English Language Teaching in its Social Context

336 JOAN SWANNTranscriptNotcs1 [Once upon a time] a I longspreading gesture to start story; downwardI long I long I long I longtimeago there was a I hunter a [verywcll-known and respected hunter]*every day he would go I out into theI bush he would catch whatevermeat he needed for the village, hewould carrv it on his back he wouldbring it into the villape he wouldthrow it down on the floor the peoplethey would see him *they would startclapping their hands body orientation.*hands out to A; A also invited hy directgaze, head movcmcnt, generalKeyI[Once upon a time]Ilong*every daycatch whatever meatASquare brackets indicate beginning and endof large spreading gestureVcrtical slash indicates downward gestureaccompanying a wordAsterisk indicates something that iscommented on in the ‘Notes’ columnUnderlined speech indicates that thestoryteller also mimes the actions shedescribesAs in transcripts above, indicatessound/action that forms part of theutteranceAudienceFigure 20.6 Representation of nonverbal features in an oral narrativesuch as the students’ first or main language, for certain purposes. In this case, it may beinteresting to see when a teacher or student uses each language.There are many diffcrent ways of representing the alternation between differentlanguage varieties. In Chapter 17 for instance, Angel Lin indicates ‘codeswitching’ betweenCantonese and English, representing Cantonese in translation and in bold type. Figures 20.8and 20.9 show how researchers have represented languages in their original form whilstalso offering an English translation. Figure 20.8, from research carried out by AntoinetteCamillcri in bilingual classrooms in Malta, shows a teacher alternating between English andMaltese, where Maltese is used to amplify or explain (rather than simply translate) an Englishsentence read from a textbook. In this case, an English translation of the Maltese utterancesi.; given in a separate column. Figure 20.9, from research carried out by G.D. Jayalakshmiin Bihar, in northern India, shows how a teacher uses Sanskrit partly to demonstrate hisknowledge and also ‘because he believes that his function is to instruct students not only inlanguage but also, more generally, in life’ (Jayalakshmi, 1996, p. 145). In this case, an Englishtranslation is given in brackets beneath the Sanskrit.In Figure 20.9, Jayalakshmi represents Sanskrit in Devanagari script. It would alsohave been possible to represent it in transliteration, in Roman script. It is, however, moredifficult to decide how to represent language varieties closely related to English, or differentvarieties of English, that do not have a conventional orthography. Figure 20.5 represented