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ABSTRACT
This paper discusses the relationship between language awareness and agency by means of a follow-up analysis of language diary based interviews with refugees and locals in Vienna collected in 2016. Based on the previous insights gained about the availablity of linguistic resources, the study puts forward arguments for relating the question of speakers’ agency to the availability of linguistic resources and the participants’ language awareness. Following the Mediated Discourse Analysis approach and theoretical re-conceptualizations of ‘language’ and its use, the study emphasizes the need for a re-evaluation of the speakers’ role in the construction of language and agency in sociolinguistic research. In a concise discussion of data-excerpts the study illustrates how language awareness may be related to the participants’ agency with regard to language learning, strategies to engage ‘the other’ in making meaning, and the notion of L2 ‘proficiency’ measured against the idealized native-speaker. The results call for further investigations into how language awareness may influence language practices and how it could benefit communication in multilingual and multicultural settings and the safeguarding of linguistic rights.
Acknowledgements
I thank my reviewers and proofreaders for their insightful comments, which have greatly helped to improve this manuscript. Furthermore, I would like to extend special thanks to a group of ELF researchers at the University of Vienna, whose work encourages and inspires me to further investigate into this field and the implications it has for socio-linguistic research.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. For a more detailed explanation of ‘mediational means’ see following section on Mediated Discourse Analysis.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Sandra Radinger
Sandra Radinger has studied English and American studies (BA) and English and Philosophy and Psychology in the teacher training programme at the University of Vienna. Her research interests lie in the fields of language philosophy, language use, and applied linguistics with particular focus on the speaker's embeddedness in society. She has presented insights from her study on the availability of linguistic resources amongst refugees and locals in Austria at the 13th International Conference of the Association for Language Awareness and currently works as a teacher in Vienna.