Interaction in collaborative writing between international and domestic students in an Indonesian university

This research investigates verbal interaction in collaborative writing between students from two countries with different L1 when writing an academic essay in a foreign language writing class. Eight students from Indonesia and China participated, and were divided into Indonesian-Indonesian pairs and Indonesian-Chinese pairs. Using the method of qualitative content analysis, the transcripts from their communication were coded inductively and then categorized. The findings denote that there are three categories in their spoken interaction: what to write (ideas), where to write (structural organization), and how to write (language-related). Similarly, all pairs focused their discussions on ‘what to write’ (ideas to be written in the essays). However, Indonesian-Indonesian pairs also discussed ‘the language-related aspects’ mostly about lexical choice and the meaning, more than the mixed pairs. The Indonesian-Chinese pairs conversed, in most of their time, about the content through sharing, explaining, and negotiating their ideas. As the implication, in order to produce an essay with the same length and type, the mixed pairs executed more time in their spoken interaction.

Surveillant landscapes

Most linguistic landscape research to date has focused on how people read and write language in the material world. Much less attention has been paid to the way linguistic landscapes sometimes read and write their inhabitants through technologies like CCTV cameras, intruder alarms, and other aspects of the built environment designed to make people ‘visible’ – what I call surveillant landscapes. This article puts forth a framework for analyzing the surveillant nature of linguistic landscapes based on tools from mediated discourse analysis. It sees surveillant landscapes in terms of the way they communicate practices of surveillance to the people who inhabit them (‘discourses in place’), the kinds of social relationships and social identities that they make possible (‘interaction orders’), and the ways architectures of surveillance come to be internalized by citizens, while at the same time aspects of their behaviors and identities come to be sedimented into their environments (‘historical bodies’). I argue that studies of linguistic landscapes should take more account of the agenitive nature of linguistic landscapes and their increasing ability to recognize and to entextualize what takes place within them, and the consequences of this both on situated social interactions and on broader political and economic realities.