Article Discussion:

Some have credit cards and others have giro cheques: individuals and
people as lifelong learners in late modernity
-Alison Piper

Objectives of discussion:

Review main points:

Rationale/Aims/Purposes

Research Question(s)/Hypotheses

Methodology

Results/Implications

Group discussion

Whole class discussion/Conclusions

Rationale/purpose

Extend previous research in order to show how certain words can have a
particular meaning/set of meanings dependent upon the discourse or context
in which they occur.

Aims of this article

Aim 1

carry out a brief review of social and cultural theories of individualization.

Aim 2

set out a broad linguistic analysis particularly of individuals and people in the
discourse of learning policy in the UK

reach a better understanding of their differences

examine how their semantic and ideological meanings are constructed by

their disposition/collocational associations in the structure of the language.
Aim 3

Contribute a more empirical analysis of the constituent potential of language;

Seek more generally to investigate the potential and the limitations of

detailed linguistic work of this kind.

Research questions and hypotheses

Lifelong learning is a process which is intended to bring about a learning

society(p. 516).

How does social agenda/policy making affect language and socio-educational

policy?

Who are the individuals and people who are supposed to be life long learners and thus
bring about a learning society?

Hypothesis:

There is a relationship the official discourse of lifelong learning (socio-educational policy)

and sociocultural theory.

The language in such discourse is somehow different from, or least a subset of, the
English language as a whole (Piper, p.521)

Methodology

In a previous study, Piper (2000) assembled a ~1 million word corpus of British

and European commission literature on education policy.

The author used a concordance-based analysis to examine the associations and

connotations in order to show the assumptions that the words embody.

In this study, she used a similar methodology, but analyzed collocations containing
individuals and people.

She used human capital theory as here theoretical framework for analyzing word
associations within the collocations.

She compared her results to collocations from BNC.

Results and implications

According to the results in this study,

People have giro cheques

Individuals have credit cards

People are associated more with singular entities who are not as educated or are
not socio-economically responsible

Individuals are associated collectivities-generally viewed as more educated and

more socio-economically responsible

Further Discussion

Can you think of a context where individuals and people might be synonymous? Please give an
example and describe the basic meaning of the words in that context.

Do you think that the policy authors purposefully used different words to refer to different categories
of learners?

Why do you think there are such different denotations and connotations of individuals and people in
the Life Long Learning policy?

What potential implications do you think this study might have in the context of second language
teaching?