Global resources, local practices – English, style and identity in a Danish international school
af Kasper Engholm Jelby
This Master’s thesis examines the semiotic role of English in the identity practices of a class of 23 Danish-speaking students attending a Danish IB program. It is argued that, due to the absence of non-Danish-speakers in the classroom, the use of English among these speakers cannot be interpreted in terms of its generally instrumental function as an international lingua franca in the IB program, but must rather be viewed as a symbolic resource used for identity construction. Analysis was based on interactions between groups of students in the class as well as supplementary semi-structured group interviews that were recorded during an ethnographic study spanning several weeks in the spring of 2022.
Interactions were subjected to qualitative discourse analysis and, based on a theoretical framework linking social-constructivist theories of identity to indexical theories of style, three overarching identity practices based on the stylistic use of English were identified: 1) the use of English to construct an IB identity; 2) the use of English to construct a clique identity; and 3) the use of English to construct translocal popular-cultural identities. Based on these findings, it is argued that the identities constructed among these Danish-speaking IB students must be understood as acts of scale-jumping (Blommaert 2010), so that students would use English to enact identities existing on various different scales, from local to more global scale-levels.
Specialet er skrevet af Kasper Engholm Jelby ved Department of English, Germanic and Romance studies ved Københavns Universitet og blev bedømt til karakteren 12.
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