SAMPLE STUDIES

Tracing culture in L2 commentary text: An exploratory crosslinguistic approach to intercultural rhetoric - (Ongoing)

 Different to the contrastive rhetoric which views writing as a materialist production of organizational patterns and rhetorical features trademarked across languages and cultures (i.e. Kaplan, 1966), intercultural rhetoric (IR) research relies on a dynamic conceptualization of culture (Atkinson, 2004; Connor, 1996, 2011; Gentil, 2018; Holliday, 1999), which affirms active processes of ongoing negotiations and maintained meaning making systems. Drawing upon Atkinson’s (2004) dynamic conceptualization of culture and Connor’s (2018) multilayered model of IR, this study examines the productive rhetorical processes in commentary writing in two language courses, beginning Arabic and French. Specifically, the study attempts to explore students and instructors’ knowledge of the functions of culture in L2 language writing, including writing conventions as understood across students’ linguistic and cultural repertoires, knowledge and practice of the genre-based organizational patterns, descriptive crosslinguistic features, and finally the potential crosslinguistic factors that inform IR in these writings. The study is directed by three main questions, with the third question being contingent upon the interpretations of the first two questions:

• How do students negotiate patterns of intercultural rhetoric in their commentary writing?

• How do their rhetorical patterns manifest in these texts and what inform such choices?

• What can crosslinguistic variation tell us about the affordances of interculturality in this genre of writing? 

Promoting Arabic in the Middle East & North Africa (MENA): Host grounded study-abroad discourses.

 Abstract: Following the 9/11 tragedies, the interest in Arabic language and culture in non-traditional destinations such as MENA (Middle East & North Africa) has become vastly obscured with sociocultural and political issues. The mandate to maintain national security served to designate the language and its destinations critical, producing the hegemony of a political rationality that thrives on the globalist commodification of language and risks the homogenization of world cultures. To interrogate these essentialist discourses and others, we examine the ideologies underlying MENA host-grounded discourses to discern the valorization of the language in those destinations, as steered by the needs of globalization and power relations. Drawing upon an adapted, complementary multimodal critical discourse analysis (MCDA) approach, the current study analyzes the linguistic and visual resources of three study abroad (SA) programs’ websites. We argue that the orientalist gaze is bidirectional within the host and US based discourse for matters of sociopolitical and economic interdependencies and that joint constructions of global hierarchies and economic inaccessibilities remain prevalent.

Keywords: Arabic; Study Abroad; MENA; Promotional Discourse; Identity.

The discursive tensions of Darija in Morocco's online news articles: A diachronic corpus-assisted approach. 

Abstract: In keeping with a diachronic corpus-assisted discourse approach, this study explores

the way Darija, the colloquial Arabic variety in Morocco, has been discursively

constructed in online news articles over a ten-year timespan. To this end, a specialized

corpus of over one million words was compiled from the news website Hespress.

The study integrates the analysis of collocational frequencies and contextual

examination of concordances, interrogating the links of the discourses encircling

Darija with major sociopolitical events. Notwithstanding the local deep-seated

linguistic rivalries and the prevailing standard-language ideology, the findings

suggest that Darija during this period adopts a joint discourse of resistance with

Amazighiya (Berber) against the Arabophone ideology, arguing for a consolidated

constituency of Moroccanness, fundamental to the maintenance and (re)production

of the country’s cultural identity. Such findings shed light on language as a site of

struggle, in which issues of social and institutional inequities are negotiated between

contested ideologies.

Keywords: Darija; Colloquial Arabic; Standard Arabic; Language Ideology; Language Equity.