Cover of the Journal for Discourse Studies- Mimicry of Marginality

»Everything a Learner Needs« – Constructions Of Linguistic and Social Marginality/Centrality In Discourses about (German) Language Learning and Multilingualism

Contribution

Anna Mattfeldt

2024

The paper deals with discursive portrayals of language learning and language learners. In a combination of quantitative and qualitative approaches, it asks whether the status of the language learner is constituted as a phenomenon of marginality or of centrality in current discourses in Germany, and whether this may in some instances be seen as a mimicry of marginality. The qualitative part of the analysis takes positionings by learners and native speakers into account, considering linguistic ways of constituting both the self and others with regard to language(s) and learning. The paper also discusses whether the status transition of a person from learner to language »expert« is depicted as possible, and whether learning a language offers a form of prestige.

Mattfeldt, Anna. 2024. »Everything a Learner Needs« – Constructions of Linguistic and Social  Marginality/Centrality in Discourses about (German) Language Learning and Multilingualism. Zeitschrift für Diskursforschung 2023 (2). S. 204–225.

print
ISSN: 2195-867X

ebook
DOI: 10.3262/ZFD2302204

Back to overview
name contradiction

“Contradiction becomes real where someone names contradiction.”

Ingo H. Warnke
ideal of a contradiction-free world

“Science has long been animated by the ideal of a contradiction-free world in which logical orders could merge with society, politics, culture and language. In the GRC Contradiction Studies we are working on ways of describing the multiplicity and complexity, the danger and beauty of our worlds that clearly go beyond concepts of freedom from contradiction.”

Michi Knecht
limits

“Resistance is a democratic right, sometimes a duty. With literature we can find models for this right and think about its limits.”

Gisela Febel
Bhabha on enlightenment and coloniality

“Homi Bhabha says about the contradiction between the ideals of the enlightenment, claims to democracy and solidarity and simultaneous colonization and ongoing coloniality: ‘That ideological tension, visible in the history of the West as a despotic power, at the very moment of the birth of democracy and modernity, has not been adequately written in a contradictory and contrapuntal discourse of tradition.’”

Kerstin Knopf
diversity and plurality

“Join us to create more diversity and plurality in knowledge production.”

Gisela Febel