This study investigates how the relationship between nationalism and language learning is manifested in discourse at an English language classroom facilitated in Nogales Sonora along the Mexico/US border. Employing ethnographically-sensitive critical discourse analysis, this study contributes to the fields of English Language Teaching (ELT), Border Studies, and Nationalism Studies by introducing three analytical terms that provide a means to document the social construction of nation-states (termed herein as imagined national communities of practice). The three terms are (1) nationalist practices, which refers to social practice that presupposes nationalist principles, (2) nationalist border practices, which refers to discerning self/other along nationalist lines, and (3) nationalist standard practices, which refers to the articulation of nationalist standards of language and subjectivity. The students attending the class under analysis comprise a unique population in that they are adults who occupy positions of economic and social privilege in the Nogales Sonora community because of their management-level employment at maquila factories. Reflecting their status, the students are invested in nationalist practices of border and standard in order to align themselves with nation-state institutions and to distance themselves from cultural and linguistic liminality (e.g., Mexican-American, paisano, code-switching, and Spanglish) characteristic of border regions. The classroom under observation upheld nationalist borders and standards, with important consequences. First, nationalist notions of border led classroom participants to disavow the bilingual language use that was clearly necessary for successful classroom operations, despite an English immersion classroom policy. Second, nationalist practices established the local classroom space as indexically linked to an imagined American community of practice, understood by students to be authentically monolingual, monocultural, and distinct from Mexico. Association with--but not full incorporation into--this particular understanding of the American nation-state is advantageous to students for maintaining their elevated social and economic positioning in the local Nogales Sonora community. Thus, this classroom serves as a site of nationalist border reproduction and the reinforcement of hierarchies of privilege. The study encourages teacher reflection on what nationalism can mean to formal language learning contexts and suggests directions for re-aligning classroom practice to approaches that embrace multilingual realities of language learning contexts.

This dissertation explored the ways in which the everyday life practices of most urban Indians embodied the "modernization of tradition" (Hancock, 1999) and the role that media texts played in facilitating and encouraging this modernization. The research is based on six months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted from June through December 2005, in the south-Indian city of Chennai, which has traditionally been regarded as a conservative city. Examining the Indian media as a discursive site where normative ideologies are not only constructed but also co-constructed, the study explored and examined how the discourses of tradition and modernity were contested in the south Indian media. It also identified and interpreted the ways in which dominant ideologies at the nexus of color/caste and gender/morality were negotiated by an urban city and its residents in the move towards modernity.Data included three different but inter-related sub-genres of print media texts -- visual images, textual advertisements, and news articles. The primary dataset of visual images consisted of 300 product advertisements culled from four, nationally available, English-language magazines gathered from the two genres of news and film. Textual data sets comprising the matrimonial advertisements and the news articles were gathered from the local editions of two nationally-available English-language newspapers. The broader ethnographic investigation included participant observations, individual formal and informal interviews, and focus group discussions with adult residents of Chennai. The data were analyzed using a multi-discursive and multidisciplinary approach. The analyses were informed by conceptual approaches which included: social semiotics and the multimodal theory of communication, genre analysis, critical discourse and feminist critical discourse analyses, and alternative modernities.In examining the media texts as the site where dominant sociocultural ideologies were being constantly configured and reconfigured, the analyses identified and examined the workings of three interconnected themes - fairness (in relation to skin color), gender, and morality. Through these themes, the dissertation examined the larger contestations and negotiations between the discourses of traditions and modernities as experienced by adult residents of urban Chennai. The discourses of identity construction and reconstruction were thus examined at the nexus of the individual self situated within the larger frame of the city.

The Internet is increasingly becoming a key medium through which people establish social contacts and form interpersonal relationships. In particular, online dating websites are gaining popularity and rapidly expanding around the world. This study explores the discourse that constitutes the practices of the deai-kee-saito 'encounter-oriented sites' in Japanese, as observed in three major personal ad websites, namely 1) Ekisaito furenzu 'Excite Friends', 2) Match.com, and 3) Yahoo!Japan paasonaruzu 'Yahoo!Japan Personals'. It focuses on the ways that self-advertisers express their socio-sexual desires and describe their ideal partners and relationships, and analyzes them with respect to the reproduction of social asymmetries.More specifically, it examines the discursive construction of the kinds of personae (personality characteristics) and bodies (physical features) that advertisers aged 20-29 wish in their future partners, as well as the kinds of practices (activities and actions) they wish to engage in with their partners, what they wish to do for their partners, and/or wish the partners to do for them in their envisioned interactions. Out of the 1200 ads collected from these websites, a total of 463 ads are identified as target-gender-explicit and analyzed at lexical, morphosyntactic, phrasal, clausal, sentential and discourse levels. It pays close attention to the linguistic resources utilized in the articulation of socio-sexual desires and desirability, and the textual formation of the addresser(advertiser)-addressee(ad reader) relationships, including adjectives, nouns, verbal phrases, person references, desideratives, conditionals, and the formula yoroshiku/o-negai shimasu 'Thank you in advance'. It also analyzes para-linguistic resources, such as emoticons, symbols, and unique use of hiragana/katakana syllabaries. These discursive processes involve prioritization, or hierarchization, of personal attributes and consequently of the owners of those attributes. It argues that socio-sexual desirability is reflective of the hegemonic ideologies of gender and sexuality in today's Japanese-speaking communities.In addition, it examines explicit and implicit language related to race, class, and similar constructs. It also investigates the functions of style-shift that advertisers use in expressing desire. This study shows that individuals' 'innocuous' expression of socio-sexual desires through personal ads is a locus for the reproduction and contestation of the hegemonic order of gender, sexuality, race and class.

Syftet med detta arbete är att försöka få en bild av vad det var som gjorde att kursen Estetisk verksamhet ansågs viktig nog att bli ett kärnämne 1994, och varför den inte längre ansågs viktig och togs bort 2011. Med hjälp av kritisk diskursanalys undersöks argument för och emot kursen som de förs fram i texter från regering, riksdag och media vid dessa tidpunkter, med betoning på vad dessa säger om kursens status och position i gymnasiet och i den skolpolitiska debatten.  Studien visar att när Estetisk verksamhet infördes 1994 var det för att låta eleverna uppleva och själva skapa, baserat i en humanistisk diskurs. När kursen togs bort 2011 var det för att andra ämnen ansågs behöva mer utrymme för att ge eleverna en tydligare yrkes- eller högskoleförberedande utbildning, baserat i en marknadsekonomisk diskurs. Fokus för vad som var viktigt i gymnasieskolan skiftade under de sjutton år som gått däremellan, och i den nya läroplanens inriktning på nyttobaserad utbildning fick inte Estetisk verksamhet plats. Den skolpolistiska synen på kunskap förändrades från en demokratisk tanke om att ge alla samma möjligheter, till ett differentierat ideal där individens kunskap ska vara mätbar och samhällsnyttig. / The purpose of this study is to gain insight into how come the course Artistic Activites was considered important enough to be introduced as a core subject in the Swedish upper secondary school in 1994, and how come it was no longer considered important and thus removed in 2011. Through critical discourse analysis the study investigates arguments for and against the course as presented in texts from government, parliament and media sources at these points in time, with emphasis on the status of the course in the Swedish upper secondary school, as well as in the political debate on education. The study shows that when Artistic Activities was introduced in 1994 the purpose was to allow students to experience and create art, based in a humanist discourse. When the course was dropped in 2011 it was to give room for other subjects considered more essential in preparing the students for university studies or their chosen profession, based in a free market economy discourse. The focus on what was considered important in the upper secondary school shifted during the intervening seventeen years, and the new curriculum’s orientation towards utilitarian education allowed no space for Artistic Activities. The political approach to knowledge changed from a democratic idea where everyone was to be given the same opportunities, to a differentiated ideal where individual knowledge must be measurable and useful to society.

Reading and analyzing literature has a long tradition of being an essential part of the teaching of English in Sweden. As the offers of entertainment have increased in popular culture with the introduction of computer games, internet and other media, interest in reading novels has decreased. Literature is still a compulsory part of English teaching and the question is how teachers of today use literature and what kind of literary instruction they use. The aim of this study is to explore and discuss the literary instruction discourse in pedagogical texts, lessons, created by and for English teachers of Swedish Upper Secondary Schools. The lessons have been collected from the site lektion.se, where teachers are able to share knowledge and lessons. The study uses an analytical method based on Norman Fairclough´s Critical Discourse Analysis in order to analyze the lessons. In the analysis aspects of language, intertextuality and assumptions are discussed. As a theoretical base, Louise M. Rosenblatt´s and Judith Langer´s ideas of reader centered literary instruction is used as well as Design Theory. The result of the study shows that the overall discourse is text orientated and, with few exceptions, there is little room for students to contribute to a creative, personal experience of literature. Furthermore, it is shown that literary texts are often used as an exercise of reading comprehension and specific literary reading is scarce. The study postulates that more effort should be put into involving the students in the reading, and less effort on literary terminology.

The use of coaching is fairly up to date in the business world although it’s relatively new. Despite this, there’s a lack of clarity about what coaching is and what it signifies. Our point is however not to define coaching. Based on the normative coaching literature, the purpose is, from a critical discourse analysis to explore the power relations that affect the coach and coached in their relation to each other, so as to be able to criticize managerial coaching relationship as presented in the literature. This will contribute to enabling for a more open discourse. The theoretical image of managerial coaching described by the literature as a democratic exercised leadership by a certain type of behavior and attitudes, will lead to improved organizational performance. For this to be possible, the relationship between coach/manager and coached/co-workers need to be characterized by safety, trust and equality. This is considered to be complex, given the power and dependency relationship prevailed between manager and employee. The empirical data on which the analysis is partly based on, have been collected through semi-structured interviews with a group within the National Insurance Office in Karlskoga, consisting of managers and employees where a coaching leadership is applied. Coaching relationship has been explored with the aid of Faircloughs analytical model and therefore conclusions could be obtained, which is that the coaching relationship is characterized by a variety of power conditions affecting coach and coached in their relation to each other. Among other things, it has emerged that the coach is governing the coached thoughts and thus indirectly also the coached acting. Managerial coaching is therefore considered according to us not to be a democratic exercised leadership but may instead implying to be more controlling in comparison with the “traditional” leadership.

Postpartum depression (PPD) is a medicalized condition that exists on a continuum of postpartum mood disorders. PPD is reported to be experienced by 10-15% of mothers and 10% of fathers during pregnancy or after the birth of a baby. PPD, as experienced by either parent, is considered a serious condition because of its potential short- and long-term negative impacts on the developing child. In this thesis I explore how motherhood and fatherhood are constructed in the context of articles on maternal and paternal PPD in Canadian and American newspapers. Specifically, I focus on how references to the opposite partner were used to position each parent, and how each parent was positioned with respect to the new baby. In the articles on maternal PPD, husbands were either inconsequential to the story, positioned as being absent, or constructed as supporting the mother through instrumental and action-oriented behaviours. In addition, mothers were constructed as lonely and isolated because of self-imposed limitations (e.g., feeling ashamed for not being happy). In the articles on paternal PPD, the mother-father relationship was based on differences and competition. Fathers were constructed as isolated, lonely and misunderstood, most often through mother-blaming, such as by positioning the mother as responsible for the father’s well-being (e.g., causing his PPD), and by labelling PPD “a woman’s domain.” Fathers’ loneliness was presented as being due to imposed limitations of others (e.g., others did not properly prepare fathers for fatherhood). Mothering was constructed as being instinctually skilled, tolerant, and self-sacrificing, with the inherent capability to manage multiple roles and changes. The mother-baby relationship was constructed as naturally joyful, all-important and –consuming. Fathers were not expected to be as skilled or instinctively prepared and tolerant, to engage in chores/childcare, or to be explicitly overjoyed with the baby. Mothers were blamed for their distress in the role, while others were blamed for fathers’ distresses. Gendered stereotypes in the parenting role were perpetuated in these newspaper articles. Parenthood was not constructed as a collaboration, but rather motherhood and fatherhood stood in isolation from each other, with motherhood positioned as the primary role. These constructions continue to maintain fathers in the background of parenthood as an “other,” and to position mothers as responsible for the well-being of her partner, child(ren) and herself.

No description available.

<p>This paper examines selected discourses found in the journals kept by 21 working-class women during a training course for domestic workers in South Africa. The principal aim of the paper is to examine how emotion, voice and agency are expressed through literacy practices such as writing. With critical discourse analysis, the existing literacy levels of these women are revealed as well as the way in which women express identity, agency and emotion through the act of writing and reflecting on their experiences. A secondary aim is to uncover those recurrent discourses and attitudes that either empower or disempower these women. This is done to showcase how women&rsquo / s perception of themselves and their opportunities help them become active or inactive agents in their communities and families. Contributions are made to the study of women&rsquo / s language and literacy practices, with particular investigation of how their identities are shaped and moulded by language use. Critical discourse analysis and narrative analysis are the main analytical tools used in the study, highlighting aspects like agency, voice and ideology. These aspects are examined through the lens of women&rsquo / s experiences.</p>

Denna studie har som syfte till att undersöka två dagstidningars och tre resetidningars framställning av Dark Tourism samt ta reda på vilka skillnader och likheter framställningarna har. Målet är även att finna en djupgående uppfattning av Dark Tourism och de olika perspektiven och gemensamma dragen som finns i artiklarna. Det empiriska materialet består av 25 artiklar varav 15 stycken kommer från dagstidningar och 10 stycken kommer ifrån resetidningar. En kritisk diskursanalys har tillämpats som metod i denna studie och resultaten visar att två olika diskurser, varav den ena är melankolisk och den andra är sangvinisk, präglar tidningsgenrerna. Det framgår även att diskurserna som råder i tidningarna kan ha en stor påverkan på människors uppfattning av fenomenet Dark Tourism. / This study aims to examine two daily newspapers and three travel magazines’ production of Dark Tourism, and find out what differences and similarities the petitions have. The aim is also to find an in-depth understanding of Dark Tourism and the different perspectives and common features found in the articles. The empirical material consists of 25 articles, of which 15 were from daily newspapers and 10 come from travel magazines. A critical discourse analysis has been applied as a method in this study and the results show that two different discourses, one of which is melancholic and the other is sanguine, characterizes these journal genres. It is also clear that the discourses that prevail in the newspapers can have a big impact on people's perception of the phenomenon of Dark Tourism.   Keywords: Dark Tourism, Discourse, Newspaper Articles, Critical Discourse Analysis, Media