Browsing by Subject "stance"

The material that has been analyzed for this study consists of video recordings from Natur & Språk’s [Nature & Language’s] multilingual summer camps. The aim was to study the children’s interactions and conversations at the camps, focusing on their stances towards other languages. A further aim was to study the results in relation to the National Core Curriculum for Basic Education 2014. The research questions focus on how the children in their conversations express their stances and positions towards other languages, and how this can be related to the views on language stated in the national core curriculum. The respondents were between 8 and13 years old and spoke either Swedish or Finnish while some were bilingual. The video recordings of the conversations between the children were transcribed and analyzed through thematic analysis. The transcripts were additionally analyzed through a sociolinguistic perspective by studying the children’s stance. The theoretical framework of this study was based upon stance. As a result of the analysis, four main categories were found that represented the children’s varied ways of expressing their stances towards other languages, as well as other people’s language choices and backgrounds. The children categorized themselves and others in relation to languages and/or language groups. They showed expectations regarding their own and/or other’s competence. They expressed comments or whishes about language choice and showed orientation towards language learning. These results demonstrate that multilingual practices with language encounters create opportunities for children to challenge themselves and develop their language awareness, their stances and interests in other languages. In relation to this, parallels were drawn to the views on language stated in the National Core Curriculum, with its aims concerning language awareness and cultural diversity. Therefor this study can contribute with insight in regard to the potential that multilingual practices and activities have to offer in different educational contexts. This study is written in collaboration with the project Natur & Språk [Nature & Language], a collaboration between the Finnish Society for Nature and Environment, the Finnish Nature League and the Faculty of Educational Sciences at the University of Helsinki.

This Master’s Thesis aims to explore evaluative language directed at Chinese culture in an online context upon the appearance of COVID-19. To achieve this objective, this study was guided both theoretically and methodologically by the stance triangle (Du Bois 2007). The stance triangle acknowledges three stance acts—evaluation, positioning, and alignment—that co-occur in each stance. An additional objective of the present study was to gather all info obtained from the stance triangle in order to determine the discursive construction of Chinese culture. Thus, the concrete research questions were as follows: 1. How do Twitter users evaluate Chinese culture on Twitter and position themselves in relation to other Twitter users and Chinese culture? 2. How do interlocutors align with each other's utterances on Twitter? 3. How do interlocutors represent Chinese culture on Twitter at the beginning of the COVID-19 outbreak? As hypothesized at the early stages of this research, in addition to issues within the immediate realm of well-being or survival of people, the emergence of COVID-19 surfaced much fear and confusion online. To inspect the opinions of people regarding Chinese culture upon the appearance of COVID-19 online, Twitter was chosen as the platform of interest. The data consisted of a tweet posted on Bill Maher’s Twitter account, which contained a video clip from YouTube promoting an episode of the late-night tv-show as an addition to the text. Additionally, a total of 52 responses were also included in the study. The results of the present study show that, overall, stances on Twitter were versatile both in their content and intensity. In relation to the first research objective regarding evaluation and positioning, it was observed that even though the stances were versatile, the vast majority evaluated different entities of Chinese culture in a negative manner. In regard to the second research question, the Twitter users sought alignment by referring to statements made beforehand or by high-ranking officials or prestigious institutions. In terms of representation, this thesis argues that Chinese culture is presented as unsanitary, unethical, and as a future threat to the rest of the world.

Today, children in Finland live in a complex linguistic environment, which offers interesting opportunities for studying how they perceive and discuss their own and others’ language use. The objective of this study is to analyse and interpret how children express stance (Du Bois, 2007; Jaffe, 2009) in relation to language use and language skills in the context of a group interview. From the perspective of stance, interaction is viewed as the central process of meaning-making and identity construction. The study is based on qualitative, thematic focus group interviews on language use, language learning and language skills with students in second grade in a bilingual municipality in Finland. A total of 15 students participated in the study, of which 9 students attended a school with Finnish and 6 students a school with Swedish as the language of instruction. The interaction of the children is analysed from a stance perspective, aiming to demonstrate how the children use available resources to position themselves and others as language users, and how their stances can be interpreted in the sociocultural context. The results illustrate how children both implicitly and explicitly position themselves and others as language users by using social categories, topicalizing and not topicalizing language skills and by negotiating epistemic authority. In the interviews, the children positioned themselves in relation to each other and to their collectively constructed ideas about language identities, language use and language skills. The study adds to the growing body of research that applies stance theory to study how cultural and language identities are expressed in interaction, and exemplifies how stance can be used to analyse the interactions of children. It also relates to the larger discussion on how individual interactions serve as opportunities for stancetaking and meaning-making, and how they can contribute to the construction of more enduring identities and ideas.