17.1413, Review: Applied Ling: Kelly, Vitanova & Marchenkova (2005)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-17-1413. Sun May 07 2006. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.

Subject: 17.1413, Review: Applied Ling: Kelly, Vitanova & Marchenkova (2005)

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1)
Date: 01-May-2006
From: Carmen Pinilla Padilla < mapipa at idm.upv.es >
Subject: Dialogue With Bakhtin on Second and Foreign Language Learning 

	
-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Sun, 07 May 2006 22:48:52
From: Carmen Pinilla Padilla < mapipa at idm.upv.es >
Subject: Dialogue With Bakhtin on Second and Foreign Language Learning 
 

Announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/16/16-2526.html 

EDITORS: Hall, Joan Kelly; Vitanova, Gergana; Marchenkova, Ludmila 
A.
TITLE: Dialogue With Bakhtin on Second and Foreign Language 
Learning
SUBTITLE: New Perspectives
PUBLISHER: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates
YEAR: 2005

Carmen Pinilla-Padilla, PhD, is an English as a Foreign Language 
teacher and teacher educator and currently director of the Centro de 
Formación, Innovación y Recursos Educativos, Torrent-Spain.

DESCRIPTION OF PURPOSE AND CONTENTS

The purpose of this edited collection of papers by different authors is 
to explore links between the Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin's 
ideas and second or foreign language learning. While Bakhtin has 
traditionally been seen as a literary critic, chapters in this book collect 
the ideas of scholars that see how Bakhtinian genres and rhetorical 
theory can be relevant and applied to second and foreign language 
education. The book addresses a variety of formal and informal 
educational contexts including elementary and university-level second 
or foreign language classrooms.

In the introduction to the book, before offering an overview of the 
chapters, the editors describe how interest of scholars in second and 
foreign language learning is shifting. They place that shift on a move 
from looking to the field of linguistics and psycholinguistics for its 
epistemological foundations to other disciplines in second and foreign 
language learning and explain how such is the case when looking into 
Mikhail Bakhtin. His understanding of language from his perspective 
as literary theorist in particular is relevant to second and foreign 
language learning for his conceptualization of the utterance as a 
socially constructed communicative act, locating learning in social 
interaction rather than within the individual learner, understanding 
learning as a product of a dialogical process.

The volume is arranged into two parts. Part I, ''Investigations into 
contexts of language learning and teaching'', presents seven chapters 
that report on investigations into specific contexts of language 
learning and teaching. Part II presents three chapters in which, 
according to the editors (p. 6), broader discussions on second and 
foreign language learning using Bakhtin's ideas as a springboard for 
thinking are presented.

Chapter 1 presents an introduction to the volume written by the 
editors with a brief description of all the chapters included in the book.

In Chapter 2, ''Mastering academic English: international graduate 
students' use of dialogue and speech genres to meet the writing 
demands of graduate school'', Dr. Karen Braxley organizes the 
chapter into two parts. She first presents a review of the concepts of 
dialogism and speech genres in relation to their relevance for learning 
English. The second part reports a study carried out with the purpose 
of analyzing how interaction enhances international graduate students 
learning to write the genres of academic English of their academic 
fields. The conclusion derived from the findings in the study reveals 
that dialogue, as proposed by Bakhtin, is basic for the negotiation of 
academic genres development.

Chapter 3, ''Multimodal re-representations of self and meaning for 
second language learners in English-dominant classrooms'', presents 
a study, based on both Bahktin and Vygostky's views, about how two 
novice learners of English as a second language in an English-
dominant-third-grade classroom reorganize and develop semiotic tools 
such as drawings, block patterns and ornate designs in order to being 
able to access the social life in the classroom and hence to the 
learning of English.

Chapter 4, ''Dialogic investigations: cultural artifacts in ESOL 
composition classes'', reports a study in which foreign students 
learning English in the United States are given the tasks of analyzing 
and responding to a series of bumper stickers of their choice in the 
form of essays and letters to the owner of the bumper sticker. These 
compositions are interpreted in Jeffrey Lee Orr's study to reveal the 
dialogic process between the students with their schemata and the 
bumper stickers as utterances.

Chapter 5, ''Local creativity in the face of global domination: insights of 
Bakhtin for teaching English for dialogic communication'', analyzes and 
compares two examples of discourse analysis of contrasting video 
recorded classroom interactions in two English lessons in different 
secondary schools in Hong Kong. Their conclusion is that the 
introduction and use of local linguistic styles and social languages in 
teaching English at second language settings may enhance 
communication and generate more creative situations in the classroom 
therefore favoring the development of critical linguistic awareness 
about English and the expansion of different social languages in 
English.

Chapter 6, ''Metalinguistic awareness in dialogue: Bakhtinian 
considerations'', deals with the development of metalinguistic 
awareness as a social, and not only individual, cognitive process and 
present an ongoing study of a small group of Finnish children learning 
English. The study shows how metalinguistic awareness is developed 
and transferred from the polyphony generated by the multiple social 
and linguistic situations the children are engaged in.

Chapter 7, ''Uh uh no hapana: intersubjectivity, meaning and the self'', 
starts by presenting a strong theoretical framework relaying on 
Bakhtin, Voloshinov and Vygostky's theories. We are then offered a 
thorough description of the methodology used in the analysis of the 
discourse and dialogic activity between two novice learners of Swahili, 
rooted in dialogism, intersubjectivity and meaning. In her study, 
Elizabeth Platt describes how, through completing an information gap 
activity, the two learners show clearly different learning strategies and 
how one of the learners develops a greater self confidence as a 
language learner as a result of negotiating and the process of 
completing the task dialogically.

Chapter 8, ''Authoring the self in non-native language: a dialogic 
approach to agency and subjectivity'', illustrates the concept of voice, 
consciousness and answerability by analyzing how three eastern 
European adult immigrants author themselves by acting as agents in 
narrative discourse. Gergana Vitanova presents a study grounded on 
Bakhtin's conceptualization of language, self and authoring, which she 
describes together with a sketch of humanistic and poststructuralist 
schools of thought and how they have influenced second language 
research through their concept of self. Vitanova provides a very rich in 
details chapter and crystal clear examples of the Bakhtinian concept 
of dialogue.

PART II, Implications for theory and practice, comprises three chapters.

Chapter 9, Language, culture and self: the Bakhtin-Vygosty 
encounter, offers a rich description of the common grounds where the 
theories by the two scholars meet in order to provide a framework for 
second language pedagogy. Ludmila Marchenkova articulates the 
chapter around the three interrelated areas of the notion of language, 
the role of culture in the developing of intercultural understanding and 
the formation of self and the role of the other in this process.

Chapter 10, Dialogical imagination of (inter)cultural spaces: rethinking 
the semiotic ecology of second language and literacy learning, by Alex 
Kostogriz, advocates for the generation of a thirdspace pedagogy of 
second language literacy. In this space, the dimensions in the 
organization of literacy learning environments are redesigned and 
reorganized to shift from the currently dominating cultural binarism in 
education to the configuration of another, new, recreated thirdspace. 
Kostogriz basis his idea on three spheres of classroom practices: 
material-semiotic, intellectual and discursive. He argues for a socially 
constructed learning (third)space where multiple voices need not 
compete to be heard and understood but rather participate in a truly 
intercultural dialogue.

Chapter 11, Japanese business telephone conversations as 
Bakhtinian speech genre: applications for second language 
acquisition, explores how language learners' pragmatic competence in 
Japanese may be developed by using the genre of Japanese 
business conversations in teaching and proposes that authentic 
conversations used for learning interactional strategies in Japanese 
will be preferred by second and foreign language students. Lindsay 
Amthor Yotsukura also explores the notion of addressivity in Bakhtin 
to explore students' design of appropriate productions for their 
audiences.

CRITICAL EVALUATION

The different chapters are written by scholars from around the Globe 
who work on diverse educational settings and have a wide array of 
linguistic and educational specializations and research interests that 
coincide on regarding Bakhtin's theories an enriching source of ideas, 
therefore, the book itself is polyglossic in nature and it gathers the 
dialogic relationship between the researchers and Bakhtin's 
utterances, a relationship that gives place to these persuasive 
chapters where we are offered a sensible understanding of ways to 
build bridges between our existing practices and our practices-to-be.

Hard as it may be to put together different authors' works on a 
cohesive single piece of writing, the editors have managed to organize 
them coherently in an interesting book around the richness and 
interest of the Bakhtin's Circle works for language teachers. In spite of 
that, the division of the material in two parts is not so evident because 
all of the chapters offer case studies and different research strategies 
and experiences and all of them offer ideas for further thinking and 
suggestions for exploration. In fact, although not strictly necessary, 
because the purpose of the book to explore links between Bakhtin's 
ideas and second or foreign language learning is fully achieved, but 
bearing in mind that second and foreign language educators are only 
recently looking into their practice under the light of Bakhtin's ideas, it 
might be of interest for those not acquainted with Bakhtin's ideas to 
read Chapters 8, 9 and 10 after the Introduction and before the other 
chapters instead of reading the book as it is because they offer a 
deep, critical overview of Bakhtin in his historical context and his 
relationship with Vygostkian views. It is in that sense that it might have 
been adequate for the introduction to offer a wider presentation of 
Bakhtin and his world. Also in relation with the structuring of the book, 
it could be argued that Chapter 11 is quite more similar in structure 
and type of contents to chapters in the first part of the book than to 
those included in the second.

Nonetheless, as every chapter shows meditated and referenced 
explanations of the different authors' interpretations and a specific 
approach to second and foreign language learning from a particular 
perspective towards Bakhtinian thought, global understanding is 
facilitated even to those novices to Bakhtin from the beginning of the 
book.

Quite relevant to practitioners of the Global English teaching trend is 
Chapter 5, that proposes teaching English for dialogic communication 
to ''heteroglossize English and to change English from an authoritative 
discourse to internally persuasive discourse to the students'' (p. 95). 
The dimensions of teaching English as a global language are evident 
in this piece of work and only four chapters (5, 7, 8 and 11) are not 
devoted to studies in English as a second or foreign language 
learning settings.

Just a little note about the introductory chapter where the book 
description of the editors may be confusing because it misplaces the 
numbers of the chapters; this introduction is actually chapter 1, 
whereas chapter 1 in the introduction actually refers to chapter 2 of 
the book. Therefore, the numbering coincides with that in the 
Introduction only from chapter 7 onwards. This may probably be 
because the editors wrote it not thinking it would be regarded as a 
chapter of the book.

Notwithstanding, the significance of this compilation is undeniable for 
linguists who are interested in Bakhtin and Vygostky and how to apply 
their theories to language learning and therefore the volume should 
be of interest to scholars coming from the field of Applied Linguistics 
but especially form the Language Acquisition subfield.

The variety of voices in this collection brings to life the dialogical 
nature of communication, the book shows the dialogue among the 
authors and Bakhtin's and it prompts our very dialogue with them 
through the reading and interpretation of their texts and of course our 
future dialogue with Bakhtin. 

ABOUT THE REVIEWER


Carmen Pinilla-Padilla has experience teaching in Primary and 
Secondary schools and University levels. She obtained her PhD from 
the Universidad Politécnica de Valencia, Spain, where she participates 
in courses at doctorate level; she also collaborates as tutor for 
students of English Philology at the Universidad Nacional de 
Educación a Distancia in Valencia. Her research interests center on 
collaborative learning, computer-mediated-communication and 
interaction in language learning.





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