Stef Slembrouck | Ghent University (original) (raw)

Papers by Stef Slembrouck

Frontiers in Psychology, Aug 29, 2023

This article focuses on transformative interactional practice in COVID-19 contact tracing telepho... more This article focuses on transformative interactional practice in COVID-19 contact tracing telephone calls in Flanders (Belgium). It is based on a large corpus of recorded telephone conversations conducted by COVID-19 contact tracers with index patients in the period mid-2020 to mid-2022. The calls were conducted through government-contracted commercial call centers. For nearly 2 years and applied country-wide, this was the most prominent strategy in Belgium for breaking transmission chains. COVID-19 telephone contact tracing with infected patients counts as transformative professional work in two ways. First, in addition to the registration of recent contacts in a relevant time window, the work is oriented to awareness-raising about how patients and their co-dwellers can and should adjust their behavior by attending actively to critical aspects of the pandemic during an individual period of (potential) infection. This is the terrain of advice, interdictions and recommendations about quarantine, isolation, personal hygiene, etc. In addition, the focus on interactional attention indexes patients' affect and emotions (e.g., anxiety, worry, or anger) in a period of health uncertainty and social isolation. The transformative work thus depends on successfully established rapport and empathetic, responsive behavior. Our analysis of the recorded conversational sequences focuses on the complexities of clientsensitive and responsive transformative sequences and highlights the constraints and affordances which surround the interactional task of 'instructional awareness raising' which is central to telephone contact tracing. Specifically, we detail the following dimensions of transformative sequences: (i) how do contact tracers deal with the knowledge status of clients, (ii) their use of upgrading/downgrading formulations, (iii) the use of humor and other mitigating strategies, and (iv) how contact tracers attend to interactional displays of affect and emotion. In a final section, we tie together our observations about the communication of particularized advice in a context of general measures through the twin notions of categorization/particularization-work. The findings in this paper are limited to the first step in the chain of contact tracing, i.e., telephone calls with tested and infected citizens.

Leuven : Acco eBooks, 2009

Journal of Literacy Research, Sep 1, 2007

Shop and café signs in multiple languages are familiar features of polyglot immigrant neighborhoo... more Shop and café signs in multiple languages are familiar features of polyglot immigrant neighborhoods. This paper examines such signs, presenting photographic, observational, and interview data from a multisited ethnographic study of language contact in Ghent, an urban Belgian city. Drawing upon diverse ethnographic sources, especially the comparative readings of foreign, immigrant, and native adults, we analyze signs and notices in several immigrant neighborhoods as (a) literacy practices, attending to their contexts of use as well as to their interpretations, and as (b) examples of indexical orders and orders of discourse, asking what hierarchical frames of interpretation and evaluation are brought to bear on the reading of such signs. Our findings show that shop signs and notices are complex indexes of source, addressee, and community, which are manifest in different readers' interpretations. The overall argument addresses several general points: that the study of indexicality helps conceptualize and analyze the rich and unexpectedly broad frames of interpretation readers bring to situated multilingual texts; that concepts of indexical or discursive order contribute to our understanding of multilingual literacy practices in situations of globalized locality; and that, conversely, the study of literacy practices reveals unexpected dimensions of Late Modern discursive orders. Shop and café signs in multiple languages are familiar features of polyglot immigrant neighborhoods. What passersby make of them, how they are read, is a question rarely addressed, but readings will surely vary by purposes of reading, prior experiences with such signs, and knowledge of languages. The field of

Language in Society, Feb 1, 2011

This article concentrates on how interviewees experience the context of semistructured or open in... more This article concentrates on how interviewees experience the context of semistructured or open interviews as a "test," both in terms of being an interviewee and in terms of the roles presupposed in what the interview is about. It invites a reflexive discourse-analytical turn in which we concentrate on the interactional negotiation of various aspects of the interview situation and the interview as an interactional accomplishment. The focus is on the implications for the status of the data that was subsequently obtained, with an eye to locating "the social forces that impress on the ethnographic locale" (Burawoy 1998:15). Insights obtained in this way are argued to bear directly on our understanding of the central research topic under investigation. The data used here have been drawn from a research project on social class and coding orientations in experiential accounts of child protection in Belgium/Flanders. The data base consists of interviews with parent clients. (Data histories, narrative, interview as test, social class, child protection, ethnographic reflexivity)

Palgrave Macmillan UK eBooks, Dec 20, 2017

In this paper, we investigate multi-class multi-server queueing systems with global FCFS policy, ... more In this paper, we investigate multi-class multi-server queueing systems with global FCFS policy, i.e., where customers requiring different types of service -provided by distinct servers -are accommodated in one common FCFS queue. In such scenarios, customers of one class (i.e., requiring a given type of service) may be hindered by customers of other classes. The purpose of this paper is twofold: to gain (qualitative and quantitative) insight into the impact of (i) the global FCFS policy and (ii) the relative distribution of the load amongst the customer classes, on the system performance. We therefore develop and analyze an appropriate discrete-time queueing model with general independent arrivals, two (independent) customer classes and two class-specific servers. We study the stability of the system and derive the system-content distribution at random slot boundaries; we also obtain mean values of the system content and the customer delay, both globally and for each class individually. We then extensively compare these results with those obtained for an analogous system without global FCFS policy (i.e., with individual queues for the two servers). We demonstrate that global FCFS, as well as the relative distribution of the load over the two customer classes, may have a major impact on the system performance.

Among others, Jones and saville (2016) argue that assessment should be informed by, and lead to, ... more Among others, Jones and saville (2016) argue that assessment should be informed by, and lead to, better learning, as part of an ecosystem of learning: 'A systemic and ecological approach seeks complementarity: informal classroom assessment and formal large-scale assessment should both contribute to the two key purposes of assessment: to provide evidence of learning and evidence for learning' (Jones and saville 2016:2; emphases in original). Jones and saville go on to state that this ecosystem of learning takes place both inside and outside the classroom. King (2018:33) agrees, and encourages: … looking beyond the classroom for the sources of language learning. We know that much language learning takes place informally -listening to music, playing games and watching films, using the Internet and communicating electronically, and increasingly in our multilingual cities in the diverse street. How will educators respond to this reality, treating it not as diversion but as a major source of knowledge and incorporating what learners bring with them from their outside world … ? Placing the learner themselves at the centre of the ecosystem of learning and assessment, as well as the integration of learning and assessment, have been recurring themes throughout recent editions of Research Notes (see issues 70, 75 and 77), as researchers seek to understand the different sources and contexts of learning that language learners find themselves in. Understanding these contexts will hopefully lead to more meaningful and more effective learning, teaching and assessment. other languages in the world of the english language learner one source in the context of language learning is to recognise the language ability that language learners already have when learning english. they already have at least one language, the language they use at home, but more often than not, they may also have additional languages -if the language of schooling is different, if they speak a regional dialect or variant, or if they speak another lingua franca, for example. this multilingual world 'is the natural way of life for three-quarters of the human race. [this] principle … has been obscured in parts of europe as a consequence of colonial history. We urgently need to reassert it, and to implement it in practical ways, for, in the modern world, monolingualism is not a strength but a handicap' (Crystal 2006:409). In europe, recent migration, as refugees, economic or academic migrants, have added to the number of people who, like Basque or Luxembourgish speakers, already usually have more than one language before they start learning english. even when mobility has been reduced, such as in the coronavirus lockdowns of 2020, the use of electronically mediated communication has kept the need for operating in more than one language alive. CAMBRIDGe AssessMeNt eNGLIsH -ReseARCH Notes: 78 | 5 the use of many languages may at first seem in stark contrast to the growing importance of english globally. In the eU, 97% of school pupils learn english as their first foreign language (european Commission 2018b). Perhaps more than three-quarters of academic journal articles are written in english (Montgomery 2013), and in the 2019 shanghai Jiao tong index of universities, 19 out of the 20 top-ranked universities were in the UsA or UK, english-language settings. 1 this has led to the growth in english as a Medium of Instruction (eMI). But it is increasingly being recognised that english is not enough. employability may demand english language skills as a given -other language proficiencies as well as multicultural sensitivities can mark employees out. these skills enable confidence in less familiar situations and domains that employees can find themselves in. Furthermore, using these linguistic resources -of the home language(s) and any other languages the individual knows -now has to be seen as an aid, not an impediment, to learning and teaching english (Cenoz and Gorter 2013, Chabert and

De Gruyter eBooks, Dec 2, 2019

Ga onmiddellijk naar paginanavigatie. As of July 1st 2010, only records submitted with full text ... more Ga onmiddellijk naar paginanavigatie. As of July 1st 2010, only records submitted with full text will be accepted in the academic bibliography. more info. Error: You do not have the rights to download this document. Paginanavigatie. ...

Academia Press eBooks, 2009

Goffman's Frame Analysis: a recent rejoinder Stef Slembrouck Ghent University 1. Introductio... more Goffman's Frame Analysis: a recent rejoinder Stef Slembrouck Ghent University 1. Introduction Goffman's concept of 'frame'has been widely and rather commonsensically received as being about frames of reference, knowledge structures about the typical interactional ...

Narrative Inquiry, Dec 31, 2003

Información del artículo What the map cuts up, the story cuts across.

Risk Discourse and Responsibility

Government responses to the Covid-19 health crisis are composed of recursively applied stages of ... more Government responses to the Covid-19 health crisis are composed of recursively applied stages of risk calculation and management as necessary processes in the containment of outbreaks. One of the most prominent forms of risk management in Flanders was contact tracing. It occurs in three variants: (i) the development and implementation of a smartphone-based contact tracing app, (ii) regionally-organised contact tracing telephone conversations conducted through commercially-contracted call centres, and (iii) home visiting by local field agents of populations who are difficult to reach. This chapter focuses on (ii), due to its prevalence, and is based on an interactional analysis of a corpus of 220 contact tracing conversations with index patients that was compiled late 2020 and early 2021. The chapter opens with a discussion of the notions of “Risk Society” and “responsibilisation” as relevant socio-cultural orientations in the current era of globalized Late Modernity and “governmenta...

Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development

Journal of Sociolinguistics

This article reports on a sociolinguistic study into the prevalence of African‐American English (... more This article reports on a sociolinguistic study into the prevalence of African‐American English (AAE) features in the lyrical language use of blues artists, relying on data from different social and national backgrounds and time periods. It adopts a variationist linguistic methodological approach to examine the prevalence of five AAE forms in live‐performed blues music: /aɪ/ monophthongization, post‐consonantal word‐final /t/ deletion, post‐consonantal word‐final /d/ deletion, alveolar nasal /n/ in < ing > ultimas, and post‐vocalic word‐final /r/ deletion. Mixed effects logistic regression analysis applied to a corpus of 80 performances finds no statistically significant association between national/ethnic background and variant use, and indicates that blues artists, from different eras and nationalities, are highly probable to realize the AAE variant of the analyzed variables, regardless of their sociocultural background. By building on early scholarly work on language and mu...

Studia Germanica Gandensia, 1986

Exploring (Im)mobilities, 2022

Het vooronderzoek in de controleschool is een onderdeel van het evaluatieonderzoek naar het proje... more Het vooronderzoek in de controleschool is een onderdeel van het evaluatieonderzoek naar het project ‘Thuistaal in onderwijs’ (2008-2013). Het evaluatieonderzoek flankeerde het project tussen 2009 en 2012. Binnen dit kader werd bij de aanvang van het eerste evaluatiejaar (februari 2009) de beginsituatie van de enige controleschool in kaart gebracht. Dit deelonderzoek behelst een inventaris van wat gebeurt (acties, handelen, percepties) in de desbetreffende school op vlak van taalvaardigheidsonderwijs en omgang met thuistalen. Door middel van het vooronderzoek kon ook worden nagegaan of de door de opdrachtgever geselecteerde school aan de voorwaarden voldeed om als controleschool in het evaluatieonderzoek te fungeren.

Acco (Academische Coöperatieve Vennootschap cvba), Leuven (België) Niets uit deze uitgave mag wor... more Acco (Academische Coöperatieve Vennootschap cvba), Leuven (België) Niets uit deze uitgave mag worden verveelvoudigd en/of openbaar gemaakt door middel van druk, fotokopie, microfilm of op welke andere wijze ook zonder voorafgaande schriftelijke toestemming van de uitgever. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by mimeograph, film or any other means without permission in writing from the publisher. D/2016/0543/12 NUR 842