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
sustained engagement

“The history of Western philosophy can be understood as a sustained engagement with contradiction.”

Norman Sieroka
earthing

“Geography as a discipline stands for a certain worlding, if not earthing, of contradiction, in both theoretical and pracitcal respect.”

Julia Lossau
prison of difference

“‘Contradiction is the prison of difference‘ writes the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze. Worlds of Contradiction asks: how can we explain and describe the world without making it more coherent and systematic than it is?”

Michi Knecht
paradox

“The basis of law is not an idea as a systematic unified principle but a paradox.”

Andreas Fischer-Lescano
city

“The city is a laboratory not only of modernity, but also of contradiction.”

Julia Lossau