EFL Women-Learners Construction of the Discourse of Egalitarianism and Knowledge in Online-Talk-in-Interaction

• Main Author: Adriana Castañeda
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Universidad Distrital Francisco José de Caldas 2012-06-01
• Series: Colombian Applied Linguistics Journal
• Subjects: Poststructuralist Discourse Analysis in online interaction, Discourse, Language learners, Language Socialization.
• Online Access: http://revistas.udistrital.edu.co/ojs/index.php/calj/article/view/3827

This research project sets out a ‘synthetic approach’ (Wetherell, 1998) to discourse analysis by combining elements of conversationalanalysis and critical discourse analysis. I explain the construction of a discourse that emerged from seven EFL women-learners online chatdiscussions around literature and how this discourse informs language as a socialization process. The findings suggest that while talking online,the language learning experience of these women-learners is intersected by what I labeled as the discourse of egalitarian-knowledgeable learners.It appears that through the enactment of this discourse, the students identified each other as equal status partners through conversationalmoves of solidarity, solicited help and repairs in miscommunication. The construction of such discourse shows that the language socializationprocess worked as an apprenticeship model. This project suggests that the seven EFL women learners, who participated in this research,invested in their language learning process as a result of the co-management of their power relationships as I will portray along the documentby tracing the discourse and giving a polyphonic interpretation of the data.