Posicionamientos a través de historias de vida escritas acerca de “Matoneo” (Bullying) en las comunidades de estudiantes de inglés como lengua extranjera de grado noveno en un colegio público de Bogotá

Abstract

Abstract This study was carried out with EFL ninth graders at one of the biggest public schools in Bogotá. It is located in an area which presents particular social issues together with bullying issues. That is why I proposed the following research question: What do ninth graders’ written life stories portray about their positioning in regard to bullying as a social issue in their communities? This is based upon a view of discourse that Fairclough (2003) presents as an element of social life to represent different aspects of the world, which are drawn from a text. Such view relates to the ways adolescents face L2 literacy development within their social contexts, being schools one of those contexts (Moje, 2006) where there are opportunities to (re)construct meaningful life experiences. The focus in this thesis is on the experiences lived by the participants as related to the social issue of bullying. Those participants’ experiences took the shape of life stories that they wrote during one year. In order to analyze the participants’ life stories, I selected a model for narrative analysis suggested by Barkhuizen. (2004) The unit of analysis in this thesis was the specific declarative statements (Hallyday 1994), which made me conscious of the participants’ positions (Davies & Harré, 1990) concerning manifestations of bullying. As a validation strategy, semi-structured interviews were implemented (Cohen & Crabtree, 2006).