CTTS News

CTTS Research Seminar: Dr Krisztina Zimányi (University of Guanajuato, Mexico) “Small-scale case studies on teacher´s self-interpreting in the EFL classroom”.

CTTS Visitor Dr Krisztina Zimányi (University of Guanajuato, Mexico) will give a seminar from 3pm to 4pm, Monday, 26 June in Room C135, Dublin City University.

Title: Small-scale case studies on teacher´s self-interpreting in the EFL classroom

Due to the still reigning prevalence of the Communicative Language Teaching method (CLT) (Canale & Swain, 1980; Widdowson, 1978) in Mexico, both the students (and their parents in the case of children) and the institutions expect the teachers to follow an English-only approach in the EFL classroom. However, so far undocumented evidence suggests that teachers often resort to Spanish in their instruction whether due ideological motives, because they subscribe to the more recently emerged English as an International Language (EIL) approach (c.f. Alsagoff et al., 2012; Holliday, 2006; McKay, 2002; Sharifan, 2009), or simply for practical reasons.

The current project aims to explore this phenomenon by classifying the code-switching/code-mixing interactions (Brian, 2000; Cook, 2010; Cook, Hall & Cook, 2013; Lin, 2008; Martin-Jones, 1995; Polio & Duff, 1994, Simon, 2001), in the EFL classroom in Central Mexico through the analysis of transcripts of video recordings of EFL teacher trainees . Following a case by case methodology, the teachers’ self-interpreted utterances (between the L1, Spanish, and the L2, English) will be categorised along the taxonomy established by Cecilia Wadensjö (2014) in the field of Community Interpreting (CI). It is hoped that this classification will help in the understanding of the discursive contexts the teachers utilize when interpreting themselves and reveal why they may employ these techniques in their communication with the students.

 

All are welcome to attend.