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Programme: accepted abstracts

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Abstract ID: 979

Part of Session 151: Language and Hyperdiversity in the Global City (Other abstracts in this session)

Imagining spaces for learning English. Language trajectories and real life experience in the city of London

Authors: Moyer, Melissa (1); Baynham, Mike (2)
Submitted by: Moyer, Melissa (universitat autònoma de barcelona, Spain)

London is a mosaic of urban spaces (often thought of as urban villages) that attracts learners of English from around the world. It is a particular kind of imagined community theorized by Anderson (1991) where what is somehow imagined as authentic British culture and language can be experienced and acquired firsthand. It is composed of  geographical (neighbourhoods, areas, urban villages)   and networked spaces of contact as described by Pratt (1991) where hybrid practices, identities, and autoethnographic texts get produced by persons who travel there to learn English in an assumed “authentic milieu” which however due to its hyperdiversity no longer fits the imagined ideal speech community characterized in the same way as Labov’s urban dialect studies (1972).

The present paper draws on data from an on-going study of autoethnographic texts produced by six persons in their late twenties and thirties who have primarily traveled to London to learn English in order to improve their chances of obtaining employment in their country of origin. Oral narratives obtained from in-depth interviews of their life experience in London and migration trajectory serves to question the ideologies about ideal spaces for language learning as well as the imagination of London as an authentic space to learn English. The data also problematizes language and its users as belonging to more defined and static speech communities which language learners who come to London envision.

 The narrative analysis, while examining on one hand the construction of these contact zones as spatial practices (de Certeau 1988, Harvey 1989) will also foreground  the construction in narrative of mobile subjects, through an examination of identity work achieved through expressions of  stance, positioning and alignment (Baynham 2011) in relation to  networked communication practices and interactional sites, and will illustrate the way new superdiverse translocal spaces which are no longer constrained by defined locations and time get constructed and (re)produced by mobile subjects. The data also show how the emergence of language practices both horizontally and vertically is a fundamental element in enacting social relations of power and resistance and how forms of local and transnational networking interact within the super-diverse context of the networked neighbourhooded city as described by Vertovec (2006) and Sassen (2006). 

References:

Anderson, B. 1991. Imagined Communities. London: Verso.

Baynham, M. 2011. Stance, positioning and alignment in narratives of professional  experience. Language in Society, 40: 63-74.

de Certeau, M. 1988. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Harvey, D. 1989. The Condition of Postmodernity:An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Oxford: Blackwell.

Labov, W. 1972. Language in the Inner City. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Pratt, M. L.1991. Arts of the contact zone. Profession 91. New York: MLA, 33-40.

Sassen, S. 2006. Cities in a World Economy. London: Pine Oaks Press.

Vertovec, S. 2006. The Emergence of Super-Diversity in Britain, Centre for Migration, Policy and Society, Working Paper No. 25, Oxford: University of Oxford.