Plenaria The Argentine Non-native Speaker of English: A consumer and a worker

CARRANZA, ISOLDA E.

Santa Fé

Congreso; 30th Conference of FAAPI ¨Towards the Knowledge Society¨; 2005

Federación Argentina de Asociaciones de Profesores de Inglés

Argentine non-native speakers of English are likely to participate in globalized knowledge-based discourse trends both as employees and as consumers. Call centers training manuals reveal that knowledge about interactional dynamics (e.g. through question tags and identification by first name), grammar (e.g. effects of semantic presupposition and inclusive ¨we¨), and conversational synchrony is reflexively applied to shape communication and direct it towards the knowledgeable party´s ends. As consumers, they are the target of ever increasing, intense marketing initiatives to sell popular culture, international exams and English language textbooks. Increase of the EFL population ensures the expansion of market for those commodities. Another generalized trend is the penetration of the discourse of marketing in multimodal texts aimed at addressing and attracting university students. Although the so-called product is higher education and the community is expected to be driven by academic values, web site visual texts instantiate an allegedly global advertising discourse. Significations of the new tendencies in the application of linguistic and visual semiosis become naturalized, but can be revealed by means of increased discourse awareness.