CIICPD 2023

As a consequence, the author positions him/herself as a complete undergoer, threatened in his/her entire personality (“So my feelings, emotions and status were totally killed and hurt by my supervisor.” (line 7–8)). The behaviour of the supervisor is determined as “Chinese culture” (line 10) and in contrast to the first example, the text does not give any indication about a joint struggle which could lead to an improvement of the situation. However, in the end the narrative shows a slight change in what Giaxolou and Georgakopoulou see as “one’s sense of self” (2022, p. 241), as the author detaches the work experience from the overall experience in Singapore. S/he finally draws a positive coda expressing his/her contentment with his/her stay abroad (“but from the life experience and perspectives, I had a great time in Singapore for that almost an (sic) year spent there in 2015.” (Line 10–11)). Stimuli for further pedagogical use: – “I should have provided any arguments” (line 5–6) Can you imagine what the narrator did to provoke the anger of the supervisor? – The narrator does not describe the context where the presentations took place. Imagine three different settings: 1. The narrator and the supervisor are alone. 2. The narrator gives the presentations in front of the whole department. 3. The narrator gives the presentation in front of the supervisor and the team leader of the supervisor. How does the different contexts influence the situation? – Did you ever experience being a total ‘undergoer’? What were your strategies to regain ‘higher agency’? 5. Conclusion First, we can observe that the findings about the structural characteristics of the examined corpus do not differ significantly from the German corpus (Fetscher, 2022). In both corpuses, around half of the narratives correspond to a scenic-episodic representation and half to a reporting style. The length of the narratives in both corpuses cover astonishingly about 2 to 12 lines. In terms of the narrated time, it was observed that in the present corpus three narratives cover a period of one semester and one narrative a period of one year, while in the German corpus the longest narrated time spans over several weeks. This is probably due to the students’ experiences during their projects. Even if we could observe mistakes and typing errors, the narratives of the lingua franca corpus could be analysed without difficulties and show the same main characteristics as the narratives of the German corpus. Nevertheless, there are some indicators, which cannot be examined further in this paper, that the strategies of positioning of self and the other vary slightly from the German corpus. Our first impression is that, in the highly diverse lingua franca corpus, these strategies are more differentiated. This goes hand in hand with the observation that in the latter corpus, explicit judgements cannot be unequivocally identified as integral parts of the narrative dynamics, e.g. in the result or coda which is the case in three narratives of the German corpus.

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