Marie Rickert has published an open access article entitled ”Categorisation as Positioning-Practice in a Dutch as Second Language Classroom” in the Journal of Language, Identity and Education.
In the article, she analyses how L2 learners of Dutch categorise themselves and one another with regard to place, nationality, and culture to structure the social space of the classroom.
The paper is empirically grounded in linguistic-ethnographic fieldwork in two Dutch as L2-classes in Amsterdam.
Abstract
This article explores how teachers and learners in a Dutch as Second Language (L2) classroom in the Netherlands make sense of themselves, one another, and thereby of the diversity encountered in the class, through practices of categorisation and positioning regarding nationality, place, and culture. Categories raised during class gain meaning in interaction. Teachers and learners engage in positioning by assigning someone a relational location within or outside a respective group or category. It becomes clear that this way of social sense-making happens embedded in or alongside teaching and learning activities in the context of the L2 classroom where using and learning a language unfold as interconnected processes.
