CLER Seminar - 2nd December

The next Centre for Language Education Research seminar at University of Leeds will take place on Wednesday 2 December, 1-2, in the Coach House at Hillary Place. Martin Lamb from University of Leeds will be talking about Desire for English in the semiotics of an Indonesian product leaflet (abstract below).

Seminars are free and open to all, and we look forward to welcoming you.

“OH, HI. HELLO”: Desire for English in the semiotics of an Indonesian product leaflet

Martin Lamb, University of Leeds

Motha and Lin have argued that ‘at the center of every English language learning moment lies desire’ (2014: 331). In this talk I’ll draw on data from a longitudinal study of 9 Indonesian learners of English, interviewed several times during the period 2002-2015, to explore the way English is perceived in contemporary urban society, and the identities and power that it affords to those who can appropriate it. The first piece of data will be a product leaflet written by one of the participants, Tahira, an elite school pupil at age 12 and at age 23 already the part-owner of 3 online accessories businesses while doing a part-time Master’s programme; a critical discourse analysis of this leaflet uncovers the shared desires and mutual recognition of the new metropolitan elite. The second will be the talk in interview of Ridwan, an educational under-achiever now struggling to earn a living on the fringes of the Jakarta fashion industry. Though having only very ‘truncated repertoires’ (Blommaert 2010) he also deploys his English language resources to earn recognition as a young man of substance. By focussing on two people at different ends of the educational spectrum, I hope to highlight both the near-universal desire for English as valued cultural capital, and some of the factors that make it so unequally distributed.

References

Motha, S., & Lin, A. (2014). “Non-coercive Rearrangements”: Theorizing Desire in TESOL. TESOL Quarterly, 48(2), 331-359. doi: 10.1002/tesq.126

Blommaert, J. (2010). The Sociolinguistics of Globalization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.