The purpose of this study is to explore how the relation between gender and humour is maintained and challenged in the Swedish TV show Parlamentet. Using an interactional approach based on Judith Baxter’s theoretical framework for feminist post-structuralist discourse analysis, the study focuses on how communicative strategies are used in negotiating for the ideal position of “the successful comedian”. This position is seen as an ideal position in Parlamentet, where comedians do political parody. In the conversation sequences examined in this study, both verbal and bodily semiotic modes have been analyzed using conversation analysis and multimodal analysis. The study focuses on how different communicative strategies encourage or reject the comedians and how this leads to different possibilities in negotiating for a powerful position, the position of the successful comedian. Humour is culturally seen as a male-coded discourse. The relations between humour and gender that are in focus are the hegemonic notions of women as lacking a sense of humour or being less humorous than men. The notions of gender are based on Judith Butler’s theories and hence seen as something performed through discourse and within a rigid regulatory frame where the subject’s possibilities are not infinite. The results of the study show that the female and male comedians do not have the same possibilities in the negotiation for the position of “the successful comedian”. The male comedians are strongly encouraged to a greater extent than the female comedians. The female comedians are also rejected to a larger extent than the male comedians. The male comedians are mostly rejected by the moderator whereas the female comedians are rejected by the moderator, male comedians and female comedians. The female comedians encourage other comedians to a larger degree than the male comedians. A significant finding of this study is that the relations between humour and gender, where women are seen as less humorous than men, are maintained when female comedians through discourse are made less humorous. However, there are strategies in the interaction that do encourage the female comedians or that lead to female comedian’s resist being rejected. These strategies indicate that the hegemonic cultural notions of women as less humorous than men are also challenged in this public discourse.

This thesis explores the communication of health knowledge among new parents in Sweden. Based on three separate studies, the thesis employs a selection of theoretical concepts and methodological approaches, mainly originating from mediated discourse analysis and linguistic anthropology. Study 1 takes a broad view on the object and asks how knowledge circulates and emerges in a particular arena for parental knowledge. Drawing on nine months of online fieldwork on a discussion forum thread for expectant parents, the study shows that communication of knowledge is engendered by entextualizations and recenterings of previous experiences, including encounters with discourse. This fact challenges categorical conceptions that construct some sources of health knowledge as trustworthy and others as unreliable, and thus, potentially harmful. Study 2 narrows the focus to professionals typically perceived as producers of parental health knowledge, namely, midwives who give prenatal education classes. Drawing on a dataset comprising observations of classes as well as interviews with midwives, the study throws analytical light on anticipatory discourse, that is, discourse designed to dictate and influence the future, and elucidates some of the ways in which midwives prepare the participants for their upcoming delivery by discursively constructing links to these future events. Study 3, finally, takes the perspective of a single individual in whose life several forms of communicated parental knowledge converge as she becomes a mother. The study focuses on a period during which this individual struggles with breastfeeding problems. A combination of the notions of interdiscursivity and the historical body is here employed to grasp this experience as shaped in relation to discourse regarding child care and health. Looking at narrative data through this lens, the study shows how this individual connects failure to follow official breastfeeding recommendations to failure to perform child care in an appropriate way. At heart, the study makes a case for the moral loading of health knowledge and cautions against the assumption that authoritative medical knowledge is the only means for taking action that a new mother might need. In conclusion, the present thesis utilizes a combination of theoretical and methodological tools from MDA and linguistic anthropology to enable a discourse analysis of health communication that privileges a view of language in use as accumulating vis-à-vis engendering meaning over time and in relation to social action. Invoking the notion of ideologies of communication, it demonstrates that parents’ knowledge about their children’s health is a non-neutral issue, and that instrumental aspects of parental health knowledge can never be isolated from moral ideas regarding how particular parenting practices are to be carried out. At the same time, the thesis points out that while representatives of institutions of the welfare state may produce messages to communicate health knowledge, the knowledge obtained by individuals is the product of myriad discursive encounters and other experiences, of which the discourse produced by representatives of state institutions constitutes only one share. / <p>At the time of the doctoral defense, the following papers were unpublished and had a status as follows: Paper 2: Submitted. Paper 3: Accepted.</p>

This is a study of students’ meaning making in web-based higher education courses. Conditions for students meaning-making change when interaction technology is used to support educational practices. Widened Participation policy activities often use web-based programs to attract “new” groups of more experienced students. The study used a communicative approach and focused on how previous experiences influenced actions and meaning making when students encountered challenges related to course objectives. Mediated Discourse Analysis was used to analyse asynchronous communication in 10 groups during 18 weeks of a 4-year part-time distance education program, training childminders for a Bachelor of Education, specialising in early childhood.  Appearances of meaning-making were traced to changes and breaks in student communication and presented as themes of orientations of actions namely:  • participation, the manifestation of presence, engagement in course work and the creation of space for engagement  • positioning, the creation of a student identity, the organisation of work, and the construction of a group culture  • reference, the orientation actions took in a nexus of practices. Where did students go for examples and to challenge theoretical concepts? • changing experience is a collection of moments of reification, when students came to make realisations of relevance to subject and task.  This study tells an alternative story to research on web-based education stating difficulties to achieve in-depth communication. The mediated environment offered strength for meaning-making and knowledge building as time, in the opportunity to develop new perspective through thinking and in encountering concepts again and again. As numbers, in the necessary impact of other’s experiences. And as distance, provided by the shift of actions in asynchronous communication, forcing thoughts into written language and making them accessible for reflection and criticism. If we are serious about widening participation we should regard students not only as numbers but instead as a valuable resource that may contribute to change in education. In this context, the combination of new groups of students and web-based scenarios provides future avenues for an informed pedagogical approach to higher education.

Magister Artium - MA / Social networking sites are used on a daily basis, to communicate with friends we have known for quite some time as well as make new friends from all over the globe - a global phenomenon. According to Aparicio (2011) the use of social networking sites have given way to a new “social dynamic” where friendships are formed with individuals from diverse backgrounds and geographical locations. Larsen (2007) continues to state that social network sites make for the creation of new friendships and the maintenance of new relationships. Using social networking sites to develop relationships provides us with new social skills, but through constant use of these sites we lose valuable interpersonal skills learnt through the use of face to face interaction (Aparicio, 2011). This thesis investigated the notion of social networking sites, specifically focusing on interpersonal relationships and language use within the networking context. The social networking site in question is that of Twitter, as majority of existing studies in this area focuses on the more popular Facebook. The main objective was to determine whether social networking sites, specifically Twitter, influence the development and maintenance of interpersonal relationships and language use. Participants included a group of 11 males and 11 females (22 in total), ranging from the ages of 17 to 33 and from different geographical locations (e.g. United Kingdom, South Africa, Tokyo, and so on). These participants frequently keep in contact with each other. Four ways in which Twitter has been adapted to emulate face to face communication have been found, namely: (1) the use of Paralinguistic and Prosodic Features to imitate speech, (2) Ustream, although not prominent within the data collected, is used to make up for the lack of face to face communication.This, however, is one-way; only one user provides a video link while those communicating with him or her (as there can be more than one) would type messages, (3) as expected a variety of shortenings can be found within the data collected. Shortenings imitate speech among the younger generation, and (4) participants make use of an informal register, as the most common type of relationship found on Twitter is that of friendships. Both strong and weak ties exist in the collected data; with weak ties being the majority. It is possible for weak ties to become strong ties. All online relationships start off as weak and gradually, over time, become strong ties. This is done through establishing trust between participants and communicating on a regular basis. Paolillo (1999) found that online relationships manifests as both weak and strong. However, “online ties are not ‘branded’ as weak ties” and these ties differ in quality; “those who have regular contact have strong ties and those with less frequent contact have weaker ties weak”. Social support is evident in the collected data and possible in online, textbased communication. In is manifested in four types of support, namely: instrumental, emotional, informational, and appraisal. The most common type of support found in the collected data is that of informational support. With regards to support activation strategies, most tweet fall under the ‘ask’ and ‘cry’ types of strategies. Also, considering the amount of emoticons found in the data, little or no emoticons were found in the activation strategies. There are also more indirect support activation strategies as opposed to direct. This could possibly be due to the fact that majority of the ties are ‘in the weak stage’. Textese has not been adapted in anyway; the same elements used by texters and IMers are used by tweeters, such as initialisms, phonetic spellings and contractions. Although present in the Twitter data, elements of textese did not occur as frequently as that found in e.g. Bieswanger’s (2007) and Thurlow’s (2003) studies; however more elements of Twitter language was found. If anything, the characteristics of textese are well-suited for Twitter; as shortened forms of words would make it easier for users to maintain a character count below the imposed limitation and it promotes the idea of writing quick and concise messages instead of filling message space with irrelevant content. With regards to the difference in the way male and female participants use language in terms of the linguistic characteristics of textese and the language unique to Twitter and the use of paralinguistic and prosodic features, it can be said that females tend to use these characteristics more than males do.

Ce travail de recherche propose une description du discours numérique tel qu’il apparaît dans l’environnement numérique qu’est Facebook. Il s’appuie sur l’étude des souhaits d’anniversaire, en montrant comment leur forme finale peut être influencée par la préconstruction technolangagière du site. La première partie, donne un aperçu de l’évolution des recherches sur le discours numérique, en décrivant d’une part le contexte d’apparition du web 2.0 et des bouleversements épistémologiques et discursifs qu’il a pu provoquer. Et d’autre part les spécificités linguistiques connues du discours apparaissant dans les environnements numériques. La deuxième partie, montre que l’avènement du web social a changé les choses dans les recherches sur le discours numérique, demandant une approche pluridisciplinaire. Cette réflexion nécessite de décentrer le regard des énoncés pour s’intéresser à leur environnement de production et aux affordances qu’il offre aux locuteurs. Ce nouveau positionnement épistémologique permet de repenser la description de Facebook, non plus comme une plateforme communicationnelle mais comme un environnement discursif complexe mettant en question les notions d’identité, d’intimité et de liens socio-affectifs. Enfin, la troisième et dernière partie de cette thèse, présente les problématiques liées à l’étude d’un cas concret d’écriture nativement numérique. La description et l’analyse des souhaits d’anniversaire sur Facebook et des outils méthodologiques et théoriques adaptés aux environnements numériques utilisés à cette fin. La description et l’analyse des souhaits d’anniversaire sur Facebook permettent de dégager deux aspects technolangagiers dans ce type de discours. Le premier est l’action environnementale sur la production langagière, c’est le cas notamment de la préconstruction technolangagière mais aussi de la prise en compte de l’exposition du message par les locuteurs (redéfinition du lien socio-affectif). Le second est l’intégration de la technologie à l’intérieur même des formes discursives, générant de nouveaux technogenres comme le discours par bouton ou des énoncés augmentés comme les hashtags. / This research provides a description of the digital discourse as it appears in the digital environment that is Facebook. It is based on the study of birthday wishes, showing how their final shape may be influenced by technological influence site. The first part provides an overview of developments in research on digital discourse, describing on one hand the context of emergence of Web 2.0 and discursive and epistemological changes that it has caused. And also known linguistic specificities of the speech appearing in digital environments. The second part shows that the advent of the social web has changed things in research on digital discourse, demanding a multidisciplinary approach. This reflection requires an interest in that production environment and affordances that provides speakers. This new epistemological positioning allows to rethink the description of Facebook, not as a communicative platform, but as a complex discursive environment by questioning the notions of identity, privacy and socio-emotional ties. The third and final part of this thesis presents the issues related to the study of a concrete case of natively digital writing. The description and analysis of birthday wishes on Facebook and methodological and theoretical tools adapted to digital environments used for this purpose. The description and analysis of birthday wishes on Facebook show two technolinguistic aspects in this type of discourse. The first is environmental action on language production, it is the case of technological preconstruction but also taking account of exposure of the message by the speakers (redefinition of socio-emotional bond). The second is the integration of technology within the same discursive forms, generating new technological genders as the discourse by button or statements increased as hashtags.

“The point is that you should be able to know your speech”. A study of the teaching practice of prepared speech, in upper-secondary school Swedish. Cristina Jarl This licentiate study explores the discursive construction of the classroom practice of teachers and students preparing a formal speech, within the Swedish language teaching. The explicit focus is on the teaching situation prior to the students’ prepared speech, and the actions per-formed by the actors within the language teaching context. The overall aim of the thesis is to increase the knowledge of teaching prepared speech as a social practice, by specifically describ-ing, analyzing, and problematizing the students’ opportunities to develop knowledge, connected to prepared speech in the language teaching classroom. By focusing on the instructional pro-cesses that lead to the delivery of the prepared speech this thesis contributes to new insights about the desired knowledge in the students’ prepared speech in school. The research questions guiding the investigation deal with aspects such as social actions, circulating discourses and the students’ subject positions as speakers in the teaching of prepared speech. A focused ethnography method was used, defined by short and intense periods of fieldwork engaging in a specific group activity in a social environment. The data production took place in two teaching groups, in two different upper secondary schools in Sweden. The empirical data consist of observations, sound and video recordings, field notes and texts produced by both teachers and students. During data production, the teaching alternated between on-site and online teaching due to the Corona pandemic. The classroom practice is explored as a social practice and as a discursive arena, where different perceptions exist. Social actors use discourse to mediate action, in which discourse impacts their ways of doing and being. By applying me-diated discourse analysis it is possible to study the complex relations between social action and discourse. The main findings suggest that teachers and students tend to focus more on the form and the production of the speech, and less on the specific subject content of the speech. The results display prominent and sometimes contradictory dichotomies in the teaching of speech: aspects of the prepared speech involve on one hand the practical, the spoken and the corporeal, and on the other hand the theoretical, the written and the visual. Additionally, the study illustrates the fixed and mobile dimensions of Swedish as a school subject. The importance of a speaker’s credibility shows a dynamic tension between students’ strategic, institutional and social posi-tions as a speaker. A concluding remark in the present study is that it seems important for the students to speak and having something to say, in a certain form and packaging, rather than what they have to say and why. Therefore the key instructional questions of what, why and who in terms of teaching prepared speech open up for further discussion.

Den tekniska utvecklingen bidrar till nya möjligheteter och sätt att kommunicera på nätet. Grafikoner introduceras successivt i Facebook och andra sociala medier och erbjuder nya funktioner för användare. I denna studie görs en jämförande analys av grafikoners användning och pragmatiska funktioner i en Facebookgrupp mellan 2012 och 2022. Syftet är att undersöka och diskutera grafikoners utveckling i en svensk kontext. Analysen är avgränsad till följande grafikontyper: emotikoner, emojier och dekaler. Grafikoner i inlägg och kommentarer analyseras med utgångspunkt i tidigare forskning om grafikoners funktioner. Funktionerna som identifieras i denna studie är: dekoration, benämning, handling/gest, reaktion och modifikation av ton. Studiens resultat visar att emotikoner endast förekommer i enstaka fall i materialet från 2012 och inte alls i materialet från 2022. Användningen av emojier har däremot ökat avsevärt mellan 2012 och 2022. I materialet från 2012 fyller emotikoner och emojier liknande funktioner, vilka främst är som modifikation av ton och som reaktion. Den vanligaste emojifunktionen i materialet från 2022 är som handling/gest. Resultatet visar en mer varierad användning av emojier i form av typ, placering och funktion 2022 jämfört med 2012. Den breddade användningen indikerar att emojin fortfarande är aktuell och användbar för svenska sociala media-användare 2022. Dekaler finns endast representerade i materialet från 2022 och den vanligaste funktionen är som reaktion på tidigare innehåll. Dekaler används fortfarande i mindre utsträckning än emojier 2022, men det finns indikationer som tyder på att dekalen kommer att följa samma utvecklingskurva som dess föregångare och öka i popularitet över tid.

Cette recherche a pour objet de comparer l’identité numérique et les particularités du langage écrit interactif dans des contextes numériques différents. Quelle est la différence entre l’identité numérique de ces deux réseaux sociaux numériques dont l’un est tellement utilisé dans le monde entier (à part quelques pays comme la Chine) et l’autre principalement par les Chinois? Et est-ce que l’identité numérique de la même personne s’exprime pareillement sur ces deux réseaux sociaux numériques ? Comment les utilisateurs s’expriment et interagissent-ils avec différents amis sur les réseaux sociaux numériques différents? Les interactions écrites dans un contexte numérique peuvent-elles manifester des aspects émotionnels? Afin d’éclairer nos questions, la recherche se focalise sur une étude comparative de l’identité numérique, des interactions écrites et des émotions exprimées dans les interactions sur les deux réseaux sociaux numériques. L’analyse des données permet de repérer aussibien les phénomènes d’ordre linguistique que ceux d’ordre social et émotionnel. Des entretiens et des questionnaires viennent éclairer l’analyse du vécu et du ressenti des sujets étudiés. Ce travail tente donc à travers la description de l’utilisation des Facebook et Renren par quatre étudiants chinois nouvellement arrivées en France de mieux comprendre les particularités de l’identité numérique et des échanges interactifs de chacun de ces réseaux sociaux numériques. / This research aims at comparing digital identity and nature of the peculiarities of interactive written language on two digital social networks (Facebook and Renren). We are interested in the difference between the digital identity of these two digital social networks, one is worldwide used (except a few countries such as China) and the other is mainly used by the Chinese. Is that the digital identity of one person is also the same on these two different social network sites? How the users interact and express vis-à-vis different friends in different digital context? Can the online interactions manifest emotional aspects? In order to respond to these problems, this research questions the digital identity and their function in the identity construction, the relational and social aspects of online interaction, the types of emotions expressed in the online interactions, and the role of emoticon in the expression of emotions of these two digital social networks. The data analysis enables to identify the linguistic, social and emotional phenomena in online interactions of the corpus of study. Interviews and questionnaires clarify the analysis of the experience and the feeling of the different actors. So throughout the description of case use of Facebook and Renren by four newly arrived Chinese students in France, this work attempts to better understand the features of digital identity and interactive exchange of these two digital social networks.

This classroom ethnography documents the developing critical literacy pedagogy of an English for Academic Purposes (EAP) instructor over the course of several terms. My research, which involved extensive collaboration with the EAP instructor, explores how specific classroom practices and discourses are enacted and mediated through dialogic intertextualities, material objects, and social actions that frame representations about language, literacy, and what Lefebvre (1988) called “le quotidien” – the everyday, and how these affect the students’ meaning-making potential in specific ways. It also traces the contours (and detours) of the instructor’s classroom practices after the researcher’s mediation in the form of collaborative inquiries on functional grammar and critical literacy, and the effects of these classroom practices on making meaning in her EAP classes. I consider several issues from an integrated theory and practice perspective. Because of an urgent need to understand the students’ practices and epistemologies as they engage in ever newer forms of multimodal text productions, I contend that EAP classroom practices must be reshaped to facilitate more (inter)active engagements of the multimodal texts that saturate students’ lives, both inside the class and outside. Related to this, I highlight in my classroom data what actually counts as the ‘critical’ or the ‘uncritical’ in this EAP classroom and argue why these distinctions matter. Lastly, I suggest ways in which the role of a critical multiliteracies education in EAP can meet the pragmatic needs of both students and teachers. My research contributes to a much-needed dialogue between critically oriented researchers and practitioners in the field of TESOL/Applied Linguistics by bridging the gap between theory and practice. The lessons learned from this collaborative classroom praxis point to concrete ways to help EAP teachers and students utilize their meaning-making potential. This involves equipping them with an expanded social semiotic tool-kit that can enable them to not only meet their immediate academic needs, but also help create a more active and possibly transformative role in the social constructions of discourse, language, and society. This doctoral dissertation has implications for those who are involved in EAP teaching and research, curriculum planning, teacher training, and student needs assessment.

This classroom ethnography documents the developing critical literacy pedagogy of an English for Academic Purposes (EAP) instructor over the course of several terms. My research, which involved extensive collaboration with the EAP instructor, explores how specific classroom practices and discourses are enacted and mediated through dialogic intertextualities, material objects, and social actions that frame representations about language, literacy, and what Lefebvre (1988) called “le quotidien” – the everyday, and how these affect the students’ meaning-making potential in specific ways. It also traces the contours (and detours) of the instructor’s classroom practices after the researcher’s mediation in the form of collaborative inquiries on functional grammar and critical literacy, and the effects of these classroom practices on making meaning in her EAP classes. I consider several issues from an integrated theory and practice perspective. Because of an urgent need to understand the students’ practices and epistemologies as they engage in ever newer forms of multimodal text productions, I contend that EAP classroom practices must be reshaped to facilitate more (inter)active engagements of the multimodal texts that saturate students’ lives, both inside the class and outside. Related to this, I highlight in my classroom data what actually counts as the ‘critical’ or the ‘uncritical’ in this EAP classroom and argue why these distinctions matter. Lastly, I suggest ways in which the role of a critical multiliteracies education in EAP can meet the pragmatic needs of both students and teachers. My research contributes to a much-needed dialogue between critically oriented researchers and practitioners in the field of TESOL/Applied Linguistics by bridging the gap between theory and practice. The lessons learned from this collaborative classroom praxis point to concrete ways to help EAP teachers and students utilize their meaning-making potential. This involves equipping them with an expanded social semiotic tool-kit that can enable them to not only meet their immediate academic needs, but also help create a more active and possibly transformative role in the social constructions of discourse, language, and society. This doctoral dissertation has implications for those who are involved in EAP teaching and research, curriculum planning, teacher training, and student needs assessment.