This paper is a response to the common perception by student teachers that the research and theory courses on their program are overtheoretical and unrelated to classroom practice. While there is some support for a categorical distinction between theory and practice in language education, it is suggested that the beliefs, assumptions and knowledge of teachers are in fact inextricably bound up with what goes on in the classroom. We investigate two groups of student teachers studying at undergraduate and postgraduate level to become Teachers of English to Speakers of other Languages. We examine the extent to which a research and theory course which both groups took in Second Language Acquisition influenced key beliefs which students held relating to language learning during their period of study.

Heralded by its five-syllable Latinate title and mouth-filling sub-text, this book uncompromisingly consolidates a theory at the nexus between cognitive linguistics, pragmatics and critical discourse analysis. The word proximization is derived from the Latin proximatus, past participle of proximare 'to draw near', and promises to bring together "a host of issues to do with speaker-imposed construal of distance and proximity in discourse" (p. 3). However, the book is not just a theoretical treatise, but also the summation of over ten years' research by its author into US political rhetoric, particularly that surrounding its excursions in the wake of 9/11 -the invasion of Iraq and the ensuing sortie into Afghanistan. During this time a plethora of rhetoric in the form of speeches, media coverage, policy documents and legislation was generated by the US administration in order to create a case for war. In this respect, Cap's theory of proximisation serves to describe the linguistico-discursive realisation of the political strategy of legitimization. After setting out his stall in the first chapter, he acknowledges his forebears in Chapter 2. Chilton is credited with playing a seminal role in cognitive linguistic descriptions of political rhetoric (p. 16), but Cap notes the narrowing of his model from one of discourse space to deictic space. Cap reviews his own work between 2005 and 2010, and notes its limitation in not drawing on wider ranging corpus data. He is slightly tougher on what he maintains is Hart's simplification of proximization in the context of UK (anti)-immigration discourse (p. 36). However, Dunmire receives approval for her consideration of the ways in which proximization operates "as a macro-structural and macro-discursive phenomenon (…) across (political) genres" (p. 37).In Chapter 4, Cap draws on the interpretation of qualitative data and the elucidation of a range of individual lexical items in order to set out his own theoretical framework for proximization. First we have to imagine the listener or reader at the centre of a conceptual space which is constituted by linguistic and lexico-grammatical resources. To describe this aspect, Cap re-introduces the wider Brought to you by |

In intercultural communication studies, the positivist preoccupation with objectivist, essentialist, solid large cultures has been replaced by a postmodern recognition that the intercultural is liquid and ideologically constructed. However, a postpositivist resistance to this paradigm change, while recognizing the dangers of essentialism, continues to be objectivist and fails to address the intersubjective nature of the ideological construction of culture. This results in a soft essentialism. This methodological failure of postpositivism is driven by a neoliberal technicalized commodification of quantitative and qualitative methods that does not address the subjective implicatedness of researchers. It therefore prevents an understanding of the liquid nature of the intercultural and sustains the neo-racist implications of essentialism. An example of this is commodifying international students as culturally problematic to serve a quantifiable notion of intercultural competence. The methodological flaws of postpositivism can only be avoided by means of an approach to researching cultural groups in which large culture concepts such as nation are viewed as one of many possible, emergent, ideologically constructed variables rather than as the starting point for research.

No abstract

For some time, the role of culture in language education within schools, universities and professional communication has received increasing attention (Corbett, 2003). This area of pedagogic activity is referred to as 'intercultural communication'; the attribute of being able to communicate with interlocutors from other cultures is termed 'intercultural competence' (Feng, Byram & Fleming, 2009); and a person who possesses this attribute has been dubbed the 'intercultural speaker' (Kramsch, 1998; Byram, 2008, pp. 57-77). The aim of this paper is to disclose, critique and circumvent the implicit ethical imperative which underwrites this area of inquiry. Indeed, across many areas of contemporary discursive practice there appears to be an incitement to communicate with the other, the ethical grounds for which remain undisclosed and unproblematised. The central argument in the paper identifies two 'aporias', in the sense of untraversable boundaries, logical contradictions or antinomies (Derrida, 1993), which arise from the ontological and axiological assumptions of intercultural communication: first, they contain an unstated impetus towards a universal consciousness; second, the truth claims of much of intercultural communication (IC) discourse are grounded in an implicit appeal to a transcendental moral signified. Inter alia, we contend that these features constitute the study of intercultural communication as 'totality' (Levinas, 1969/2007, 1998/2009) or as a 'metaphysics of presence' (Derrida, 1976, 1978, 1981). We then propose more considered and radical ethical grounds for intercultural pedagogy and praxis. Intercultural Consciousness Intercultural communication aims to encourage mutual understanding and dialogue across cultural divides in ways that not only consolidate the communities to which its members belong, but also win over the sceptical. In particular, it seeks to raise awareness of the role of language in constituting national and supra-national identities and cultures (Holliday, 2010). This includes not only subscribing to radical intercultural pedagogies (Shi-xu & Wilson, 2001), but also envisaging more cosmopolitan subjects who traverse the transnational terrain with openness towards, and tolerance of, the other (Starkey, 2007). These goals are often expressed as a desire Page 1 of 19 EPAT Workflow EPAT Workflow 'oneness', IC discourse systematically effaces the premise of its own ontology-the irreducible relation to the other. Thus, by means of the passage from the many to the one, intercultural communication brings about its own dissolution. Truth and Transcendentalism To achieve these transformations, interculturalists frequently adopt an interventionist stance which appeals to the transcendental. That is, they contribute rhetorically and materially to the transnational public sphere in order to promote cooperation , reduce conflict and improve human rights (Phipps, 2007a; de Souza, 2006), and they do so by appealing to an implied higher order of

SizeWord length (not including title page, abstract, biography keywords, references): 7,301Word length (including title page, abstract, biography keywords, references): 8,734Number of bytes: 657KB Biographical noteMalcolm MacDonald (BA, Durham; MEd, Bristol; PhD, Warwick) AbstractThe discourse of any institutional field is composed of a variety of different genres. In medical discourse, three prevalent genres are the research paper, the doctor-patient interview and the textbook. This paper describes how the textual, interpersonal and ideational metafunctions of each genre operate in relation to their institutional context of situation (Halliday, 1978;. As a medical text is delocated and relocated from one institutional context to another (Bernstein, 1990(Bernstein, , 1996, transformations take place with regard to: the ideational options of tense, transitivity and process, the interpersonal options of modality and speaker's comment, and its rhetorical organisation (Halliday, 1978;. These transformations constitute the codes of the pedagogic device. These operate as a symbol system having two ideological effects (Giddens, 1979). First, certain medical texts are privileged over others as 'doxic' texts (Bourdieu, 1991); and secondly, subjects are variably positioned in the professional field depending on their command of the codes of the genres relating to different institutional sites.

In this paper we explore the usefulness of the criterion of authenticity for the selection and evaluation of EAP materials. These materials were specialised listening texts used on a first year undergraduate programme at a UK university. Using a student questionnaire and techniques of discourse analysis based on Halliday's concepts of field, tenor and mode, we investigated the levels of difficulty and relevance of materials using four media: published audio tapes, audio recordings of a live lecture, video materials and a short, simulated lecture by the teacher. We found that the texts which related to the students' experience and permitted learner interaction appeared to have more potential for language learning than those which merely replicated the discourse of the target situation.

No abstract