Meaning in English

Meaning in English L2 attitudes, choices and pronunciation in Norway Ulrikke Rindal Dissertation for the degree of Philosophiae Doctor Department of Teacher Education and School Research Faculty of Educational Sciences UNIVERSITY OF OSLO 2012 I Acknowledgements This thesis would not exist without the 100 students who patiently shared their English language practices with me. Thank you for allowing me to record you and for telling me about meanings. Thank you to their teachers for generously letting me into your classrooms. I am very grateful to my supervisors. Thank you, Andreas Lund, for guiding me through everything and anything, for your faithful support and endless optimism. Thank you, Unn Røyneland, for academic and personal guidance, and for not letting me forget the Norwegian in the middle of all the English. Thank you, Paul Foulkes, for being so ambitious on my behalf from the very beginning. A big thank you to Andy Maul is also in order, for supervising me without getting credit for it. Thank you to Stanford Linguistics, in particular Penny Eckert, John Rickford and the members of Sociolunch, for hosting me and for taking an interest in my work. Thanks also to Samy Alim’s educational linguistics workshop for discussing and directing my data. Thank you to the Department of Language and Linguistic Science at the University of York for letting me listen and learn, and particularly to Huw Llewelyn-Jones for recording all the stimulus voices. Thank you, Caroline Piercy, for co-authoring one of the articles in this thesis and thereby drastically improving its quantity and quality, as well as the pleasantness of the process. Thank you, Lars Anders Kulbrandstad for conscientious, critical and encouraging mid- and final evaluation. I would like to thank the Department of Teacher Education and School Research for funding and supporting my PhD thesis. I owe much of my research training to the National Graduate School in Education (NATED); many thanks to Track 2 for educational workshops and seminars, and specifically to Nils Otto Steen-Utheim, Toril Aagaard and Kenneth Silseth for post-seminar escapades. I am also grateful to the research groups SPRING, KIS and SISCO for academic and financial support. Thank you to the Text Laboratory at the Faculty of Humanities for developing a corpus for my data. Thank you, Are Burheim and Alex Iori for endless hours of transcribing and coding. With such solid academic and administrative reinforcement, it goes without saying that any weaknesses remain my own. II In addition, some people have to be thanked for just being there: Thank you, Maria Vetleseter Bøe, Fredrik Jensen and Margrethe Naalsund, for our invaluable collaborative avoidance of all things academic during lunch hours. Thank you, Kirsti Engelien, for emotional and nutritious support. Thank you, Inga Staal Jenset, for improving my office. Thank you, friends and family, for elegantly ignoring my rapidly deteriorating social competence. Dear Christian, it is safe to say this thesis would not exist without you, not only because of your endless support and patience, but also because it was, after all, your idea. Ulrikke Rindal, October 2012 III Summary English is the language of international communication, and the status of English is increasingly characterised by speakers who use it as a second or later language (L2). People around the world appropriate and negotiate English into their local environments, which calls for research into new and developing Englishes. In an L2 environment such as Norway, with considerable English language proficiency and domain uses, we might expect an increase in language variation and with it the need to investigate social aspects of language use. This study therefore investigates the socially meaningful use of English among Norwegian adolescents. The thesis reports a sociolinguistic investigation into L2 practices in a Norwegian English language teaching context, and is consequently highly interdisciplinary in nature; the theoretical and methodological framework is a composite of elements from both linguistics and education. Theory and methods are used related to language attitude and language variation research in sociolinguistics, as are frameworks related to the global development of English in applied linguistics. The study uses auditory analysis to investigate the pronunciation of English among Norwegian learners, and explores their language attitudes with an evaluation test combined with speaker commentary. Data from a questionnaire and interviews are used to discuss potential social meanings of L2 choices. The thesis consists of three articles which form its foundation, as well as an extended abstract to create unity and discuss the overall themes and contributions. The analyses show patterned variation in the L2 of Norwegian learners: English accents are socially evaluated by the participants, not only when these accents are spoken by native speakers of English, but also when these are appropriated by peers. The participants’ pronunciation reflects the social reality in which they practice language, showing traces of social evaluations, pragmatic considerations, media influence and language competence. The overall results suggest that Norwegian learners can express local and individual identity through English. This thesis shows that speaking English is a social practice for Norwegian adolescent learners. The acknowledgement of L2 as social has implications for educators concerned with English language teaching, who are encouraged to take social aspects into account when developing curricula and instructional design. IV List of articles Article 1: Rindal, U. (2010). Constructing identity with L2: Pronunciation and attitudes among Norwegian learners of English. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 14(2), 240-261. Article 2: Rindal, U. (forthcoming). Learner attitudes and L2 choices in Norway. Awaiting editor decision for Language Awareness Article 3: Rindal, U., & Piercy, C. (forthcoming). Being ‘neutral’? English pronunciation among Norwegian learners. In press for World Englishes. V Contents Acknowledgements ..................................................................................................................... I Summary .................................................................................................................................. III List of articles ........................................................................................................................... IV Contents ..................................................................................................................................... V 1 INTRODUCTION .............................................................................................................. 1 1.1 General introduction ...................................................................................................... 1 1.2 Approaching social meaning ......................................................................................... 2 1.3 The meaning in language .............................................................................................. 4 1.4 My piece of the puzzle .................................................................................................. 5 1.5 Primary objective and research questions ..................................................................... 6 1.6 A reader’s manual ......................................................................................................... 6 1.7 Outline of the thesis ....................................................................................................... 8 2 SUMMARY OF THE ARTICLES .................................................................................... 9 2.1 Article 1: Constructing identity with L2: Pronunciation and attitudes among Norwegian learners of English .............................................................................................. 9 2.2 Article 2: Learner attitudes and L2 choices in Norway .............................................. 10 2.3 Article 3: Being ‘neutral’? English pronunciation among Norwegian learners ........ 11 3 WHAT IS ENGLISH? ..................................................................................................... 13 3.1 English as a global language ....................................................................................... 13 3.1.1 The circles of English ......................................................................................... 14 3.1.2 World Englishes ................................................................................................. 16 3.1.3 English as a lingua franca ................................................................................... 16 3.2 English language teaching ........................................................................................... 18 3.3 English in Norway ....................................................................................................... 19 3.3.1 English in school ................................................................................................ 20 3.3.2 The status of English .......................................................................................... 22 3.3.3 The sociolinguistic climate of Norway ............................................................... 23 3.4 Variability as a functional design feature of language ................................................ 24 4 CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK ...................................................................................

Load more