Linguistic Diversity: a Qualitative Analysis of Foreign Language Teachers' Category Assembly
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Linguistic Diversity: A qualitative analysis of foreign language teachers' category assembly Melinda Dooly Owenby TESI DOCTORAL DIRIGIDA PER DRA. LUCI NUSSBAUM DEPARTAMENT DE DIDÀCTICA DE LA LLENGUA, LA LITERATURA I LES CIÈNCIES SOCIALS UNIVERSITAT AUTÒNOMA DE BARCELONA ABRIL 2005 Acknowledgments The list of people to whom I owe infinite gratitude for their help and support during the conception, development and finalizing of this research is much too long to include here. Hopefully each and every one of them are aware of how grateful I am to them. Particular thanks must be given to my family. Their unflagging encouragement and patience have been the basis of my survival during the years spent on this research. Special mention goes to my mother for her infinite patience, emotional and mental support and superior baby-sitting skills. Also I must thank my father for all his time, energy, effort and boundless wit. He has gone far beyond the call of duty, providing me with excellent suggestions and intriguing ideas and challenges. Needless to say, a special thanks must go to Pablo and Joel for all their patience with me. And of course, I owe a special note of thanks to Luci; without her insight, timely comments and criticisms this never would have been written. She has often been responsible for raising new issues and helping to relate theory to practice so that I might clearly see my way to the end of this project. Needless to say, I alone am responsible for errors and omissions which can be found herein. Seek first to understand and then to be understood. Most people do not listen with the intent to understand: they listen with the intent to reply. They’re filtering everything through their own paradigms, reading their autobiography into other people’s lives. -Stephen R. Covey; The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People Two mice sat in their hole watching Cat lurk outside. "I know how to make Cat go away," said the first mouse. "How?" the second mouse asked in surprise. "Watch! Bow, wow!!!" barked the first mouse. Peering through their hole in the wall, they saw Cat running away in fear. "Ah, see the benefit of knowing another language!" -Anonymous (http://www.comedy-zone.net/jokes/laugh/education/student4.htm) Introduction ....................................................................................................... 8 i. Research Context: Immigration as the backdrop for a socially constructed understanding of diversity ............................................................................. 8 ii. Foreign language teaching as a tool for integration ................................ 10 iii. Starting point of research: diversity seen as an obstacle........................ 12 iv. Research type: finding a balance between objectivity and reliability.... 14 v. Research approach: a diverse framework for dealing with diversity ...... 17 Chapter I. Beliefs, perspectives and categorizations ...................................... 25 1.1. The Pygmalion effect seen from a different paradigm......................... 25 1.2. Literature review of teacher expectations............................................. 32 1.3. Categorization as related to teacher expectations................................. 40 1.4. Literary Review of Categorization Changes ........................................ 47 1.5. Ethnomethodology................................................................................ 53 1.6. Bakhtin: Contributions to the stock of knowledge............................... 57 Chapter II. Membership Categorization Analysis .......................................... 66 2.1 What is Membership Categorization Analysis? .................................... 66 2.2. How does MCA work? ......................................................................... 69 2.2.1. Recognizability and shared agreement of sense ............................ 71 2.2.2. Background expectancies (scheme of interpretation) .................... 72 2.2.3. Indexicality, relevance and orientation .......................................... 73 2.2.4. Consequentiality............................................................................. 74 2.2.5. Accountability and normative backdrop........................................ 75 2.3. Achieving meaning through “gaps” ..................................................... 76 2.4. Social construction of meaning does not mean absolution of the individual ..................................................................................................... 78 2.5. Comparison of MCA with other socially situated language theories... 79 2 2.5. How is Membership Categorization Analysis relevant to teachers’ perspectives? ................................................................................................80 Chapter III. Becoming aware of diversity.......................................................82 3.1. What is meant by diversity? -- Creating the “Other” ...........................82 3.2. Some types of different-language situations.........................................84 3.3. Value attributed to language .................................................................88 3.4. Language Awareness ............................................................................89 3.5. Reflective Teachers...............................................................................91 Chapter IV. Foreign language teachers’ roles: a threshold to the future ........97 4.1. Reasons that the FL teacher’s role must include an understanding of linguistic diversity........................................................................................97 4.1.1 FL Teachers as cultural mediators...................................................98 4.1.2. Multicultural education and language teachers............................101 4.2 Implications of changes in FL teachers’ roles .....................................103 Chapter V: Research objectives ....................................................................105 Chapter VI: Research Paradigm for the approach.........................................109 6.1.1. Contextualizing the researcher and the research approach ..........111 6.2. Kuhnian shifts of paradigm & qualitative research ............................112 6.2.1. Paradigm shifts .............................................................................112 6.2.2. Seeking a paradigm shift: qualitative analysis as the key............113 6.3. Some clarifications about the data compilation process.....................115 6.3.1. Some theoretical and ethical considerations of audio recording & use of students’ journals .........................................................................116 7.1. Setting and subject groups ..................................................................118 7.2. Data .....................................................................................................118 7.3 Visual aides and texts used for setting up dialogues ...........................119 7.3.1. Descriptions of tasks ....................................................................119 7.3.2. Researcher’s role in tasks .............................................................123 7.4. Journals ...............................................................................................124 3 7.5. Classroom discussions........................................................................ 125 7.6. Explanation of the Catalogue of Category Assembly ........................ 125 7.7. The use of an approach similar to triangulation in the research framework.................................................................................................. 127 7.8. Data analysis procedure...................................................................... 129 7.9. Transcript key .................................................................................... 131 Chapter VIII. Dialogue analysis................................................................... 134 8.1. Preliminary data selection................................................................... 134 8.1.1. Catalogue of category assembly................................................... 134 8.1.2. Categorizations and agency.......................................................... 140 8.2. Accountability and normatives: establishing the framework of “normal”..................................................................................................... 145 8.2.1. Accountability and orientation..................................................... 146 8.2.2. Recognizability of “normal” ........................................................ 149 8.3. Consequentiality and relevancy according to physical features......... 155 8.3.1. Context: Awareness of their student role..................................... 163 8.4 Categorization of “other”.................................................................... 167 8.4.1. Physical features as attributes of “other” ..................................... 167 8.4.2. “Living ideologies”: a resource for category assembling and accounting .............................................................................................. 170 8.4.3. Geographical categorizations as a construct of “other”............... 171 8.4.4. Resolving ambiguity about “normal” versus “other” through category assembling ............................................................................... 173 8.5. CBA’s (category-bound activities) of the multilinguistic student: strong and weak recognisability