Last updated by tomash on 2015-04-22. Originally submitted by tomash on 2015-04-20.
“I only teach English”:
Gender and sexuality made (ir-)relevant in the
Polish EFL classroom Joanna Pawelczyk & Łukasz Pakuła & Bartek Kruk & Aleksandra Sokalska-Bennett
Education as an institution constructs and regulates gendered identities (Jones
2006), typically endorsing hegemonic gendered identities and heteronormativity. Current perspectives on EFL teaching (see Sunderland et al. 2002, 2014) give a central role to teachers as regards how teaching materials are ‘consumed’ (cf. Fairclough 1992), yet students do not remain passive in this process, for example, they may actively resist the textual constructs provided and instead offer their own critical readings and interpretations. Due to the various processes of globalization − also involving human relationships − and the impact of new technologies to which they have access, students are exposed to diverse gender and sexual identities and ideologies that may not necessarily be reflected in their EFL learning materials or teacher practices.
In this presentation we will look into the context of the Polish EFL classroom to discuss how various gender and sexuality discourses emerge in the EFL textbooks and classroom interactions and whether ‒ and if so how ‒ they are interactionally negotiated by teachers and students. The data to be discussed in this presentation were collected for the British Council-funded project entitled “Investigating gender and sexuality in the ESL classroom: Raising publishers’, teachers’ and students’ awareness” and comprise EFL textbooks, classroom interaction recordings and focus groups. The classroom and focus groups interactions were recorded at Polish state-run schools at the primary, middle and secondary levels and interpreted with insights of critical discourse analysis (see Rogers 2011) as well as critical pedagogies (Norton and Tooney
2004; Monchinski 2008) and queer linguistics (Motschenbacher 2011; Nelson 2007).
Guidelines for language education practitioners as regards the teaching of gender diversity and sexual diversity as part of ELT will be offered.
WHERE: ROOM 601A
WHEN: this Friday, APRIL 24, 1.30 P.M
Dr Paula Orzechowska
Role of phonological features in phonotactics: a cross-linguistic perspective.
For over a century, phonological theory has relied on the measure of sonority in determining consonant cluster well-formedness. Proposed sonority hierarchies (e.g. Clements 1990, Steriade 1990, Trask 1996, Vennemann 1988) have been mainly based on a single criterion of manner of articulation, although some phonotactic models have systematically combined several phonological features beyond sonority (e.g. Dziubalska- Kołaczyk 2009). The analysis pursued here draws on the observation that phonological features rather segments determine phonotactics in a given language.
In this presentation, we will provide a close inspection of word-initial consonant clusters in Polish and English in terms of four features; (1) complexity, (2) place of articulation, (3) manner of articulation and (4) voicing, with the goal of determining their preferability in phonotactics. It will be shown that there are different patterns of feature organization that play a role in cluster formation. For instance, English clusters tend to start with a voiceless segment and end with a voiced one, while in Polish voice agreement is preferred.
The proposed approach constitutes an alternative to existing models of phonotactics as it is not based on a priori assumptions on cluster structure. It allows to trace idiosyncratic properties of clusters and formulate the preferred feature settings for a given language. This phonotactic measure complements other approaches by stating what clusters are like rather than what they should be like.
