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National identities have been challenged by European integration, globalisation, migration and regionalisation. More recently, there has been a resurgence of nationhood and national identity which begs the question how education systems, and curricula in particular, are responding to this. This article explores how national identity is reflected in history, geography and civic education curricula in France and Ireland. More specifically, it examines how national, European and international aspects are intertwined in these state curricula. This question is explored through a case study of curriculum units and subunits as well as discourses of how identity is being promoted in the curriculum. Our analysis highlights that French curricula privilege national topics, especially in history and civic education, whereas Irish curricula veer between national, European and international (global) notions. Our analysis explores the extent to which macro-political discourses around national identity are reflected in the shaping of the subject curricula in two countries. While the article focuses on France and Ireland, the discussions are also of interest to other jurisdictions regarding the civic expectations and role of schools in promoting national (or other) identities.

Implementation of any inclusive policy is dependent on longstanding conceptions, beliefs, and public discourses on schooling, learning, and including children in mainstream schooling. The adoption of inclusive education in education policies in France and the United Kingdom requires discursive support to reshape the meaning and content of teachers' work, duties and practices. Although inclusive education is widely debated, analyses of the variations in policy narratives promoting inclusive teaching in Europe are lacking. This article reports on comparative and international analysis of discourses and policies for empowering teachers for continuous professional development and inclusive school practices. The analysis focuses on an exploration of varieties of articulations, resources, and conceptual dynamics in the UK and France. These elements are discussed within the broader scheme of the teaching profession, with reference to the inclusive education paradigm.

The doctoral defence is the oral examination of the doctoral thesis. While it is a major milestone for doctoral candidates, this event is often shrouded in mystery. In this article, I explore the doctoral defence from an international perspective. I have studied the format of the defence based on written testimonies as well as the literature on this topic. From this analysis, I distinguish four main elements of the defence format: (1) timing of the defence with respect to thesis publication, (2) number of steps in the defence, (3) public or private defence, and (4) the timeline of the defence itself. I then use these building blocks of the doctoral defence format to discuss differences and similarities between the formats, and finally to categorize defence formats used internationally by analysing the format of 26 countries, 24 of which use an oral defence format. The result is a deeper understanding of the defence format, which is valuable for candidates, committee members, supervisors, and administrators, and which can also serve the current discussions within the European Union on a standard format for the doctoral defence. Ultimately, understanding the defence format removes the mystery surrounding the defence.

This article examines the integration of Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) in the French educational system and more especially in primary schooling. The research question concerns the purposes, the form of integration and the definition of the content of ESD. To answer these questions, I present and analyse the main features of these three questions as presented in the official texts of the Ministry of Education. I also draw on a case study focusing on the integration of ESD at primary level. Thirty-four semi-directive interviews were carried out with local ESD actors working in two communes in southern France. In this study, the interviews were subjected to thematic analysis using NVivo 12 software. The results show that, both in the official texts and in the discourse of the interviewees, the purposes of ESD tend to be civic and emancipatory. Furthermore, while the choice of content is left to the actors on the ground, the incoherence and lack of clarity of the official texts complicates their task. They thus have difficulty in setting ESD projects within an interdisciplinary approach.

In this study, we draw data from a tripartite telecollaborative project that involved 112 teacher candidates (TCs) from university-based teacher education programmes in France, Turkey, and the USA. Theoretically, we rely on Pantic's (2015. A model for study of teacher agency for social justice. "Teachers and Teaching" 21, no. 6: 759-778) model of teacher agency for social justice and use discourse analytic methods (Gee. 2018. "Introducing Discourse Analysis"; from Grammar to Society. Routledge) to examine how TCs negotiated their agency for social justice in small group discussions around the topics of social justice (e.g. conditions of refugees and immigrants, gender inequities, and LGBTQ+ rights) in their educational contexts. We found that when TCs used agentive positionings in their discussions, their discourse involved first person pronouns coupled with will + infinitive structure (e.g. I will teach …) followed by specific plans of action, as opposed to when agentive positioning was lacking with the use of generic pronouns and hypothetical structures (e.g. teachers/everyone would/could …). We also found that TCs used the discursive space of telecollaboration to negotiate their agencies and had variable success as they navigated tensions in their beliefs and positioned themselves as future social justice teachers in relation to the discussion topics. Their positionings demonstrated their level of engagement and their individual/collective efficacy. Our findings suggest that future research should continue to investigate the micro-level discourse involved in telecollaborative spaces.

In any society there is a link between social-intellectual (ideological) views and discursive structures in media. Therefore, it is possible to discover this relationship by clarifying appropriate discursive remedies in text analysis and eventually determining how it is and its application. Some journalists are very skillful in literature, their discussion talent and their ability to manipulate the language result in complexity in language form and also in semantic features. Many fundamental factors are involved in production and comprehension of the press texts. The main objective of the current study is to investigate some of these factors such as powers relations in the society and also political and ideological institutions in press texts. Applying a discourse analysis approach and considering news theories, this study tries to analyze French press texts and explore the ways information is transferred to the addressees through word selection. The findings of this study indicate that mass media (and newspapers) are tools for expanding the ideology in the society because, facing the same issue, they take different positions according to their interests. The investigation of how this information is transferred is possible through discourse analysis. We try to show how French express media manipulate public opinion by using different vocabularies.

Our study draws from discussion board data from a telecollaboration including three teacher education courses in France, Turkey, and the USA. Our data analysis of three groups' conversations (n = 21) addressed this research question: How do participants use translingual negotiation strategies in online contact zones as they construct their cultural, linguistic, and professional identities? The findings indicate that preservice teachers employed: Envoicing and interactional strategies to create a caring teacher identity and resolve conflicts; recontextualizing strategies to maintain the frame of culturally-responsive instruction through their linguistic choices; and entextualizing strategies to locate self in time and space when discussing future teaching and diverse students.

Football stadiums have traditionally been named after local sites (e.g. "Goodison Park," Everton FC) or regions ("Ruhrstadion," VfL Bochum). As big business takes increasing precedence in decision making in football at large (e.g. associations and leagues, regarding fixtures, media coverage, kick-off times, player transfers, etc.) and within individual football clubs (e.g. regarding kits and sponsorship), such toponyms are more and more being replaced by company or product names (e.g. "bet365 Stadium," Stoke City). In this paper, we will consider corporate renamings from the German Bundesliga, the English Premier League and the French Ligue 1 and particularly fan reactions to controversial, badly received corporate renamings. As revealed by earlier studies, in our data here we also find the discourse and practices of the fans celebrating local identification with their city or region, often with the stadiums constituting the homestead of a tradition. Where corporate stadium renamings are badly received, this discourse clashes with the discourse of big business and thus a number of tensions are revealed. More specifically, in fans' reactions to controversial corporate stadium renamings, we find a number of recurrent themes -- for example, concerning consequences to fans' identity to the club; in managing (anticipated) humorous retorts from rivals consequent from the stadium renaming; in resisting, but also feeling resigned to, financial pressures in selling the stadium name; etc. -- some of them across our three national contexts and others specific to one national context.

According to recommendations of the UN Secretary General's Global Education First Initiative, countries and regions require a number of structural changes if they are to implement educational policies and practice based on global citizenship education, and to promote respect and responsibility across cultures. In this paper, we present the first results of a three-year project to compare existing educational policies, strategies and school curricula in ten European Union (EU) countries (Austria, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, France, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Spain, Portugal, UK) to ascertain the current level of such structural changes. Through a comparative policy analysis, we investigated whether, to what extent, and how global citizenship education is integrated within primary school curricula. The article focuses on national governmental agencies--specifically two main bodies in each country, the ministries of foreign affairs and education--and their political discourses. We argue that the gap between the two traditions, with separate approaches, purposes, concepts and bureaucracies, represents a strategic political challenge for the introduction of global citizenship education in primary schools.

Comprehension substantially benefits from attending to, thinking about, and mentally representing the sources of any presented information. Such processes require mental effort and unfortunately people do not always engage in such activities. The current article presents a nascent, evolving model of discourse comprehension that formalizes mechanisms to predict and explain people's strategic use of source information. The discrepancy-induced source comprehension (D-ISC) model and its theoretical assumptions describe the moment-by-moment cognitive processes in which readers engage when they interact with potentially contradictory or controversial messages presented by different information sources. The utility of the model is supported by evidence from a growing research base examining single- and multiple-text comprehension experiences. The D-ISC model is also useful for suggesting future directions that could help build more-nuanced understandings of the ways that diverse readers engage in sourcing activities within everyday discourse contexts.

In Bourdieusian theory, the use of so-called 'legitimate' language serves to maintain dominant power structures, with 'legitimacy' determined by an array of economic and social conditions inherent in speech communities. Standard languages function as normalised products and are imbued with a greater degree of legitimacy than non-standard varieties due to the Standard Language Ideology (SLI). This leads us to question what happens when a non-dominant language seeks to acquire greater legitimacy and prestige. Can standardisation increase legitimacy for varieties subjected to centuries of political and ideological subordination? What then happens to minority languages when there is not one clear standard, but rather a pluricentric situation with competing solutions? We examine speaker testimonies regarding the standardisation of Occitan and Catalan in France. We show that the discursive construction of legitimacy for standard varieties is contingent on the ideological creation of linguistic difference. We conclude that the application of the SLI to non-dominant language varieties results in the complex renegotiation of value in the Bourdieusian 'linguistic market', which is clearly attestable at the individual, discursive level. We recommend that attempts to subvert existing hegemony and challenge social order need to address underlying ideologies held by minority language speakers.

The present study investigated the effects of group set-up in a semester-long telecollaborative discussion forum project in second-semester German. In order to explore whether group set-up affects learning in discussion forums, small groups of non-native speakers (NNS) of German were partnered either with native speakers (NS), other NNS with the same L1, or other NNS with different L1s. The study compared participation and negotiation of meaning routines between the three groups, and assessed overall writing development of the second-semester German learners as a result of forum participation. Data were analyzed using descriptive statistics as well as an analysis of the negotiation of meaning episodes (Varonis & Gass, 1985) to reveal whether any of the three groups offers a more productive language learning environment. Results indicate that the NS--NNS groups participated the most in the forum and produced the highest amount of negotiation of meaning routines. Students reached higher writing proficiency than comparable second-semester students who did not complete a discussion forum task.

For many decades, Francophone regions in Canada have provided language study exchanges for French as a second language (FSL) learners within their own country. At the same time, FSL students and teachers in Canada continue to orient to a native speaker standard associated with European French. This Eurocentric orientation manifested itself in a recent study examining conceptions of authentic language among Canadian FSL teachers on professional study abroad in France. Taking an interactional perspective (De Fina & Georgakopoulou, 2012), this article examines how the teachers negotiated discourses of language subordination (Lippi-Green, 1997) that construct Canadian French as less authentic than French from France. Findings show some teachers drawing on this hierarchization of French to "authenticate" (Coupland, 2010) an identity as French language expert, either by contrasting European and Canadian varieties of French or by projecting France as the locus of French language and culture as exclusively representative of authentic "Frenchness."

This paper revisits the notion of 'legitimate language' [e.g. Bourdieu 1977. "The Economics of Linguistic Exchange." "Social Science Information" 16 (6): 645-668] as it relates to multilingualism in educational contexts. Since Heller [1996. "Legitimate Language in a Multilingual School." "Linguistics and Education" 8: 139-157] developed the notion of 'legitimate language' to encompass issues of language choice, there has been a consensus that a legitimate language is a language that is "appropriate" in a given situation. However, a crucial issue remains to be addressed, namely that of knowing what benchmark do classroom participants use to know when a language is appropriate, that is, legitimate or not. To address this issue, this paper takes as an example the case of an induction classroom for newly-arrived immigrant children in France where multiple languages have been observed. A Conversation Analysis of a set of audio-recorded interactions reveals that whilst languages other than French are not legitimised by top-down language policies and ideologies held at the societal and institutional levels, they are nevertheless seen as legitimate according to the local 'practiced language policy' [Bonacina-Pugh 2012. "Researching 'Practiced Language Policies': Insights from Conversation Analysis." "Language Policy" 11 (3): 213-234]. This paper thus argues for a multi-layered understanding of legitimacy and shows how in the classroom under study, and possibly in other multilingual classrooms, practiced language policies play a key role in the legitimisation of multilingual language practices.

In this contribution, we argue that consideration should be given to the implications of a holistic approach to language acquisition as a fundamental part of plurilingual and pluricultural education serving several aims of a knowledge-based and innovative learning through metalinguistic knowledge, well beyond developing communicative competence in the language of schooling. By analysing discourse data, we examine to what extent the success of such a plurilingual education is dependent on how the notion of plurilingual speaker is presented, represented by visual images, taught, developed as well as broadly discussed (and understood) among the school community.

This study explores the interplay of nationalism and English Language Teaching (ELT) classroom practices, as reported in 11 interviews with ELT educators in various locations (e.g., United States, Serbia, France, and Saudi Arabia). The study approach is informed by theories of discursive nationalism which interpret nations and nationalized things (e.g., nationalized cultures) as social constructions maintained and managed through discourse. Qualitative analysis of interview data identified teacher-reported practices reflective of national reproduction (e.g., analogy-making and neutral stance-taking) and of national transformation (e.g., recasting nationalized things to global levels and engaging students with cultural and linguistic diversity within an otherwise coherent nationalized culture). The data reporting national reproduction are consistent with the existing literature, and the teacher reports of national transformation offer something new to the existing literature on nationalism in ELT. The analysis further highlighted teacher-reported use of assimilation/dissimilation discursive strategies in representing nationalized things to their students. The study findings contribute to a comprehensive understanding of how the ideology of nationalism intersects with ELT classroom practices. Such an understanding is valuable to the critical project of raising teacher sensitivity to the implications national representations have for social relations of power and privilege outside the classroom.

Resolving the inability to produce a word through a gestural realization is often a compensatory strategy used with aphasic patients. However, context and interpersonal knowledge between participants are also essential factors for finding or guessing the right word or the right gesture. In the "Interactions between Aphasic people & Caregivers" project, we explore video-recorded interactions between a single patient with aphasia and her caregivers (family or speech therapists). Video recorded data involving this patient in interaction with different caregivers allows us to more accurately analyze the interactional compensatory strategies used by caregivers and patients according to their communicative habits. We will be particularly interested in an interactional situation between a speech therapist (Anna) with her aphasic patient (Aïcha) during a single reeducation session. We will analyze the place of gesture in this conversation. We will show how the interactional skills of the two speakers are constantly called into question, especially when the patient, is engaged in an activity of "gestural repetitions." We will see that to resolve the lack of a particular word, the patient can perform gestural representations. Through the analysis of three excerpts, we reveal that the gestural retraining of the aphasic patient is as important as her/his speech reeducation and we will show to what extent the speech therapy is essential in relearning to communicate. Our work contributes to existing linguistic and clinical research in that it focuses not only on the patient, but also on the caregiver (the speech therapist).

Discourses which seek to position different speakers/users of Breton through the use of labels such as 'traditional', 'new', 'learner', 'néo-bretonnant', 'brittophone', etc. draw on persistent essentialist ideologies of language and create, in the process, contested elites and counter-elites in Breton-speaking networks. These discourses can be counter-productive towards projects which aim at producing multilingual citizens in Brittany at the present time. This article examines how stances of different speakers towards other speakers of Breton can involve jostling for positions of power within the Breton-speaking community and how attempts at creating elites and counter-elites seem to be a defining feature of contemporary revitalisation efforts in Brittany. This characterisation may, however, miss a 'third space' which some social actors may seek to engage with. These discourses are examined in this article through a critical sociolinguistic exploration of how (elite) multilingualism is constructed, maintained and contested by different actors in the Breton language community.

One strand of comparative didactics aims at discussing the relationships between the theoretical constructions developed within subject didactics and how these can contribute to research about teaching and learning. This article explores the relationships between categories for analysing joint actions of teacher and students (didactic contract, milieu, mesogenesis, topogenesis, chronogenesis) and categories used in the pragmatist approach of classroom discourse analysis (practical epistemology and epistemological moves). We combine both frameworks to feature different types of breaches in the didactic contract and the building of continuity in teaching and learning actions for dealing with these breaches. Analyses are carried out through examples of classroom events in science education and physical education. We argue that these frameworks, when elaborated on and compared, enable us to characterise both generic and specific dimensions of teaching and learning in different subjects.

At its inception in 1993, the European Union (EU) did not consider education one of the pillars of its regional cohesiveness and identity. As time went by, recognition of the potential role of education at individual and social levels increased. This concern for education, however, is much more centred on the acquisition of knowledge and skills towards developing a competitive labour force than towards facilitating the integration of all citizens in the European community--a bias which is reflected in EU policies and recommendations. At local levels, communities need to offer educational opportunities to all members of society, irrespective of their social, cultural and linguistic background and their level of education. In many EU member countries, this kind of learning is offered by "popular universities" (PUs), which are not state-funded and run in close collaboration with their respective local communities. The authors of this paper carried out a qualitative survey, collecting data on PUs in Spain and France. Their purpose was to examine how European PU offerings align with community needs, and to what extent they address emerging issues such as immigration, the refugee crisis, an aging population and youth unemployment. In the evaluation of their comparative survey, the authors link the grassroots approaches of PUs in Spain and France to the broader European Union (EU) discourse on lifelong learning (LLL) as seen in policy documents such as the European Commission's "Memorandum on Lifelong Learning". Finally, they examine the ways in which PUs' approach to LLL works to contest the dominant consensus on the meaning and scope of lifelong learning, offering an alternative way forward.

Academic careers are social processes which involve many members of large populations over long periods of time. This paper outlines a discursive perspective which looks into how academics are categorized in academic systems. From a discursive view, academic careers are organized by categories which can define who academics are (subjectivation) and what they are worth (valuation). The question of this paper is what institutional categorizations such as status and salaries can tell us about academic subject positions and their valuation. By comparing formal status systems and salary scales in France with those in the U.S., Great Britain and Germany, this paper reveals the constraints of institutional categorization systems on academic careers. Special attention is given to the French system of status categories which is relatively homogeneous and restricts the competitive valuation of academics between institutions. The comparison shows that academic systems such as the U.S. which are characterized by a high level of heterogeneity typically present more negotiation opportunities for the valuation of academics. From a discursive perspective, institutional categories, therefore, can reflect the ways in which academics are valuated in the inter-institutional job market, by national bureaucracies or in professional oligarchies.

In our study we analyse how the same interactional dynamic is produced in two different pedagogical settings exploiting a desktop videoconference system. We propose to focus our attention on a specific type of conversational side sequence, known in the Francophone literature as sequences of normative evaluation. More particularly, we analyse data from two telecollaborative projects through desktop videoconference: a French-Chinese tandem, and a French-Irish telecollaboration between trainee teachers and learners of French as a foreign language. The comparison of two different pedagogical settings allows us to understand what types of interactional dynamics are co-constructed through the desktop videoconference environment and which characteristics are specific to each pedagogical setting. Within a socio-interactionist perspective, we analysed four hours of interactions, focusing particularly on the transmodal enactment of the sequences under scrutiny and its relation to learners' uptake. Our results show on the one hand that there are some quantitative differences in the production of sequences of normative evaluation between the two pedagogical settings, and on the other hand that, contrary to our hypothesis, the co-construction of these sequences does not differ in multimodal density across the two contexts. We discuss these results and propose some tentative explanations for them.

Higher education institutions are increasingly interested in offering more flexible teaching and learning delivery methods that are often independent of place. Where foreign language learning is concerned, telecollaboration is gaining ground. This paper focuses on synchronous webconferencing-supported teaching and examines how different semiotic resources are used during lexical explanation sequences. The context is a telecollaborative exchange between Business students learning French and trainee teachers on a Master's programme in Teaching French as a Foreign Language. Using multimodal transcriptions of interaction data from two sessions, the sequential analysis provides access to different combinations of semiotic resources. These include using the visual mode to project active listening strategies and the complementary role of the text chat to secure common ground concerning the target item. The analysis sheds light on a "thinking break" strategy employed by the trainees. Descriptive examples demonstrate how verbal explanations were accompanied, firstly, by deictic and iconic gestures and, secondly, by metaphoric gestures used to help forefront different properties of the target item. Finally, changes in gaze and proximity were observed as playing a role in interaction management and in signalling which verbal modality was forefronted. The study illustrates emerging pedagogical and multimodal communication strategies for "doing vocabulary teaching".

Although a well-established domain of research in English language teaching, native-speaker ideologies have received little attention in French language education. This article reports on a study that examined the salience of "authentic French" in the identity construction of French as a second language (FSL) teachers in English-speaking Canada. Adopting a discursive-constructionist approach, the qualitative multiple case study analyzed FSL teachers' discursive representations of their experiences while on professional development in France. Findings point to FSL teachers' continuing orientation to a native-speaker ideal and its significant impact on their professional self-conceptions. The discussion focuses on how non-francophone teachers in particular negotiate a legitimate identity as FSL teachers through various discursive processes. Implications of the study foreground identity as a key factor in how teachers learn and practise their profession and remind us that non--native-speaker teachers must be given opportunities to develop alternative ideas about what it means to be a competent language teacher.

At the heart of the nineteenth-century educational soundscape lies a paradox. Whilst "modern" classrooms generally strived for orderly silence, the goal of its educational practices was the production of competent "citizens". Middle-class boys in particular were expected to acquire a voice fit for business, the professions, or even (political) public speech whilst quietly listening to a teacher. This silence within the educational institution has generally been understood as an element of discipline. In this paper I want to examine the paradox of the silent classroom and the speaking citizen. I will focus specifically on those instances where the clear goal of education was vocal sound (i.e. fluent speech, civilised pronunciation, and song) and look at how silence was mobilised by educators. I will argue that the silences employed in these educational practices were not (only) tools of order and discipline, but rather means to create a "borderland" where the leap between childhood and its uncivilised noises, and adulthood and its rational speech, could be made. I will draw upon the interpretations of silence as "in between" signs as it has been developed by semioticians to analyse a corpus of sources consisting mainly of French, German, and English pedagogical literature focusing on the development of children's voices. Reframing the place of silence in "institutionalised" education allows us to delve deeper into the specific ways in which "discipline" (re)produced and articulated dichotomies of power.

This text through the direct use to Foucault's work and using the concepts of "care of the self" and biopolitics is questioning and analyzing resistance and practices of freedom. Mainly, from the Foucault's courses at the College de France and the methodological tools found there, here I present a discussion about Gilles Deleuze's contributions to Foucault's thought and I develop a dialog where I try to explain the concepts of domination, power, ethics, esthetics and the relationship of the self with himself.

This article traces the evolution of the French policy PISA debate from 2001 to 2014 by analysing the results of two original qualitative researches. Theoretically, this debate is the outcome of specific policy configurations, which predetermine its scope, content and effectiveness. These configurations are themselves described through their political, institutional, professional and cognitive dimensions. Thus, three configurations are highlighted, all of which favour different public discourses: the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) is seen as a topic only interesting to insiders (2001-2004), then as a politicised ranking (2005-2010) and, finally, as a tool purely for communication (2010-2014). The article shows that the major effect of PISA on the French education policy debate was to confirm and legitimate pre-existing opinions and policy stances, and that PISA was progressively scooped out from its statistical content.

France has a long tradition of linguistic prescriptivism, linked to a casuistic metalinguistic literature going back to Vaugelas, Gilles Ménage, and others. This type of normative discourse has survived into the twenty-first century, but is affected by changes in the media. Since the emergence of mass media in the late nineteenth century, national newspapers have contained a popular genre, the "chronique de langage," language chronicles, written mainly by people from the literary world, philologists and--in some cases--linguists. Until the 1970s these "chroniques" were among the most popular articles in the French press. Authors like Abel Hermant, Marcel Cohen, Jacques Cellard and Claude Duneton have since the 1970s shaped the public linguistic conscience, responding to an obvious public need for normative orientation. Although there is a certain decline of this genre to be observed, metalinguistic discussion continues to play an important role in popular French media. The attitudes towards prescriptivism merit reflection. Have there been changes in normative attitudes during the last decades? Do these "chroniques" serve as prescriptive language usage guides, or should they, on the contrary, rather be seen as popularized non-normative linguistics? This study focuses on some of the most popular twentieth-century "chroniques."

The aim of this paper is to analyse certain techniques of subjectivation in modern child-rearing and the way in which medical discourse leads to the construction of children through those techniques. As a case study, several manuals on childcare used during the first third of the twentieth century in Spain and France have been selected. A historical-genealogical perspective is adopted, according to which childhood is not a natural or ahistorical category, but depends on cultural practices. In Western countries, these practices have been strongly influenced by expert discourses. The techniques proposed in the manuals are identified and the theoretical justification for them analysed according to the socio-cultural and historical context. It is shown in what sense the practices recommended by doctors for mothers constituted a kind of early informal education contributing to the creation of future well-educated citizens.

Our paper aims to present students' interactions in a teletandem--that is, tandem through desktop videoconference [Telles, J., ed. 2009. "Teletandem. Um contexto virtual, autônomo, colaborativo para aprendizagem das linguas estrangeiras no século XXI". Campinas, SP: Pontes Editores]--telecollaborative project between third-year undergraduate students in a Chinese university and first-year graduate students in a French university. More precisely, we aim to find possible relations between the sociocultural roles co-constructed during interaction and the language learning possibilities in this teletandem environment. In our study, we adopt a socio-interactionist approach [Mondada, L., and S. Pekarek-Doehler. 2004. "Second Language Acquisition as Situated Practice: Task Accomplishment in the French Second Language Classroom." "The Modern Language Journal" 88 (4): 501-518], assuming that learning is situated in social interactions. Our corpus of analysis is formed by 15 teletandem sessions of four partnerships, which result in about 20 hours of interaction. Our analytical approach consists of three steps. First, we analyse role-taking and role-giving in terms of interlocutors' positioning as experts in relation to different topics of conversation [Reichert, T., and G. Liebscher. 2012. "Positioning the Expert: Word Searches Expertise and Learning Opportunities in Peer Interactions." "The Modern Language Journal" 96 (4): 599-609]. Second, we analyse scaffolding [Bruner, J. 1983."Le développement de l'enfant. Savoir faire, savoir dire". Paris: PUF] as it appears in different types of conversational side sequences [Jefferson, G. 1972. "Side Sequences." In "Studies in Social Interaction", edited by D. Sudnow, 294-338. New York: The Free Press] identified in studies on exolingual conversation [Porquier, R. 1984. "Communication exolingue et apprentissage des langues." In "Acquisition d'une langue étrangère III", edited by B. Py, 17-47. Paris: Presses de l'Université Paris VIII Vincennes à Saint-Denis]. Third, we observe the relations between types of role-taking and role-giving and types of scaffolding side sequences. Statistical analysis shows that some conversational phenomena are more common than others. In our opinion, the knowledge of such configurations can enrich task designers' perspectives on teletandem and possibly on telecollaboration.

The paper proposes a theoretical and methodological framework based on a pluralistic, concerted approach to the study of activities that take place in and through speech interactions. The framework has a general scope, applying to any collective activity taking form through language interactions. It contributes to a fuller understanding of the dynamics of activity and the emergence of the phenomena observed. The framework fits a constructivist and interactionist paradigm. It allows an approach to different dimensions of the activity: communicational, functional, discursive and interlocutory. The theories, models, concepts and methods chosen to address each of the dimensions are presented. From the study of a collaborative philosophical inquiry produced in the first year of a French primary school, we illustrate the use of the framework and show how it can be enriched according to the nature of the activity studied and researchers' aims.

Background: PISA results appear to have a large impact upon government policy. The phenomenon is growing, with more countries taking part in PISA testing and politicians pointing to PISA results as reasons for their reforms. Purpose: The aims of this research were to depict the policy reactions to PISA across a number of jurisdictions, to see whether they exhibited similar patterns and whether the same reforms were evident. Sources of evidence: We investigated policy and media reactions to the 2009 and 2012 PISA results in six cases: Canada, China (Shanghai), England, France, Norway and Switzerland. Cases were selected to contrast high-performing jurisdictions (Canada, China) with average performers (England, France, Norway and Switzerland). Countries that had already been well reported on in the literature were excluded (Finland, Germany). Design and methods: Policy documents, media reports and academic articles in English, French, Mandarin and Norwegian relating to each of the cases were critically evaluated. Results: A policy reaction of "scandalisation" was evident in four of the six cases; a technique used to motivate change. Five of the six cases showed "standards-based reforms" and two had reforms in line with the "ideal-governance" model. However, these are categorisations: the actual reforms had significant differences across countries. There are chronological problems with the notion that PISA results were causal with regard to policy in some instances. Countries with similar PISA results responded with different policies, reflecting their differing cultural and historical education system trajectories. Conclusions: The connection between PISA results and policy is not always obvious. The supranational spell of PISA in policy is in the way that PISA results are used as a magic wand in political rhetoric, as though they conjure particular policy choices. This serves as a distraction from the ideological basis for reforms. The same PISA results could motivate a range of different policy solutions.

In qualitative research on Americans in study abroad contexts, female gender often emerges as problematic, with young women portrayed as hapless victims of sexual harassment. The assumption underlying interpretation of these studies appears to maintain that female students are victimized because they find themselves in places where inherently superior American discourses of gender equity do not prevail. Meanwhile, however, scrutiny of participants' stories reveals deeper mysteries, to do with gender trouble from home that students bring to their experiences abroad. This paper adopts a narrative approach to interview and journal data from a previous study in which American students, both male and female, recount their experiences in France. Their accounts are linked to the sociocultural history and popular ideology of Franco-American relations and to images of study abroad in the American media. Students' stories draw upon and contest an amalgam of images related to social class, gender, and national identity, which are embedded in perennial American representations of French language learning as social class transcendence. In the early decades of the twenty-first century, this phenomenon has morphed into a contemporary postfeminist self-help literature for would-be Frenchwomen, which celebrates anachronistic images of women as accomplished homemakers and objects of sexual desire who nevertheless control their destinies through artful styling of self and navigation of the global marketplace. "Frenchness," with or without corresponding language ability, symbolizes membership in the mobilized, global elite. Thus, while a second language offers potentially new resources for the performance of gendered identity, this study shows how the relationship between such resources and learners' desires is mediated by previous participation in specific discourses of gender and social class, which may or may not prioritize language learning "per se."

Increasingly, tourism and hospitality university programs in France include internships which add a vocational dimension to the academic aspects of the course. These internships a) provide exposure to real world professional situations, b) add market value to the student experience, and c) offer a foothold for employment. The field of blog research is increasing in an effort to understand the social and economic context and impact of blogs: however, most existing studies only provide insight into English-language content. This paper explores French tourism and hospitality undergraduate student blogs--completed during their 4-6 month internships outside of France--as a manifestation of their knowledge. Qualitative analyses by means of text mining of the students' posts, was used to assess their experiences and perceptions. Utilizing content analysis, 28 blogs were examined with the aim of understanding blogs and blogging under the theoretical framework of cultural perceptions. Results demonstrated that these internship blogs provide rich and authentic feedback; the blogs facilitate student monitoring while allowing for a wide cross-section of readers to assess different destination-based student internship experiences. The results showed that the "image" students projected of their destinations were chiefly positive, yet tended to conform to their preconceived ideas of these places. This study underscores the importance of empathy and appreciation when working in foreign contexts, because even though student internships were located all over the world, a tendency to believe in stereotypes of peoples and places remained. The findings a) shed light into the process of perception transformation during overseas work placements, and b) have practical and methodological implications for researchers and educators who are see academic blogging as a teaching and learning tool.

"Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother" (Chua, 2011) and "Bringing up bébé: One American mother discovers the wisdom of French parenting" (Druckerman, 2012) are two recent global bestsellers belonging to a relatively new discursive genre: the intercultural parenting book. The purpose of this article is to present the first findings of an extensive study on this category of texts. I will show in what ways Franco-American intercultural parenting books (FAIPBs) display intercultural features: how do their authors, who not only have intercultural experience but write about this experience, negotiate competing practices and discourses about childrearing from different cultural contexts in their personal narratives? First, the study is placed in the theoretical framework of Cross-Cultural Discourse Analysis. The analysis then focuses on how the authors portray their own intercultural development and interact with their readers to foster intercultural development on their behalf. Finally, the discussion highlights how non-child-centred child rearing, which the authors culturally situate as being a French practice, is discursively promoted. A comparison with "monocultural" guides shows the influence of the community in which the authors were first socialized on their discursive productions, even when they explicitly criticize this community for its childrearing practices.

This paper addresses the use of videography combined with group interviews, as a way to better understand the informal learnings of 11-12 year old children in cross-cultural encounters during French-German school exchanges. The complete, consistent video data required the researchers to choose the most significant sequences to highlight the processes by which the pupils communicated and expressed feelings and meanings within their experiences. The target of these paradigmatic situations was focused on two important questions relevant in the science of education: First, an epistemological and ethical question arose about the relationship between the researchers and the subjects of the research: How could cooperative research with pupils be led so that they were considered actors within the situation, and could share with the researchers the meaning of what happened in their cross-cultural experience? The second question arose from a methodological problem, which caused the researchers to develop a mixed apparatus involving a special recall technique using video data combined with group interviews to help the children remember what they were experiencing during the filmed interaction.

This article investigates different kinds of learner subjects that study-abroad programs produce. It is based on discourse analysis and ethnographic fieldwork in May-September 2011, involving three students from a US college studying abroad short term in Europe. The discourse of immersion in study abroad valorizes a learning-by-doing, individual, reflective learner subject who learns alone by gaining everyday experience outside the classroom and by reflecting on it. Some students subverted this discourse and became group and classroom-based learner subjects; nonetheless, they all became reflective learner subjects. This article proposes critical analysis of the discourse and links that reflectivity to critical pedagogy.

Successive republican governments in France have constructed a complex educational context, which is rhetorically committed to a myth of provision of educational equality of opportunity whilst in practical terms it is characterised by a system focused on the production and reproduction of elites. This article aims to consider the political drivers and levers that are transforming French teacher education during the current challenging economic, social and cultural context. It uses a relatively new methodological approach to the analysis of policy evolution and development by applying a critical analysis of discourse, which considers the ways in which teacher education policy is "reproduced and reworked". This is achieved through the discourse analysis of a policy speech made in October 2013 by the then Minister of Education, Vincent Peillon, contextualised by comparisons with reforms enacted by the previous Sarkozy government ("masterisation"). The article, therefore, utilises a systematic framework that allows analysis at the levels of contextualisation and deconstruction of the text and so highlights developments to date in the arguably unique approach of the Hollande government, driven by the relationship between the republican state and the education system in France. The article also considers how reaction following the "Charlie Hebdo" attacks of January 2015 afforded opportunities to assert new validity for the teacher education policy espoused within Peillon's speech.

This paper examines the resulting qualitative transformation of two students' metapragmatic awareness following a semester abroad in southern France--one of whom had access to a concept-based pragmatics instruction programme (expert-mediation), while the other followed a standard semester programme. The larger study from which these cases are drawn was designed to address the many calls for pedagogical interventions to help students to engage in, interpret, and negotiate the complexities that surround them during study abroad. Through a thematic discourse analysis of pre- and post-programme language awareness interviews, both focal students exhibited development and growth in their metapragmatic awareness but each student's development was markedly different in nature. These case studies show that expert-mediation provided one learner with notably more systematic, reliable, and recontextualisable conceptual knowledge (in comparison to her non-expert-mediated counterpart) through which she could interpret the language use she encountered through everyday interactions abroad. Subsequent theoretical and pedagogical implications are also discussed.

France’s reaction to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was initially conciliatory. However, the current French President’ statements, Macron, gradually changed, suggesting a potential shift in France's stance. The French president recently suggested troops could be sent to Ukraine to fight the Russians, a move that could significantly impact the course of the war. Our paper aims to address this possibility. How feasible would this be from a military perspective? Second, are there any other relevant political actors that will support it? Third, why has Paris changed its position to such a radical stance? We start from the theoretical design of realist constructivism. Postcolonial theories and the concept of locked-in path dependence supported this research. The methods follow the path of historical synthesis, discourse analysis of key political actors, and text analysis of defense white papers. Quantitative military variables are used to understand France’s and the EU’s military-industrial complex capabilities and assess its potential. The collapse of France’s neocolonial empire in Africa and Russia’s growing influence in the region partially explains Macron’s discourse change. This is correlated with the need to follow a more independent European security policy and the worsening military situation in Ukraine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The closing of the aging nuclear power plant of Fessenheim was eventually concretized in June 2020 after many years of controversy, reflecting the sensibility of closing nuclear power plants in France, the world's second largest producer of nuclear power. This paper provides insight into how this highly policy vexed issue was discussed on the local level during 2017, a period when the decision regarding the shutdown was still at stake. Here, I examine the discursive strategies mobilized by key actors lobbying for the shutdown or maintenance of the nuclear power plant to enhance their argumentations. Using political discourse analyses combined with the logics approach, the article shows that the argumentation of proponents and advocates of a shutdown is structured around the same concept of sustainability. However, economic growth, social prosperity, and environmental "cautiousness" are not articulated with the same chain of equivalence and do not activate the same fantasmatic logics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Internationally, politicians and practitioners have focused strongly on humanization of births, to enable fewer medicalized birth care procedures. In this paper, we explore policy efforts to support better births in order to comprehend developments in maternity care in Denmark and France, two countries previously identified as having different birth cultures. Our analysis has been fueled by the question of how birth policies have developed in both countries in an era in which medicalization of birth has been problematized internationally. Using discourse analysis, we examine the political constructions of specific problems in central policy documents. The analysis shows which problematizations around maternity care are discursively constructed, what solutions are discursively presented and on what assumptions the problematizations are based. The article supports the conclusion of other scholars that a pervading risk discourse on birth and birthing bodies constitutes how maternity care can be experienced and practiced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the recent past, European states have adopted mandatory due diligence (MDD) laws for holding companies accountable for the environmental and human rights impacts of their supply chains. The institutionalization of the international due diligence norm into domestic legislation has, however, been highly contested. Our contribution analyzes the discursive struggles about the meaning of due diligence that have accompanied the institutionalization of MDD in Germany and France. Based on document analysis and legal analysis of laws and law proposals, we identify a state‐centric, a market‐based, and a polycentric‐governance discourse. These discourses are based on fundamentally different understandings of how the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights should be translated into hard law. By outlining these discourses and comparing the related policy preferences, we contribute with a better understanding of different ways in which MDD is institutionalized, with important consequences for the possibilities to enhance corporate accountability in global supply chains. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the security of energy supply in Europe is at stake, the debate on energy sources prominently took hold on the agenda of European countries. Nuclear energy is one of the issues on this agenda. However, nuclear energy is discussed quite differently in Germany and France, although the two countries both experienced strong public protest in the 1970s and are similar in size, economy, industry and culture. By comparing the two, this article analyses the reasons for the different debates on nuclear energy existent in Germany and France. It argues that stances on nuclear energy form the core of social identities that prevent members of these groups to deviate from the group norm. The relevance of certain types of identities is a function of the institutions of the political system. To change the way energy sources are discussed, it is necessary to create or make salient different group identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Sur le Journalisme, About Journalism, Sobre Jornalismo is the property of Sur le journalisme, About journalism, Sobre jornalismo and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The article aims to describe the regional security challenges and major threats for India in South Asia. Since 1947, India has been suffering from external security threats such as, a form of proxy warfare and terrorism from its neighbouring countries. To this purpose, the article also examines recurring issues where India has major border issues with China, in the Himalayan terrain to the eastern region of India. This article looks at the defence cooperation between India and France through the prism of India's security threats in the South Asian region. India's soft power policy reflected in a neo-realist approach and expanded its long-standing defence cooperation with France. Therefore, India has been receiving support from the French government whenever the country needs defence equipment and other assistance. The article uses empirical and discourse analysis methods to answer the questions, and to draw a proper conclusion to the study. Finally, as a result of the study, we can see that India's serious security threats in the South Asian region are pushing the country to purchase defence equipment from France. The relationship between India and France is strengthening the bilateral cooperation at a broader level and shaping a strong strategic partnership by uniting South Asia and the Indo-Pacific as well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The global rise of populism and concomitant polarizations across disenfranchised and marginalized groups has been magnified by so-called echo chambers, and a major public health crisis like the COVID-19 pandemic has only served to fuel these intergroup tensions. Media institutions disseminating information on ways to prevent the propagation of the virus have reactivated a specific discursive phenomenon previously observed in many epidemics: the construction of a defiled 'Other'. With anthropological lenses, discourse on defilement is an interesting path to understand the continuous emergence of pseudo-scientific forms of racism. In this paper, the authors focus on 'borderline racism', that is the use of an institutionally 'impartial' discourse to reaffirm the inferiority of another race. The authors employed inductive thematic analysis of 1200 social media comments reacting to articles and videos published by six media in three different countries (France, United States and India). Results delineate four major themes structuring defilement discourses: food (and the relationship to animals), religion, nationalism and gender. Media articles and videos portrayed Western and Eastern countries through contrasting images and elicited a range of reaction in readers and viewers. The discussion reflects on how borderline racism can be an appropriate concept to understand the appearance of hygienic othering of specific subgroups on social media. Theoretical implications and recommendations on a more culturally sensitive approach of media coverage of epidemics and pandemics are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Conexão Letras is the property of Conexao Letras and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Although French courtly models spread to Europe, little research has compared the development of politeness in France with more remote European linguacultures. To fill this gap, I examine folk understandings of historical politeness in Finnish and French linguacultures. Concentrating on cultural outsiders' own understandings – that is, French people living in Finland and Finns who live or have lived in France – my study lies within the framework of a discursive approach, and draws upon data from five focus-group discussions and their dialogical discourse analysis. My study shows that the different forms of government, levels of urbanisation and branches of Christianity reportedly influenced differences in Finnish and French politeness. Yet, during participants' stays in these respective countries, an affinity towards politeness was described as stemming from globalisation. Future research should examine if the frames of expectations of politeness in Europe are generally moving closer towards one another. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: The Scottish Government introduced a free Baby Box scheme for all new parents in 2017, modelled on the Finnish scheme, to give every baby 'an equal start in life'. There is little evidence that it results in better health outcomes, but there has been limited research into different perspectives and discourses on such schemes. Methods: Four focus groups were conducted with 21 parents in North‐East Scotland. Recordings were transcribed verbatim, anonymized and analysed thematically with NVivo 12 software. Our thematic analysis was both inductive and deductive—remaining open to themes identified by participants themselves but also informed by the social policy literature on universalism and social cohesion. Results: Across all the focus groups, we found a high degree of positivity about the principle of the Baby Box scheme, and for the most part the practical value of the contents. This was remarkably consistent across different communities and backgrounds. There was little evidence of the strongly polarized views present in media reporting. Parents seemed considerably less focused than the media on safety and health outcomes, and more focused on practical, material and social impacts. They reported little in the way of feeling patronized or monitored by the government. Conclusion: Our findings have important implications for future economic evaluations of the baby box. Such evaluations should broaden the valuation space beyond health outcomes to allow for the value of feelings of inclusion, solidarity and being part of a community. Patient or Public Contribution: This small project was designed in response to parent views already collected in the early roll‐out of the Baby Box scheme in Scotland, about their priorities and responses to the scheme. Additional views were sought on the topic guide for the focus groups, and local community groups advised us on recruitment and the best timing and location for the focus groups to be held. The focus groups themselves were conducted as research, but with the intent of ensuring parent views featured more prominently in a debate that has been largely dominated by clinical and public health perspectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]