School of Language and Culture

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https://hdl.handle.net/10292/554
The study of language, society and culture is at the core of the broad spectrum of knowledge known as the humanities. AUT's School of Language and Culture focuses on language in its widest sense — creative writing, English and its relationship with new media, translation and interpreting, international studies and the importance of intercultural competencies, discourse analysis and language teaching.

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Browsing School of Language and Culture by Subject "4704 Linguistics"

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
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    Designing for Diversity in Aotearoa / New Zealand Chinese Language Classrooms
    (SAGE Publications, 2023-04-18) Qi, GY; Sun, SYH; Carvalho, L
    There has been an increased interest in teaching and learning Chinese language across many schools in Aotearoa / New Zealand (NZ). Chinese language teachers, particularly those new to the Aotearoa/NZ schools and education system, are confronted with (1) an educational environment that calls for learner-centred pedagogies and (2) an increasingly diverse classroom that requires these teachers to adopt pedagogical strategies that address and cater for diversity. In response to these needs, this article discusses a case study of a research-informed professional development (PD) workshop designed to support Chinese language teachers to (1) identify ways that diversity manifests in the Aotearoa/NZ classroom and (2) figure out how to design for learning whilst accounting for diversity in Aotearoa/NZ. The workshop promoted a discussion on diversity from an inclusive, heterogeneous perspective, and introduced teachers to contemporary conceptual ideas connected to ‘teaching-as-design’, and to the Activity-Centred Analysis and Design (ACAD) framework. Teachers (N = 19) were randomly assigned to groups of three to five. Groups were encouraged to collaborate on the design of learning tasks that incorporated TBLT (Task-Based Language Teaching) and addressed diversity in the classroom. Analysis of their design activities and produced artefacts reveals that teachers’ understanding of diversity comprised many characteristics, they held a positive attitude towards being responsive to diversity, and were able to experiment with new design concepts and ideas using the ACAD toolkit. In particular, teachers were able to successfully expand the design of their learning tasks to include social and material design elements to address learner diversity. Findings also reveal teachers’ emerging awareness of their dual role as facilitators and as teacher-designers.
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    The Discursive Construction of Language Ownership and Responsibility for Indigenous Language Revitalisation
    (Wiley, 2023-07-20) Ting, Chien Ju
    Unpacking the possible ramification of how ownership of language and the responsibility of language revitalisation is perceived and how this may impact language revitalisation, this study uses a critical discourse studies approach to examine how the speakers negotiate their language ownership, which eventually leads to the question ‘who is responsible for language revitalisation’. The data of this study comes from semi-structured interviews with 11 Indigenous participants in Taiwan. The findings suggest that, when deciding who can ‘do’ language revitalisation, only those who are deemed legitimate by the speakers have the power to act. However, the speakers view the non-Indigenous speakers as potential speakers and, thus, were also assigned language revitalisation responsibility. Thus, by encouraging non-Indigenous speakers to become speakers of an Indigenous language via language acquisition, language ownership is shared. This study shows the complexity of how the speakers negotiate language ownership and how this has an impact on language revitalisation efforts.
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    Using Online Comments to Explore General Attitudes Towards Learning Mandarin Chinese as a Foreign Language in the UK
    (2023-07-05) Yu, Shanjiang
    Due to the impact of global English, theoretical research on the motivation of L2 learning in the past few decades has been dominated by studies involving learning English. Questions need to be asked as to what degree those results apply to the situation relating to other languages, especially non-European languages. Different from conventional studies, this explorative study sets out to investigate people's attitudes towards Chinese as a foreign language (CFL) in the UK through public comments on a major media platform. Among the findings, the majority of comments are negative about CFL and the integrative/ intrinsic dimension is crucial. Language difficulty is not the main reason why people are not studying Chinese as it is widely believed. Among the specific factors, English being the global language is the biggest barrier. Based on this finding, it seems reasonable to argue that, for an emerging regional/ global language like Chinese, more attention should be given to integrative/ intrinsic motivation rather than instrumental benefit. Cultural and social-political factors are also discussed, and suggestions are made for more effective promotion of CFL as well as for other emerging languages.
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