Language, Identity and Symbolic Culture

Language, Identity and Symbolic Culture PDF Author: David Evans
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350023027
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description
Language is integral to the construction of personal, socio-cultural and socio-political identities. Language, Identity and Symbolic Culture closely investigates the relationship between language and identities, offering a comprehensive yet progressive view of how linguistics relates to development and education, both in theoretical and real world applications. Progressing from a theoretical core examining the connection between language and individual identity, this book moves on to look at the wider socio-political discourse involving the marginalization and resistance of communities in the world. Beginning with the philosophical paradigms of language, Evans questions whether language shapes personal identities in its daily use or whether language is simply a tool for describing, rather than creating, the world. Extrapolating on this, the contributors utilise case studies from across the globe to see how these linguistic perspectives are played out in the real world, considering the role of language in issues surrounding power, colonization, marginalization and education. Language, Identity and Symbolic Culture offers a view of language identity conflicts around the world and an understanding of the opportunities of political and cultural emancipation created through language and open discourse.

Language, Identity and Symbolic Culture

Language, Identity and Symbolic Culture PDF Author: David Evans
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350023027
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 296

Get Book

Book Description
Language is integral to the construction of personal, socio-cultural and socio-political identities. Language, Identity and Symbolic Culture closely investigates the relationship between language and identities, offering a comprehensive yet progressive view of how linguistics relates to development and education, both in theoretical and real world applications. Progressing from a theoretical core examining the connection between language and individual identity, this book moves on to look at the wider socio-political discourse involving the marginalization and resistance of communities in the world. Beginning with the philosophical paradigms of language, Evans questions whether language shapes personal identities in its daily use or whether language is simply a tool for describing, rather than creating, the world. Extrapolating on this, the contributors utilise case studies from across the globe to see how these linguistic perspectives are played out in the real world, considering the role of language in issues surrounding power, colonization, marginalization and education. Language, Identity and Symbolic Culture offers a view of language identity conflicts around the world and an understanding of the opportunities of political and cultural emancipation created through language and open discourse.

Language, Culture and Identity – Signs of Life

Language, Culture and Identity – Signs of Life PDF Author: Vera da Silva Sinha
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN: 9027261245
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 329

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Book Description
The dynamics of language, culture and identity are a major focus for many linguists and cognitive and cultural researchers. This book explores the inextricable connection that language has with cultural identity and cultural practices, with a particular emphasis on how they contribute to shaping personal identity. The volume brings together selected peer-reviewed papers from the 7th International Conference on Language, Culture and Mind with other specially commissioned chapters. Like the conference, this book aims to enhance mutual understanding among researchers from diverse disciplinary and theoretical perspectives, offering a wealth of insights to a wide range of readers on recent culturally oriented cognitive studies of language.

Language, Culture and Identity

Language, Culture and Identity PDF Author: Torben Vestergaard
Publisher: Aalborg University Press
ISBN:
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 180

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Book Description
Are people's identities an effect of their membership of linguistic, national regional and ethnic groups, and does such group membership create problems for "inter-cultural communication"? These questions are addressed in this collection of nine papers from the Third Annual Conference of the Nordic Network for Intercultural Communications. Answers are drawn from general, theoretical, pedagogical and empirical points of view. They agree on one fundamental issue: the language-identity-cutlure complex, dynamic and overlapping rather than static and isomorphic. This leads the contributions to touch upon the political implications of a relational and dynamic view on language, culture, human rights and regional identities in a Europe with crumbling national boundaries. Among the topics are whether a person's identity is bound to a certain place and whether it is constant. Others discuss cross-cultural communication, a post-structuralist stance, different values ascribed to words and actions; the ability of people to interact with different cultures; the cross-cultural language link in language teaching; what language choice says about people and their attitudes towards each other when more than one language is available; and a recognition that most of us are members of several cultural groups, which can create incompatible values and attitudes.

Language and Culture

Language and Culture PDF Author: David Nunan
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135153906
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
This state-of-the-art exploration of language, culture, and identity is orchestrated through prominent scholars’ and teachers’ narratives, each weaving together three elements: a personal account based on one or more memorable or critical incidents that occurred in the course of learning or using a second or foreign language; an interpretation of the incidents highlighting their impact in terms of culture, identity, and language; the connections between the experiences and observations of the author and existing literature on language, culture and identity. What makes this book stand out is the way in which authors meld traditional ‘academic’ approaches to inquiry with their own personalized voices. This opens a window on different ways of viewing and doing research in Applied Linguistics and TESOL. What gives the book its power is the compelling nature of the narratives themselves. Telling stories is a fundamental way of representing and making sense of the human condition. These stories unpack, in an accessible but rigorous fashion, complex socio-cultural constructs of culture, identity, the self and other, and reflexivity, and offer a way into these constructs for teachers, teachers in preparation and neophyte researchers. Contributors from around the world give the book broad and international appeal.

Problematizing Identity

Problematizing Identity PDF Author: Angel M. Y. Lin
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136765468
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
This book argues that identity as a term needs to be problematized, not taken for granted – for both the risks and the potential that the concept offers to educators for understanding issues of social inequality and how social inequality is being reproduced, and for exploring possible alternative ways educators can work with identity de/formation processes to seek to break the social reproduction structures mediated through identity fixing and essentialization. It provides some of the meta-language and theoretical, analytical tools to embark on such a practice of making the familiar strange, problematizing the taken-for-granted, and uncovering the linguistic, discursive, and cultural processes that serve to subordinate some people while privileging others. The chapters are organized around three themes: Identity, Class, and Difference; Gender, Ethnicity, and Education; and Gender, Ethnicity, and Language. The diverse sociocultural contexts in which the data and analyses are situated help to illustrate symbolic struggles and identity politics that are being engaged in by peoples in different cultures, languages, and societies of the world, offering insights from multidisciplinary, trans-cultural, and trans-local perspectives. By offering a comprehensive integration and clarification/ delineation of the different ways identity has been thought about and used in different theoretical traditions, and discussing the implications of different theoretical senses of "identity" for language educators, this volume will be useful to undergraduate and graduate students, researchers, and educators in sociolinguistics, applied linguistics, discourse analysis, sociology, education, gender studies, and cultural and media studies.

Language and Culture

Language and Culture PDF Author: David Nunan
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135153914
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 247

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Book Description
This state-of-the-art exploration of language, culture, and identity is orchestrated through prominent scholars’ and teachers’ narratives, each weaving together three elements: a personal account based on one or more memorable or critical incidents that occurred in the course of learning or using a second or foreign language; an interpretation of the incidents highlighting their impact in terms of culture, identity, and language; the connections between the experiences and observations of the author and existing literature on language, culture and identity. What makes this book stand out is the way in which authors meld traditional ‘academic’ approaches to inquiry with their own personalized voices. This opens a window on different ways of viewing and doing research in Applied Linguistics and TESOL. What gives the book its power is the compelling nature of the narratives themselves. Telling stories is a fundamental way of representing and making sense of the human condition. These stories unpack, in an accessible but rigorous fashion, complex socio-cultural constructs of culture, identity, the self and other, and reflexivity, and offer a way into these constructs for teachers, teachers in preparation and neophyte researchers. Contributors from around the world give the book broad and international appeal.

Intercultural Spaces

Intercultural Spaces PDF Author: Aileen Pearson-Evans
Publisher: Peter Lang
ISBN: 9780820495460
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 326

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Book Description
This selection of peer-reviewed essays is taken from the Royal Irish Academy Symposium Intercultural Spaces: Language, Culture, Identity, hosted by Dublin City University in November 2003. It brings together a fascinating range of scholarly interpretations of the 'intercultural space' with rich contributions coming from the fields of sociology, politics, language teaching and learning, translation, drama, literature, and history. Individually each essay draws the reader into its own particular 'intercultural space' shaped by the norms and parameters of the discipline within which it is being described. As a collection, however, the essays link these usually separate spaces together to forge new and exciting interdisciplinary connections. This collection offers readers from many different disciplines a comprehensive array of interpretations and insights into the phenomenon that is the 'intercultural space', and invites them to explore the richness of this concept as it is revealed in Intercultural Spaces: Language, Culture, Identity.

Language and Identity

Language and Identity PDF Author: David Evans
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 0567566145
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
Language not only expresses identities but also constructs them. Starting from that point, Language and Identity examines the interrelationships between language and identities. It finds that they are so closely interwoven, that words themselves are inscribed with ideological meanings. Words and language constitute meanings within discourses and discourses vary in power. The powerful ones reproduce more powerful meanings, colonize other discourses and marginalize or silence the least powerful languages and cultures. Language and culture death occur in extreme cases of marginalization. This book also demonstrates the socio-economic opportunities offered by language choice and the cultural allegiances of language, where groups have been able to create new lives for themselves by embracing new languages in new countries. Language can be a 'double-edged sword' of opportunity and marginalization. Language and Identity argues that bilingualism and in some cases multilingualism can both promote socio-economic opportunity and combat culture death and marginalization. With sound theoretical perspectives drawing upon the work of Bakhtin, Vygotsky, Gumperz, Foucault and others, this book provides readers with a rationale to redress social injustice in the world by supporting minority linguistic and cultural identities and an acknowledgement that access to language can provide opportunity.

Language and Culture

Language and Culture PDF Author: Claire Kramsch
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 9780194372145
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 148

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Book Description
This work investigates the close relationship between language and culture. It explains key concepts such as social context and cultural authenticity, using insights from fields which includes linguistics, sociology, and anthropology.

The Politics of Language : Conflict, Identity, and Cultural Pluralism in Comparative Perspective

The Politics of Language : Conflict, Identity, and Cultural Pluralism in Comparative Perspective PDF Author: Carol L. Schmid Professor of Sociology Guilford Technical Community College
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0195350219
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 230

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Book Description
Important aspects of the history of language in the United States remain shrouded in myth and legend. The notion of "one nation, one language" is part of the idealized history of the United States, although in its short history it has probably been host to more bilingual people than any other country in the world. Language is more than a means of communication. It brings into play an entire range of experiences and attitudes toward life. Furthermore, language is a potent symbolic issue because it links power and political claims of ownership with psychological demands for group worth. How people belonging to different language and cultural communities live together in the same political community and how political and structural tensions arise to divide them along language lines, are questions addressed in The Politics of Language. This book analyzes the historical background and recent controversy over language in the United States and compares it to two official multilingual societies: Canada and Switzerland. It's accessibility as a survey of this topic makes it ideal for courses in linguistics, political science, and sociology.