Linguistics Society of New Zealand
19th Biennial Conference
17-18 November 2011
(Pre-conference workshops 16 November 2011)
Hosted by
School of Linguistics and Applied Language Studies
Victoria University of Wellington
Plenary speakers: Prof. Kon Kuiper (University of Canterbury)
and
Prof. Diana Slade (UTS, Sydney)
Earlybird Registration Closes 30 September 2011
A provisional programme for the conference can be found here.
Please navigate the rest of the conference website using the menu to the right.
Plenary Abstracts
Prof. Kon Kuiper
Subject-expert linguistics teachers' reflections on their expert teaching practice
Mastery in teaching a subject involves two sets of competencies: subject competencies and teaching competencies in that subject. Both involve declarative, procedural and attitudinal aspects. This talk will be based on what can be learned from the informal, undirected reflections of those who have achieved mastery as teachers of their subject. The participants were all outstanding teachers and researchers in their subjects. They were non-randomly selected from inner circle, Anglophone, settler societies or the UK. They each contributed a chapter to a book on teaching their discipline with no brief other than to write reflectively about teaching their subject.
The results show the following:
- Subject expert teachers are keen to share their approach to their subject teaching with others. Almost all the chapters show an other-directedness and a keenness to share teaching expertise with others.
- Being unburdened by style, length and content requirements, the subject teachers write as themselves rather than as subject experts. Hence the writing is more creatively anarchic than one might find in journal articles.
- Not withstanding 2. virtually all areas of concern to subject teaching are covered: graduate attributes, learning outcomes, fitting the subject into the curriculum, course planning, textbook selection, practical work, assessment, student engagement, making learning enjoyable, competition for students among disciplines, generating research from teaching, and more.
- Every institution frames and constrains teaching a subject in its own way.
- All subject areas present their unique pedagogical challenges which subject-expert teachers must solve.
- All expert teaching practice is idiosyncratic.
- All expert teaching is affectively engaged.
- All expert teachers are good learners.
Prof. Diana Slade
The role of talk in the construction of identities
Casual conversation is a critical site for the maintenance and modification of our social identities: it both creates and reflects our social worlds. Ideationally it construes our experience, unselfconsciously constructing understandings of the commonsense world. Interpersonally, it is the primary location for the enactment of social values and relationships. Textually, it is where interactants colloborate in constructing a shared semiotic reality. And as Berger and Luckman (1966) so astutely pointed out many years ago, it is precisely because of the essential spontaneity and informality of casual conversation that it can do the work it does.
In this paper I will be describing the role of casual conversation in the construction of identities focusing on casual talk among people at work. The paper will argue that casual conversation, as the primary, unmarked form of communication, provides the key to understanding spoken language and the critical role it plays in the construction of our realities. I hope to demonstrate that the primary motivation behind casual encounters at work is the exploration of similarity and the negotiation of solidarity.
In this paper I will start by outlining the different text-types that occurred in a large sample of authentic casual conversational data, collected during coffee breaks at work. The distribution and frequency of the different genres found in three different contexts - one with all men, one with all women and one with men and women - will be presented.
I will then describe how speakers use the interpersonal resources of English to negotiate their roles in conversations and their positions in social groups. I will focus on teasing and gossiping amongst work colleagues, during their morning and afternoon tea breaks. It will show how solidarity is created by interpersonal, linguistic resources and how speakers use these resources to express their attitude about the world and each other, as well as indicating solidarity or exclusion.
It is by analysing these casual encounters in the workplace that we can see how social networks and social groups are formed. This analysis will demonstrate how these different groups define and redefine their values and attitudes through the exploration of similarity and value judgement.
Diana Slade is Professor of Applied Linguistics at the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS) and recently at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. She has over 20 years experience in researching, teaching and publishing in applied linguistics, linguistics and organisational communication. Her major research focus is on developing and extending theoretical work in these three areas, with a particular focus on the analysis and description of spoken English. She has earned over 6.2 million in research income and recently has led research in a number of different health care contexts.
Her PhD related research was on the analysis of English casual conversation, and her books include Conversation: from Description to Pedagogy (with Scott Thornbury, 2006, Cambridge University Press); Analysing Casual Conversation (with Suzanne Eggins, 1997 Equinox, UK) and, Minority Languages and Dominant Culture: Issues of Equity, Education and Assessment, (with Kalantzis and Cope, Falmer Press 1990). She has published extensively in the area of discourse analysis of spoken English, workplace organizational commumication, and more recently on healthcare communication.
Workshops
The conference will be preceded by two parallel interactive workshops
on Wednesday 16 November:
Workshop 1: Politeness (to be facilitated by Dr Michael Haugh, Griffith University)
Workshop 2: Multimodality (to be facilitated by Associate Professor Sigrid Norris, AUT)
Details can be found in the workshops section of the conference website.