Feedback on performance is a feature of professional training. Much feedback is delivered in post-observation conferences where a ‘trainer’ will discuss the ‘trainee's’ performance with him/her. What transpires in these conferences, however, is ‘hidden from view’ (Heritage and Sefi 1992: 362) and the norms of interaction are largely unexamined in the literature. Even less is known about feedback conducted in groups, yet many teachers training to teach English experience feedback in this way. This article provides a discourse analysis of four extracts from group feedback conferences on a pre-service programme for teachers of English language. Drawing on the concept of ‘legitimate talk’, the analysis shows how topics and speaking rights are established and negotiated and how participants orientate to and contest both the forms of knowledge that emerge and the speaking rights. While the study was not initially designed to support trainers in their professional development, the argument is made that data from linguistic ethnographic studies can be used by research participants and others for these purposes, thus enhancing the relationship between the researcher and the researched.
This study analyses question–answer (QA) sequences in second language tutorial interaction. Using conversation analysis methodology as an analytical tool, the study demonstrates how the act of questioning is a dominant form of interaction in tutoring discourse. The doing of questioning is accomplished through a myriad of forms other than interrogative questions, such as declaratively formatted utterances, and-prefacing, b-event questions, and embodied practices. QA sequences are fundamentally remedial in nature in that they revolve around tutees’ linguistic needs. In this regard, questions that do not address tutees’ linguistic needs are framed as being somewhat disjunctive or ‘out of order’. Through the fine-grained analysis of the QA sequences in four videotaped tutoring sessions, this study contributes to the line of scholarship that seeks to demonstrate how the investigation of questions as interactional products has a bearing on our understanding of the connection between grammar and social organization.
L2 requests in developmental pragmatics research are commonly investigated using non-interactive data collection techniques or sidelining the larger discourse sequence in which the request proper is embedded. This study takes a different approach to the study of L2 requests. In a cross-sectional design, we collected role play data from learners at four proficiency levels, and focused on the sequential organization of the interactions and the impact of participants’ proficiency level. Findings indicate that lower level learners were less likely to project the upcoming request and lay the groundwork for it through ascertaining interlocutor availability and providing accounts. They used fewer first-pair parts and uttered the request early relying on the interlocutor to elicit further information. The interlocutor also adjusted to learners’ proficiency level in keeping complications to a minimum. Effects of the social context variable Power were very limited but discernible at high-proficiency levels. We argue for a more discursive approach to developmental data in interlanguage pragmatics that allows the identification of interactional correlates of proficiency.
This study compares the relative effectiveness of reading and writing sentences for the incidental acquisition of new vocabulary in a second language. It also examines if recall varies according to the concreteness of target words. Participants were 203 French-speaking intermediate and advanced English as second language (ESL) learners, tested for incidental acquisition of 16 rare concrete, or abstract L2 words. Immediate and delayed cued recall was used to assess acquisition. Results from immediate recall show superior recall for writing tasks over reading tasks, and for concrete words over abstract words. However, delayed recall scores suggest that this superiority disappears over time.
This article reports on an adaptation and validation study of SRCvoc (self-regulating capacity in vocabulary learning scale; Tseng et al. 2006) in a Japanese EFL setting. The piloting phase revealed that factor structures were different from those in the original study. The main study, including a self-reported measure of procrastination to explore the convergent evidence of the construct validity, suggests that the scale can be a valid measure of self-regulation capacity in vocabulary learning in a Japanese EFL environment. These findings provide implications for future studies that utilize the same type of research paradigm.
This forum article examines the conceptualization of strategic learning over the past 30 years, focusing on recent conceptualizations that shift towards the notion of self-regulation. In recent years, scholars have argued that language learning strategies are too general, undefined, and incoherent and the questionnaires designed to measure language learning strategies are inaccurate and unreliable (see, for example, Dörnyei 2005; Woodrow 2005; Tseng et al. 2006). Instead Dörnyei proposes a new theory to replace language learning strategies based on the psychological concept of self-regulation encased within his own model of motivation control. This article will argue that this reconceptualization might be a matter of throwing the baby out with the bathwater, in that it throws out a problematic taxonomy and replaces it with another one, which is also problematic—including the same ‘definitional fuzziness’ for which previous taxonomies have been criticized.
Feedback on performance is a feature of professional training. Much feedback is delivered in post-observation conferences where a ‘trainer’ will discuss the ‘trainee's’ performance with him/her. What transpires in these conferences, however, is ‘hidden from view’ (Heritage and Sefi 1992: 362) and the norms of interaction are largely unexamined in the literature. Even less is known about feedback conducted in groups, yet many teachers training to teach English experience feedback in this way. This article provides a discourse analysis of four extracts from group feedback conferences on a pre-service programme for teachers of English language. Drawing on the concept of ‘legitimate talk’, the analysis shows how topics and speaking rights are established and negotiated and how participants orientate to and contest both the forms of knowledge that emerge and the speaking rights. While the study was not initially designed to support trainers in their professional development, the argument is made that data from linguistic ethnographic studies can be used by research participants and others for these purposes, thus enhancing the relationship between the researcher and the researched.
This study analyses question–answer (QA) sequences in second language tutorial interaction. Using conversation analysis methodology as an analytical tool, the study demonstrates how the act of questioning is a dominant form of interaction in tutoring discourse. The doing of questioning is accomplished through a myriad of forms other than interrogative questions, such as declaratively formatted utterances, and-prefacing, b-event questions, and embodied practices. QA sequences are fundamentally remedial in nature in that they revolve around tutees’ linguistic needs. In this regard, questions that do not address tutees’ linguistic needs are framed as being somewhat disjunctive or ‘out of order’. Through the fine-grained analysis of the QA sequences in four videotaped tutoring sessions, this study contributes to the line of scholarship that seeks to demonstrate how the investigation of questions as interactional products has a bearing on our understanding of the connection between grammar and social organization.
L2 requests in developmental pragmatics research are commonly investigated using non-interactive data collection techniques or sidelining the larger discourse sequence in which the request proper is embedded. This study takes a different approach to the study of L2 requests. In a cross-sectional design, we collected role play data from learners at four proficiency levels, and focused on the sequential organization of the interactions and the impact of participants’ proficiency level. Findings indicate that lower level learners were less likely to project the upcoming request and lay the groundwork for it through ascertaining interlocutor availability and providing accounts. They used fewer first-pair parts and uttered the request early relying on the interlocutor to elicit further information. The interlocutor also adjusted to learners’ proficiency level in keeping complications to a minimum. Effects of the social context variable Power were very limited but discernible at high-proficiency levels. We argue for a more discursive approach to developmental data in interlanguage pragmatics that allows the identification of interactional correlates of proficiency.
This study compares the relative effectiveness of reading and writing sentences for the incidental acquisition of new vocabulary in a second language. It also examines if recall varies according to the concreteness of target words. Participants were 203 French-speaking intermediate and advanced English as second language (ESL) learners, tested for incidental acquisition of 16 rare concrete, or abstract L2 words. Immediate and delayed cued recall was used to assess acquisition. Results from immediate recall show superior recall for writing tasks over reading tasks, and for concrete words over abstract words. However, delayed recall scores suggest that this superiority disappears over time.
This article reports on an adaptation and validation study of SRCvoc (self-regulating capacity in vocabulary learning scale; Tseng et al. 2006) in a Japanese EFL setting. The piloting phase revealed that factor structures were different from those in the original study. The main study, including a self-reported measure of procrastination to explore the convergent evidence of the construct validity, suggests that the scale can be a valid measure of self-regulation capacity in vocabulary learning in a Japanese EFL environment. These findings provide implications for future studies that utilize the same type of research paradigm.
This forum article examines the conceptualization of strategic learning over the past 30 years, focusing on recent conceptualizations that shift towards the notion of self-regulation. In recent years, scholars have argued that language learning strategies are too general, undefined, and incoherent and the questionnaires designed to measure language learning strategies are inaccurate and unreliable (see, for example, Dörnyei 2005; Woodrow 2005; Tseng et al. 2006). Instead Dörnyei proposes a new theory to replace language learning strategies based on the psychological concept of self-regulation encased within his own model of motivation control. This article will argue that this reconceptualization might be a matter of throwing the baby out with the bathwater, in that it throws out a problematic taxonomy and replaces it with another one, which is also problematic—including the same ‘definitional fuzziness’ for which previous taxonomies have been criticized.
The relationship between creativity, play, and language learning has been of increasing interest over the past decade, but the role of humour itself in SLL remains significantly under-explored. The present study examines humorous language play initiated by a bilingual EFL teacher and taken up by his post-beginner students in a Thai university setting. A framework of verbal art is adopted in order to locate this use of humour in relation to both language play and to creativity more broadly. Textual analysis draws upon the psychological notion of incongruity, as well as upon Bakhtin’s ‘carnival’. The verbal humour observed in this class is identified as having two foci: linguistic, relating to word-play, and discursive, relating to social positioning. For students, benefits to learning are recorded in affective, sociocultural and linguistic dimensions. In consideration of the teacher’s role, it is suggested that the capacity of humour to ‘unsettle’ requires careful handling.
As China is increasingly occupying the world's attention, its explosively expanding economical and political clout has also been felt in the applied linguistics domain, with the discussion on China's/Chinese language issues growing by leaps and bounds (e.g. China's English education policies, Chinese language classes in the West). Amid the world's hopeful or ambivalent attitudes towards China, the present brief discussion, favourably disposed towards a new era in East–West relations, revisits applied linguistics research on Asian language learners, whose problematized image conventionally lends support to Western supremacy and the westernized Asian learner. Future research directions are explored in the light of new global power relations that are expected to act as a conduit to re-balancing dominant language-learner ideologies, applied linguistics research discussion and its pedagogical implications.
This study assessed, in a sample of 98 adult native speakers of Dutch, how their lexical skills and their speaking proficiency varied as a function of their age and level of education and profession (EP). Participants, categorized in terms of their age (18–35, 36–50, and 51–76 years old) and the level of their EP (low versus high), were tested on their lexical knowledge, lexical fluency, and lexical memory, and they performed four speaking tasks, differing in genre and formality. Speaking performance was rated in terms of communicative adequacy and in terms of number of words, number of T-units, words per T-unit, content words per T-unit, hesitations per T-unit, and grammatical errors per T-unit. Increasing age affected lexical knowledge positively but lexical fluency and memory negatively. High EP positively affected lexical knowledge and memory but EP did not affect lexical fluency. Communicative adequacy of the responses in the speaking tasks was positively affected by high EP but was not affected by age. It is concluded that, given the large variability in native speakers’ language knowledge and skills, studies investigating the question of whether second-language learners can reach native levels of proficiency, should take native-speaker variability into account.
In the present study, we surveyed the English language-learning motivations of 518 secondary school students, university students, and young adult learners in the capital of Chile, Santiago. We applied multi-group structural-equation modeling to analyze how language-learning goals, attitudes, self-related beliefs, and parental encouragement interact in shaping motivated behavior and to investigate age- and group-related differences in the internal structure of language-learning motivation. We compared our findings with previous studies using similar instruments in different settings, and based on our findings, we proposed a new interactive model of language-learning motivation, which consists of goal systems, attitudes, self-efficacy beliefs, and future self-guides.
The purpose of this article is to analyse interaction in academic weblogs, focusing on discursive features that provide cues as to the participants’ interpersonal behaviour. The data for this study consisted of postings and their corresponding comments taken from 11 academic weblogs. The analysis of the corpus allowed us to work out a framework of different categories of discursive indicators of social and antisocial behaviour. Following Rourke et al. (1999), the indicators of social behaviour were categorized into the following types: (i) affectivity, (ii) cohesiveness, and (iii) interactivity. The indicators of antisocial behaviour were classified into three groups: (i) negative socioemotional behaviour, (ii) group exclusion, and (iii) confrontational interaction. The study shows that bloggers and weblog readers use a great variety of discursive strategies aimed at constructing and sustaining affective and solidarity relations in the community and creating an identity for themselves as competent members of the disciplinary community.
This article aims to fill a gap in current studies on the semantics of branding. Through the analysis of a number of well-known international brand names, we provide ample evidence supporting the claim that a finite set of cognitive operations, such as those of domain reduction and expansion, mitigation, and strengthening, among others, can account for the drawing of inferences on the basis of the cue provided by the brand name. Such conceptual mechanisms are often randomly and unconsciously used in the process of building a new brand name. Nevertheless, this article argues that their systematic use results in (i) an increase in the degree of suggestiveness and semantic richness of the brand name, (ii) a lower risk of generating negative associations and connotations, and (iii) higher cognitive economy in the interpretation of brand names on the part of the potential consumer. In doing so, these cognitive operations arise as powerful tools for the task of creating safe and successful brand names.
This article examines a little-studied review genre of academe: letters written for faculty retention, promotion, and tenure (RPT). Given their centrally evaluative nature, these documents have potential to illuminate academic community values, particularly those related to faculty work. Of specific interest in this study is the evaluative language that RPT letter writers use to review three core areas of faculty performance: teaching, research and service. To this end, the author examined positive evaluative lexis in 95 RPT letters written for 11 faculty members from 8 US universities. The analysis revealed that letter writers assessed faculty in terms of seven key dimensions of their work (presentation, expertise, conscientiousness, affect, prestige, uniqueness, and productivity) and that these dimensions clustered in different ways across the three work areas. What emerged were three distinct ideals of faculty performance, which both promote and obscure realities of faculty work. In addition, while negative evaluation was sometimes expressed directly, it was typically mitigated, pointing to community concerns with politeness when evaluating colleagues.
This article reports a study on metaphor comprehension by the international students whose first language is not English, while attending undergraduate lectures at a British university. Study participants identified words or multiword items that they found difficult in extracts from four academic lectures, and they interpreted metaphors from those extracts. Among the items reported as difficult, we established the proportion of metaphorical items, plus the proportion of items composed only of words familiar to the students. We developed a measure of the extent of students’ awareness of their metaphor interpretation difficulties, plus a scheme for categorizing the most common types of metaphor misinterpretations. We found that, of the items that were difficult though composed of familiar words, ~40 per cent involved metaphor. Further, when the students misinterpreted metaphors, they only seemed aware of having difficulty in ~4 per cent of cases. As university lecturers use metaphors for important functions, such as explaining and evaluating, such international students may thus be missing valuable learning opportunities. Our error categorization scheme could be used in helping English learners with metaphor comprehension.
This article assesses the influence of L1 intralexical knowledge on the formation of L2 intralexical collocations. Two tests, a primed lexical decision task (LDT) and a test of receptive collocational knowledge, were administered to a group of non-native speakers (NNSs) (L1 Swedish), with native speakers (NSs) of English serving as controls on the LDT. The tests assessed collocations in three critical conditions: (i) collocations with translation equivalents in Swedish and English (L1–L2), (ii) collocations that were acceptable in English but not in Swedish (L2-only), and (iii) unrelated items for baseline data. Our results showed that the L1 may have considerable influence on the development of L2 collocational knowledge. NNSs both processed [with faster reaction times (RTs) on the LDT] and recognized (with higher receptive scores) L1–L2 collocations more effectively than L2-only collocations. However, the results of the LDT also showed considerable variability for the L2-only condition, suggesting that the overall slower RTs in this condition might have been linked more to a lack of priming for individual items rather than slower RTs for this condition as a whole.
This article proposes that a complex issue such as bilingualism gives rise to a need for complex research. Complexity theories, both in the psycholinguistic and educational fields, may inspire new empirical studies on bilingualism that will likely provide data otherwise unattainable through classic pre-test/post-test methods. The article also warns against hardcore educational egalitarianism which may seriously harm Content and Language Integrated Learning programmes if they become one-size-fits-all models. The article has been written in response to a reply to these authors’ original article Lorenzo et al. (2010).