Research in the Teaching of English - Volume 49, Issue 1, 2014

By examining how a student from Vietnam used English to interact with her peers in an English-medium secondary school in Singapore, this paper argues for an examination of language and literacy development through a cosmopolitan lens. Building on earlier research on cosmopolitanism (e.g., Campano & Ghiso, 2011; Canagarajah, 2013a, 2013b, 2013c; Hansen, 2010; Hull & Stornaiuolo, 2010), I illustrate how a broader understanding of cosmopolitanism in language and literacy education is timely in the wake of contemporary transcultural flows that characterize globalization, the emergence of a neoliberal order in education, and a pressing need to address educational inequities encountered by the growing number of immigrant learners whose home languages may not be valued in classrooms. The data in this paper, which include politicalspeeches, school documents, and classroom interactions, are part of a larger, yearlong critical ethnographic study and are subjected to microethnographic discourse analysis (Bloome & Carter, 2014). Through investigating how local interactional events are linked to broader events in wider Singapore society, I demonstrate how my Vietnamese focal student and her Singaporean peers were able to enact and develop a cosmopolitan outlook. Implications on language and literacy development are also discussed.

While research in L2 language and literacy in academic contexts has shed light on learning language per se (e.g., students’ development of syntactic complexity), classroom situations, in which ESL students engage in English and make it meaningful to them, have received far less attention. With a sociocultural perspective, this qualitative case study examined the discursive practices of a face-to-face community college ESL classroom and of its online discussion forums. We found that the discourse in the face-to-face classroom tended to prioritize shaping students’ academic knowledge and identity, pushing aside knowledge and identities that were peer- or life-worldbased. In contrast, the online forums afforded discourses through which students displayed peer-based, life-world, and academic knowledge and identities, while negotiating responses to academic assignments. The study suggests that classroom-based online forums can provide a space for the legitimate display of students’ nonacademic discourses in the service of academic work.

Prior work in education, broadly, and in L2 education, more specifically, has documented both the difficulty and importance of integrating conversation into the language classroom, where conversation is both the means and end of language learning. Yet to be described is how the teacher plays an active role in engineering such integration and how he or she navigates a delicate balance between formal classroom talk and more casual conversation. Using the methodology of conversation analysis, I describe how one particular instructor manages to maintain an open and yet structured space that fosters connection without sacrificing control in an adult ESL classroom. In particular, I show how the balance between control and connection is achieved by embedding a conversational frame within an institutional one or reestablishing the institutional frame in the midst of talk about conversational matters. Findings of this study expand our current understanding of how learner voice may be promoted within the institutional structure of a classroom, and in particular, how conversation may be integrated into the language classroom without abandoning teacher control.

With graduate training only in literary research methods, the author built a successful career focused on issues of student plagiarism. Gradually, however, she came to realize that her claims about plagiarism were based on local observation and personal experience; they could not persuade wide audiences. Late in her career, she began doing large-scale, data-based research that allows her to persuade wider audiences; the data-based research has also challenged and revised some of her earlier claims about plagiarism.