Refracted knowledge:students work with ‘alien words’ across

contexts and languages

David M. PalfreymanAfaf Al-Bataineh

English and Arabic in the UAE

• School• University•Work• Rest of life

(Trans)languaging

• Languaging“process of making meaning and shaping knowledge and experience through

language” (Swain, 2006, p. 98)

“among other purposes, to focus attention, solve problems and create affect”(Swain & Lapkin, 2013: 105)

• Translanguaging“ways in which bilinguals use their complex semiotic repertoire to act, to know,

and to be” (García & Li, 2014: 137)

Heteroglossia (Bakhtin, 1981; Busch, 2014; Barwell, 2016)

• Linguistic diversity“a dialog of languages” (Bakhtin, 1981: 294)

• Multidiscursivity“a multitude of bounded verbal-ideological and social belief systems” (Bakhtin, 1981: 288)

• Multivoicedness“[The word] lies on the borderline between oneself and the other.. [...] It becomes 'one's own' only when the speaker [...] appropriates [it], adapting it to his own semantic and expressive intention.” (Bakhtin 1981: 293).

Context and participants

Federal government universityFour pairs of female, Muslim, Emirati undergraduate students;In their first year of a mainly English-medium Business major programme (following General Education);Aiming for a career in business/ organizations in the UAE.

Research questions

• How do undergraduate students understand course content through heteroglossia?• How do they work with heteroglossia to mediate between course

content and work situations?

Mediation task A (cf. Stathopoulou, 2015)

You are working as an intern in a small clothing company in the UAE. The company is not performing well, and the Arabic-speaking manager would like some ideas to help it perform better. Read the English text [SWOT analysis and the Five Forces model], and prepare to present some ideas to the manager (in Arabic) to help the company improve.

Understanding SWOT Analysis

S1: SWOT analysis... It includes strength, weaknesses, opportunities and threats.

S1: there’s an external and an internal problem; maybe it’s an external problem with the company and maybe it’s an internal problem with thecompany; and maybe it’s the employees, that they have the problem..

S1: Personally speaking, I don’t rely on theories.S2: Okay, yeah [you’ve got] experience... But for me, I have the university text in front of me...

Engaging with the SWOT text

S4: Okay, mm what’s this? “The second step... begins when managers embark on a full-scale planning exercise to identify potential opportunities”: the opportunities that might help them, and the threats that might threaten them, the threats that might threaten their environment.S3: mm.

S4: “increase in foreign competition”, it means that were manycompetitions in the business [...]; “domestic competition”: local, and this is international.

Presenting to the ‘manager’

S3: The better the leadership, the more every department has a good manager – for example, the marketing has a good leader, the manager is good, or the human resources department or finance [...] – this is considered a strength, that is good for the business.M: Okay.S1: and there’s a plan and strategy the business is required to do before starting, and while doing the business...

Mediation task BYou are working as an intern in the UAE Ministry of Foreign Affairs. An English-speaking visitor is interested in using their money to develop education in the Arab world. Read the Arabic text [The Islamic system of Waqf/ endowment], and prepare to present some ideas to the visitor (in English) to help them understand the local context.

Encountering the Waqf text

S5: “Linguistically speaking, ‘waqf’ means ‘confinement’ or ‘setting apart’; it is the gerund from the root ‘w-q-f’. You can say ‘I set this house apart’, meaning that you confined its use to waqf; but you should not say ‘I endowed it’, because this is incorrect.[And the endowment-]”S6: [‘endowment’ means] setting apart?S5: That’s right, yeah, ‘endowment’ means setting apart.S6: My God, how am I supposed to explain this? Okay...

Translating ‘waqf’

S1: These are religious concepts, look, in translation these words don’t change, they stay as they are; like ’al-waqf’... So, mmm... the legal meaning of Waqf is mmmm, it’s sort of... They mean legal Islamic Waqfor shari’ah, because shari’ah is the same as shar’i [legal]... I don’t know what it is in English, ‘shar’i’ is ‘shari’a’....

Engaging with the Waqf text (1)S5: “and some in the Maliki tradition [defined waqf as]: the owner grants an owned benefit, even if it is rented, or grants its income to an entitled party, for a period defined by the granting body”. The point is they set the thing apart, yeah? and leave it as a profit for someone, charitable bodies.S6: How do we say ‘charitable bodies’? Charity?S5: Charity. S6: emm... S5: For example you have ::emm “a building, plot of land or other assetsS6: [for] S5: [for] Muslim religious or charitable purposes with no intention of claiming- reclaiming the assets”.S6: As if you’re donating som:ething.S5: Yeah.S6: Okay.

Engaging with the Waqf text (2)

S5: ... and it helps, we can say it helps develop the Islamic country.S6: Okay, yeah.S5: “And the endowment institution is a:ble to participate in this; that is, some large regional and international organizations organize and direct different efforts towards Islamic countries-” See! “...towards Islamic countries or Islamic groups who are in need of help”. See: like in Somalia and such, you know?S6: So it means donations.S5: Yeah!

Presenting with the ‘visitor’

S2: When Islam came, the first aya was ‘eqraa’, which means ‘read!’

S2: [... But] the reason why we don’t improve like the West [is that] the

educated people went out of their own country, their mother country,

because they didn’t find that motivate and attracted environment; and

we call this ‘hejrat al 3oqool’, which means, which means…

V: Ooh... ‘Brain drain’?

Betraying one’s discourseS1:As a Muslim, I know there is reward after life and death and so on, and that this is done to please God, and these things. But [the visitor] wasn’t a Muslim; so I feel that most of what we said was related to worldly life, and we didn’t talk about the things in our religion.I feel that my partner and I couldn’t communicate the meaning to her. The vocabulary was difficult, we couldn’t come up with the appropriate terminology. So we talked about it as if were a charity and it would help people to develop, and that we should help them... We didn’t talk about the [spiritual] reward and return, not at all. I feel that we weren’t able to convey the information as it should be.

(Trans)lingual processes in learning

• Using language from the text/ background knowledge to structure understanding and assert knowledge.• Translation, explanation and elaboration ‘across’ languages as

evidence of understanding/learning.• Evoking academic authority through use of text language/ discourse/

voice.• The ‘alien word’ of academic material; distancing.• Making concepts and terms one’s own.• The task of translation; bringing concepts and terms to the other.

Languaging and Higher Education in Bilingual Contextsresearch cluster

bit.ly/2KqUmSZ

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