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Australian Aboriginal stories have thrived for thousands of years through oral tradition and Aboriginal author Alexis Wright invokes this tradition in the construction of her novel Carpentaria. This article investigates the orality of Carpentaria, which stages "oral" narrators who speak differently to Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal readerships. First, using Bakhtin's notion of "speech genre", the article explores why Wright creates these two narrative layers. Second, it investigates the language use and tone of voice in the framing narrative that addresses non-Indigenous readers. Third, it looks closely at Wright's linguistic experimentation in the embedded narrative, creating multiple oral effects through language and mobilising the storytelling dynamics of performance, spontaneity, rhythms and mnemonics. Finally, it discusses how her creative use of orality plays off and with its Western literary conceptions and enacts cross-cultural communication between the two readerships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates children's science learning in a nursery in Turkey. The participating children (aged 5 and 6) are from a socio-economically disadvantaged community. This is an ethnographic study that includes participant observations and audio recordings of classroom interactions based on a long-term basis. It takes a socio-cultural approach and uses the concept of speech genre [Bakhtin, M. M. 1986. Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Austin: University of Texas Press] to examine children's science learning. The findings highlight the role of the teacher in learning scientific concepts. It shows that the experiments enable the children to test and investigate scientific concepts. It also problematises the role of the teacher in structuring science activities and classroom talk by suggesting that teachers need to be explicit when they introduce children to concepts, rather than leaving technical knowledge for children to make inferences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Field visits to churches, mosques, temples or other buildings used by religious groups, are often valued by students of religious education as an opportunity to engage with the 'reality' of the subject: religions as they exist in the world. The Council of Europe text Signposts specifies field visits as an important contributor to the religious dimension of intercultural education, but also identifies issues that need to be addressed by researchers and teachers. During an excursion, students interact with representatives who are likely to represent their tradition in one particular way. The aim of this paper is to investigate how the representation of religion and religiosity is constructed during excursions by representatives and visitors. We have developed an analytical tool based on the interpretive approach and the theory of speech genres. Based on our analysis of documentation related to four field visits with students to places of worship, we suggest how the different speech genres in play during an excursion can help in promoting awareness of different levels of religion: individual, group and the whole tradition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay explores the cultural legacy of Hindustani, which names the intimate overlap between two South Asian languages, Hindi and Urdu. Hindi and Urdu have distinct religious identities, national associations and scripts, yet they are nearly identical in syntax, diverging to some extent in their vocabulary. Hindi and Urdu speakers, consequently, understand each other most of the time, but not all of the time, though they can never read each other's texts. Their shared space, Hindustani, finds no official recognition in India or in Pakistan, but it denotes, particularly in the early twentieth century, an aspiration for Hindu–Muslim unity: the dream of a shared, syncretic culture, crafted from the speech genres of everyday life. Beginning with the colonial project of Hindustani, the essay focuses on a discussion of the works of early twentieth-century writers like Nehru, Premchand and Sa'adat Hasan Manto. I argue that the aesthetic project of Hindustani attempted to produce, not a common language, but a common idiom: a set of shared conventions, phrases and forms of address, which would be legible to Indians from all religions and all regions. By theorizing Hindustani as an idiom, and not a language, I explain its persistence in Bollywood cinema well after its abandonment in all literary and official registers. Bollywood, I argue, is Hindustani cinema, not only because of its use of a mixed Hindi–Urdu language in its dialogues, but also because of its development of a set of clearly recognizable, easily repeatable conventions that can surmount linguistic differences. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The purpose of this article is to illustrate how potential learning is related to hegemonic speech genres. This we do through examples from two religious education (RE) classrooms, one Norwegian and one Swedish. By presenting important dimensions of speech genres used in RE classrooms, the article also contributes to developing theory. The theoretical perspectives in use are drawn from sociocultural theory. The Bakhtinian concept of speech genre is the central one, but positions, positioning and discursive practice and its institutional framing are highlighted too. Methodologically the article starts with the theoretical perspectives and uses data from a case study to illustrate the importance of these perspectives in understanding constructions of potential learning in RE classrooms. Besides demonstrating the importance of these theoretical perspectives, the article shows how the potential learning of the RE classroom is related to the teachers’ positioning along a pupil–content axis and to the character of the speech genres where two dimensions seem of special importance: how religion is valued (respectfully – mockingly) and how the borders of religions and beliefs are to be understood (fixed – open). [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article describes the modern media stylistics field of research in Russia. Media stylistics is based on the methodology of functional stylistics, which studies speech along with other intrinsic properties of people's activities and consciousness. In this respect, the field is developed in close connection with epistemological, deontological, political, sociological, psychological, praxeological, culture-related research of the media. It is shown that changing conditions in the rapidly developing world of mass communication require extending the horizons of research into stylistics to allow for analysing media text with its complex integrative nature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]