Fostering Social Change Through Community Engagement

Join us for a critical insight into strategic knowledge and identity during domestic professional internships in Spanish for specific purposes.

This linguistic ethnography follows three journalism students (Petra, Penelope and Maria) as they engaged in experiential language learning via collaboration with community members during their Spanish for Specific Purposes internship sites in the fields of journalism and medicine within the local Metro Phoenix community. Data were collected over the course of a 15-week semester via ethnographic methods (field notes, interviews, observations and participant-reported data) to explore how the interns took advantage of their Spanish for Specific Purposes internship experiences to engage in identity work that exceeded the goals of the program and how they as well as implemented their strategic knowledge via communicative strategies during breakdowns in communication with community members related to their internship sites and the social function of such strategies.

In order to answer the first research question, the data were analyzed via open and focused coding (Dyson and Genishi, 2005), followed by discourse analysis (Gee, 2005) informed by Critical Applied Linguistics (Pennycook, 2001) and Positioning Theory (Davis and Harre, 1990). To answer the second question, all instances in which the interns implemented communicative strategies were analyzed based upon the categorization repertories established by Dornyei and Scott (1995a, 1995b, 1997), Lafford (2004) and Tarone and Yule (1987). To go beyond understanding what the interns were saying to why were they saying it, discourse analysis was used (Gee, 2005).

The findings show that Petra, Penelope and Maria appropriated their Spanish for Specific Purposes internship to engage distinct, yet interrelated language- and ethnic/racial-based identity work. Each intern utilized language (and extra-linguistic elements, such as corporeal expression) to position themselves in different ways within social discourse. Furthermore, this identity-work influenced which communicative strategies they utilized, as the social function of many of these strategies was to maintain or protect their desired identities.

Drawing on these insights, a variety of implications are offered from four viewpoints:

• Experiential language learning-based research (colonized versus humanizing research)
• Critical community collaboration inside and outside of experiential language learning
• Communicative strategies and communicative competence
• Experiential langauge learning and languages for specific purposes pedagogy and internship design

 Committee includes Barbara Lafford, Chair; Brendan O'Connor; Katie Bernstein; and Sara Beaudrie.