2014, Vol.22, No.2

The Sociolinguistic Journal of Korea 2023 KCI Impact Factor : 0.57

pISSN : 1226-4822
https://journal.kci.go.kr/socioling

This study aims to examine how university administrative workers perceive the workplace context under English as an official language policy, and further how their perceptions of the context would correlate with the roles of English uses for work. The data came from the questionnaire responses of 116 employees of a Korean university and qualitative interviews with 6 administrative workers. Descriptive and correlation analyses showed that the participants' evaluation of three contextual factors, i.e., English as an official language policy, online English learning, and coworkers' English competence, was only moderate. In the self-evaluation of their English proficiency, the majority of the participants indicated that they were only able to participate in a short English dialogs, but had difficulty with English discussions. A striking difference was found in the evaluation of significance of English skills between their current work performance and under full execution of the policy. Although most of the participants ranked reading skill the most significant in their current work performances, they selected speaking as the most crucial skill under the full execution of the policy. Implications of the findings are presented for more efficient practices of English as an official language policy at work.

The United States federal government entered a shutdown due to the ideological dispute between Democrats and Republicans from October 1 through 16, 2013. This paper attempts to elucidate ideological representations through a thorough analysis of editorials in two elite newspapers, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. In particular, we examined how an in-group and an out-group were formed, and how the formation was reinforced in terms of in-group homogeneity and out-group exclusion, by means of linguistic features such as naming choices, the so-called editorial we, and lexical selections, following van Dijk's (1998) ideological square. The results are as follows: (i) the Wall Street Journal emphasized “their” bad properties more aggressively than the New York Times, while the New York Times emphasized both “their” bad qualities and “our” good qualities in a more moderate way than the Wall Street Journal; (ii) the two strategies of emphasis and mitigation enabled both newspapers to reinforce in-group homogeneity and out-group exclusion: The Wall Street Journal openly framed Republicans as the in-group and Democrats as the out-group, whereas the New York Times posited Americans and Democrats as the in-group, in relation to Republicans.

This paper addresses the question of agency in shaping linguistic landscape and its manifold social and political implications in changing language ideology, attitudes and situations in post-Ujamaa Tanzania. Based on empirical data collected in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, this paper attempts to explain shifting agency in shaping linguistic landscape in the context of globalization as well as the spread of English in Tanzania. Agency in shaping linguistic landscape is inseparably interconnected with various social actors'motivations and reflects social changes at large. The domain of human agency behind linguistic landscape (public uses of written language) can be characterized as an epiphenomenon which involves a historical dimension and perspective. The study of linguistic landscape with special reference to agency offers a useful tool for examining various social actors who vie for public space. Agency in linguistic landscape needs to be seen in the wider context of social processes and existing power structures.