of Education’s (OME), 2014 publication entitled, Achieving Excellence: A renewed vision for education in Ontario (hereafter referred to as Achieving Excellence). In this publically-available text, the OME discusses its successes over the past decade and presents its renewed goals for the future of public education in Ontario, which includes raising expectations for educational staff, students, and parents as well as enthusiastic facilitation of entrepreneurial innovation. My preliminary findings suggest that Achieving Excellence discursively constructs a re-articulation of a hegemonic neoliberal ideology which connects good citizenship with post-school employment in in-demand job and career paths. Findings may suggest that the marketization of higher education has trickled down into secondary and elementary school systems.

Enbridge and “Gateway Facts”: A case-study of corporate environmental communication

Alicia Massie (MA Student)

While researchers have begun to pay attention to the role of discourse in environmental issues (Sikka, 2012; Aerts & Cormier, 2009; Lischinsky, 2015), there remains a need for the critical examination of how corporate actors employ discursive strategies to manage their environmental legitimacy. Widely studied in other disciplines such as political science, philosophy and law, legitimation is a necessary field of inquiry for critical discourse studies as it is through this discursive practice that corporations employ ideological arguments to influence and manipulate public knowledge and opinion (van Dijk, 1998; Breeze, 2012). This study is a qualitative critical discourse analysis (Wodak & Meyer, 2009) of the oil corporation Enbridge’s “Gateway Facts” website – a public online discourse created to offer information to the public regarding their new Northern Gateway Pipeline (NGP) project proposed in western Canada. A controversial project among the Canadian public due to its potentially devastating environmental impacts, Enbridge, like other oil corporations worldwide, has been forced to devote large amounts of time and energy to justify and promote this pipeline. This paper argues that a close analysis of the website’s discursive strategies reveals the appropriation of three discursive themes to promote, justify and legitimate the NGP: scientific expertise, financial solidity and environmental concern. These findings suggest that this type of corporate legitimation may be a reflection of the broader ideology of late capitalism’s struggle to justify controversial practices at a time when environmental protection is a priority and ecological disasters have a huge media impact.

Effect of collaborative learning on English as Second Language (ESL) students’ vocabulary development

Muftah Mohamed (PhD Student)

ESL students face problems in learning new vocabulary items. Some studies revealed that collaborative learning and reading comprehension are effective teaching methods that could be used to help ESL students to learn new vocabulary items. While some of these studies revealed that collaborative learning is far superior to reading comprehension (Shafaei & Abdul Rahim, 2015), other studies revealed opposite results (AlKialbi, 2015). Few studies investigated and compared the effect of the two teaching methods. Through the lenses of sociocultural theory, this pilot study investigates and compares the effect of the two methods by using a mixed model approach. 12 ESL students participated in a quasi-experimental study by forming two groups (experimental group and control group). While the experimental group (collaborative learning) performed their tasks in pairs; the control group (reading comprehension) performed their tasks individually. Both groups sat for pre-test, immediate post-test and a delayed post-test. Preliminary SPSS analysis revealed that the collaborative learning group participants achieved higher vocabulary recall and retention rates than the reading comprehension participants.

Pilot-air traffic controller interactions and intercultural communicative competence: An issue for non-native speakers alone?

Ana Lúcia Tavares Monteiro (PhD Student)

This study focuses on a practical language-related issue in the context of intercultural radiotelephony communications in aviation. Aircraft accidents that happened due to the effect of cultural differences in aviation have been investigated (Helmreich, 1994; Merrit, 2000), as well as other factors that can lead to misunderstandings between pilots and air traffic controllers (Monteiro, 2012). However, the impact of cultural background on pilots’ and air traffic controllers’ interactions on the radio, using the English language, is still underestimated and a lot of debate still takes place related to the communicative needs of these professionals, both native and non-native speakers of English. This study addresses these concerns by analyzing two communication practices involving international pilots and air traffic controllers, under a Cultural Discourse Analysis approach (Carbaugh, 2007). Based on a theoretical framework which privileges the view of language as action and cooperation, and in light of theories of cross-cultural communications (Gudykunst, 2005), the description, interpretation, comparison, and evaluation of data uncovers specific features of air-ground communications that are affected by cultural differences. Finally, it proposes an intercultural communicative competence model for both native and non-native speakers involved in radiotelephony communications and discusses some implications for teaching and assessment, aiming to benefit the aviation industry and society as a whole.

Genre analysis of online forum posts written by an undergraduate professor

Rebecca Morse, Melissa Caputo, Nicole Jacobson (MA students)

Over the last decade, online teaching has increasingly become popular for students wanting to receive a degree from a distance or on their own schedule. While there has been significant research done regarding student writing in the online context, there is relatively little that examines the writing done by teachers of these classes. This study analyses the writing done by an undergraduate professor within the context of an online undergraduate course. In order to determine whether or not instructor writing constituted a genre, a corpus consisting of six forum posts was collected and analyzed using a Move/Step approach. Following this analysis, an interview with the course instructor was conducted in an attempt to identify the social purpose for which the posts were written. The results indicate that the online forum posts do follow a set structure and share a set of communicative purposes, which are to convey knowledge and facilitate communication between students and the instructor. While further research is required, similar studies could assist in the creation of online courses and provide resources to teachers with regards to facilitating online communication with students.

Willingness to communicate and L2 speech fluency: An investigation of cognitive dynamics

Shahin Nematizadeh (PhD Student)

Theory of Complex Dynamic Systems (CDST) has not been around for long but has engendered a growing series of studies concentrated on dynamicity of systems across a myriad of fields including education and psychology. This theory argues that systems possess a dynamic nature, that is, they are characterized by their nonlinearity and are subject to perpetual change. Founded on the basis of CDST, this multidisciplinary study is designed to investigate the cognitive fluctuations of second language learners’ willingness to communicate (WTC), or an individual’s readiness to engage in communication when an opportunity arises (MacIntyre, 2012), and the degree to which they influence the temporal measures of speech fluency, including speech rate, length of fluent runs, and number/length of pauses. Employing a mixed-methods design, the present study adopts an innovative method to capture moment-by-moment cognitive nuances of WTC self-reported by the participants, exploring the impacts these may exert on the quality of speech fluency. The findings of this ongoing project represent a range of remarkable insights into the dynamic layers of cognition collected through individuals’ stance, offering certain implications for second language teachers, curriculum developers, and speaking assessors.

Notes

Notes

Notes

Organizing Committee

Matthew Falconer

Christina (Nina) Doré

Patricia (Dawn) Severenuk

Codie Fortin Lalonde

Chloë Grace Fogarty-Bourget

Thank you

Randall Gess, Kristin Snoddon,

and all the poster presenters!

Special thanks to our behind-the-scenes support

Joan Grant, Connie Wall, Mike Barker, Natasha

Artemeva (Abstract Workshop), Misty Saikaley & Clare

Gallant (ASL interpreters), and David Wood

We would like to acknowledge and thank our

sponsors

The School of Linguistics and Language Studies

The Graduate Student Association

Thank you for attending the 11th Symposium!