Constructing Agency: The Role of Language
نویسندگان
چکیده
Is agency a straightforward and universal feature of human experience? Or is the construction of agency (including attention to and memory for people involved in events) guided by patterns in culture? In this paper we focus on one aspect of cultural experience: patterns in language. We examined English and Japanese speakers' descriptions of intentional and accidental events. English and Japanese speakers described intentional events similarly, using mostly agentive language (e.g., "She broke the vase"). However, when it came to accidental events English speakers used more agentive language than did Japanese speakers. We then tested whether these different patterns found in language may also manifest in cross-cultural differences in attention and memory. Results from a non-linguistic memory task showed that English and Japanese speakers remembered the agents of intentional events equally well. However, English speakers remembered the agents of accidents better than did Japanese speakers, as predicted from patterns in language. Further, directly manipulating agency in language during another laboratory task changed people's eye-witness memory, confirming a possible causal role for language. Patterns in one's linguistic environment may promote and support how people instantiate agency in context.
منابع مشابه
Iranian EFL Learners’ Autonomous Behavior in Out-of-class Contexts: A Call for Understanding Learners’ Personalized Approaches to Learning
The salient, and often ignored, role that out-of-class learning plays in second/foreign language (L2) learners’ development is overshadowed by classroom research. The main aim of this study is to problematize the role of out-of-class learning in the specific English-as-Foreign-Language (EFL) context of Iran by examination of the ways in which four learners attempted to revamp their English lang...
متن کاملA Supervised Method for Constructing Sentiment Lexicon in Persian Language
Due to the increasing growth of digital content on the internet and social media, sentiment analysis problem is one of the emerging fields. This problem deals with information extraction and knowledge discovery from textual data using natural language processing has attracted the attention of many researchers. Construction of sentiment lexicon as a valuable language resource is a one of the imp...
متن کاملMaking sense of EFL teacher agency: Insights from an Iran case study
This investigation set out to look into the issue of teachers’ exercise of agency in the Iranian EFL context. More specifically, as part of a larger study, it reports on the ways two Iranian Ministry of Education teachers make sense of and operate in the country’s educational setting under the demands of a centralist system of education. Priestley, Biesta, & Robinson’s (2013) framework of teach...
متن کاملConstructing Stories in a Foreign Language: Analysis of Iranian EFL Learners’ Lived Narratives Structure
Most popular models of narratives and narrative analyses have been drawn on native stories, yet EFL learners’ narratives have not received due narrative analysis. The present study then aims at scrutinizing the structure of personal English stories as told by EFL learners. To this aim, three hundred narratives were collected through classroom discussions and interviews. Qualitative analysis met...
متن کاملBook Review: "Learning Strategy Instruction in the Language Classroom: Issues and Implementation"
Language learning strategies, “the techniques or devices which a learner may use to acquire knowledge” (Rubin, 1975, p. 43) or more pertinently “complex, dynamic thoughts and actions, selected and used by learners with some degree of consciousness in specific contexts” (Oxford, 2017, p. 48), have been widely researched and discussed for more than forty years since the mid-1970s. Shifting the fo...
متن کامل