Repairing Tales from Japan: Changes Over Time in Personal Narratives

At two different times, Time 1 and Time 2, 13 participants in Japan (8 Japanese and 5 Americans) were asked to spontaneously respond in English to this prompt: "Tell me about one of the most exciting or dangerous moments in your life." The Japanese responded during their first and fourth years of college, which involved an interval of 42 months. The Americans were native speakers of English and responded earlier and later in their one year study abroad program in Japanese language and culture. Three questions addressed by this paper were the following: (a) What types of topics and narrative structures characterize these 26 stories? (b) What types of speaker-initiated repairs appear, and are the repairs the same or different at Time 1 and Time 2? (c) How are the repairs related to different listener (American, Japanese, Filipino, and Taiwanese) assessments of the intelligibility of the narratives

ELLIPSIS AS A MARKER OF INTERACTION IN SPOKEN DISCOURSE

In this article, we discuss strategies for interaction in spoken discourse, focusing on ellipsis phenomena in English. The data comes from the VOICE corpus of English as a Lingua Franca, and we analyse education data in the form of seminar and workshop discussions, working group meetings, interviews and conversations. The functions ellipsis carries in the data are Intersubjectivity, where participants develop and maintain an understanding in discourse; Continuers, which are examples of back channel support; Correction, both self- and other-initiated; Repetition; and Comments, which are similar to Continuers but do not have a back channel support function. We see that the first of these, Intersubjectivity, is by far the most popular, followed by Repetitions and Comments. These results are explained as consequences of the nature of the texts themselves, as some are discussions of presentations and so can be expected to contain many Repetitions, for example. The speech event is also an important factor, as events with asymmetrical power relations like interviews do not contain so many Continuers. Our clear conclusion is that the use of ellipsis is a strong marker of interaction in spoken discourse

The Pragmatic Functions of Repetition in TV Discourse

Since repetition is a natural phenomenon used to perform various functions in interactional discourse, adopting a pragmatic analysis to the discourse of Dr. Phil and his guests on Dr. Phil's TV show, this study attempted to explore the pragmatic functions of such repetitions as used by English native speakers. The data were gathered from conversations between native speakers of English, and based on 7 full episodes of Dr. Phil's TV Show. The researchers watched, and studied these episodes on YouTube. The study revealed that one of the salient features of TV discourse is repetition, which is employed to perform a variety of language functions. Repetition was used to express emphasis, clarity, emotions, highlight the obvious, be questionable, express annoyance, persuasion, express surprise, give instructions, and as a filler in order to take time, when the speaker was searching for a proper word to say what would come next. The study concluded that these findings had significant implications for EFL/ESL teachers and the interlanguage development of EFL/ESL learners

Self-Repair Devices in Classroom Monologue Discourse

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Aging, Emotion, Attention, and Binding in the Taboo Stroop Task: Data and Theories.

How does aging impact relations between emotion, memory, and attention? To address this question, young and older adults named the font colors of taboo and neutral words, some of which recurred in the same font color or screen location throughout two color-naming experiments. The results indicated longer color-naming response times (RTs) for taboo than neutral base-words (taboo Stroop interference); better incidental recognition of colors and locations consistently associated with taboo versus neutral words (taboo context-memory enhancement); and greater speed-up in color-naming RTs with repetition of color-consistent than color-inconsistent taboo words, but no analogous speed-up with repetition of location-consistent or location-inconsistent taboo words (the consistency type by repetition interaction for taboo words). All three phenomena remained constant with aging, consistent with the transmission deficit hypothesis and binding theory, where familiar emotional words trigger age-invariant reactions for prioritizing the binding of contextual features to the source of emotion. Binding theory also accurately predicted the interaction between consistency type and repetition for taboo words. However, one or more aspects of these phenomena failed to support the inhibition deficit hypothesis, resource capacity theory, or socio-emotional selectivity theory. We conclude that binding theory warrants further test in a range of paradigms, and that relations between aging and emotion, memory, and attention may depend on whether the task and stimuli trigger fast-reaction, involuntary binding processes, as in the taboo Stroop paradigm

THE ANALYSIS OF REPETITION AS PART OF LEXICAL COHESION IN TALK SHOWS

The aim of this paper is to define the lexical cohesion in the dialogue. The focus of this paper is the repetition that happens frequently in the dialogue. The dialogue is taken from the talk shows downloaded from youtube. The analysis is given based on the data from the dialogue of the speakers and draw the conclusion. This study brings benefits in building the perception of the audiences. From the data that has been analyzed, it has been found that the speakers tend to repeat the word, phrase, or sentence because they want to strengthen their opinion, eventhough from the sentence structure the repetition is not good and eficient. The result of the study also show that there are some reasons why do the speakers repeat their word. phrase or sentence such as to strengthen their opinion.Tujuan penelitian ini adalah menjabarkan lexical cohesion pada dialog. Adapun fokus penelitian ini adalah dengan melihat bentuk pengulangan yang sering terjadi dalam percakapan. Penelitian ini melihat telaah pada dialog dalam beberapa acara berbentuk talk show yang diambil dari youtube. Analisis kemudian diberikan terhadap data-data berupa dialog dari narasumber dan menyimpulkan temuan yang didapat. Penelitian ini sangat berguna terutama dalam hal membangun persepsi terhadap pendengar. Dari data yang telah dianalisis, peneliti menemukan bahwa kecenderungan pembicara adalah mengulang baik itu kata, frasa maupun kalimat yang terkadang pengulangan tersebut menjadi baik karena mempertegas sebuah pemikiran namun juga merugikan karena kalimat menjadi tidak efisien. Peneliti juga telah merangkum berbagai alasan pembicara melakukan pengulangan seperti misalnya untuk mempertegas penyampaiannya

Characteristics of quality teaching for students in New Zealand schools whose first language is not English

The current paper draws on the findings of two recent research reports commissioned by the New Zealand Ministry of Education (Alton-Lee, 2003; Franken & McComish, 2003) in order to generate a synthesised statement of characteristics of quality teaching for students for whom English is not the first language (referred to from here as NESB students1) in New Zealand schools. Alton-Lee (2003, see Ministry of Education website, www.minedu.govt.nz) provides a synthesis of research-based evidence addressing the nature of quality teaching in schooling for the full range of diverse students. In this work, diversity encompasses “many characteristics including ethnicity, socio-economic background, home language, gender, special needs, disability, and giftedness” (Alton-Lee, 2003, p. v). Because her synthesis addresses diversity in the student population, she focusses on what is common to diverse students and thus does not specify particular conditions that pertain to any one sub-group of diverse students. Franken and McComish (2003) on the other hand, is a research report into the English language support for NESB (Non English Speaking Background) students in New Zealand schools. It includes a literature review of evidence-based research into second language teaching and learning, particularly classroom based research. It also reports on observations and analysis of practices in New Zealand schools, and discusses how these documented practices relate to the research findings from the literature