A rationale and suggestions for including sound symbolic expressive vocabulary in university-level Japanese language classroom instruction

textThe Japanese language is unusually rich in a variety of sound symbolic words. Sound imitation is used to reflect physical, audible noises relating to the actions or movements of people, animals, and things. Such words are also used to express imitation of manner to portray feelings and figurative meanings. These expressions are found in a wide variety of contexts, ranging from classical literature to daily conversation, to manga (the trendy comic books read extensively by virtually every age group in Japan). Sound symbolic vocabulary adds a vividness and flair to the Japanese language, making it colorful, creative, and psychologically expressive. These words have common structural features and syntactic functions that make them readily identifiable (though, perhaps, not at a conscious level for the native speaker) as a lexical group. And yet, despite their undeniable presence in all areas of language use, sound symbolic words have been virtually ignored in Japanese language textbooks and classroom instruction. They continue to represent, to outsiders, at least, one of the most elusive and least understood aspects of the Japanese language. In this dissertation, I frame my discussion of characteristics of sound symbolic vocabulary by first reviewing the literature on Japanese sound symbolic vocabulary and on vocabulary acquisition in L1 and L2. I then discuss the results of interviews with textbook authors and language educators concerning the teaching of sound symbolic words. Although they expressed some divergent views, for the most part they agreed that these words do play an important role and should be introduced to students in manageable increments, at a point when students have acquired enough knowledge to make learning meaningful. Imagery-based pictorial, verbal, and contextual responses to 100 sound symbolic words given by 50 Japanese native speakers are presented. I then provide suggestions for classroom instruction of sound symbolic vocabulary based on a constructivist model using metalinguistic previews and imagery-based elaboration strategies, offering a sample “snapshot” lesson. Ramifications of this dissertation should help students increase their knowledge of and ability to communicate using real-life Japanese, greatly expand their word power, and make significant progress to greater language proficiency.Curriculum and Instructio

There are No Mistakes on the Bandstand (or in the Classroom)

“There are no mistakes on the bandstand” is the title of a music performance and talk by jazz vibraphonist Stefon Harris (2011), on the website ‘TED.com.’ The emphasis of his theme is the fact that mistakes are not necessarily mistakes, exemplified in his world of jazz performance and improvisation, and that what one may consider a mistake may actually be a new opportunity. As Harris states in his performance, “I have no idea what we’re going to play. I won’t be able to tell you what it is until it happens,” summarizing what every foreign language speaker expects and what every native speaker often forgets. As such, teaching and learning expectations are often mismatched between structured classroom learning tasks and real world experiences. Just as Harris points out, we have no idea what we are actually going to say until it, a dialogue, takes place. But, just like a jazz musician, we need to be confident enough in improvising to continue the music, or in this case, language communication. We may have some rough idea based on previous experiences, whether through study or previous communication, but fundamentally we won’t be able to predict what we will say to someone else until it, the intended utterance for whatever reason, happens. We cannot predict the unpredictable. As such, students as language learners and teachers as language facilitators must become aware of the fundamental need to improvise in any given situation. A successful improvisation allows the speaker to grow and realize their potential as an English language speaker

Céad mίle fáilte: a corpus-based study of the development of a community of practice within the Irish hotel management training sector

This thesis examines the discourse of a unique third-level academic institution in order to identify the variety of linguistic features, which align it, first of all, to the higher education sector in general, but more specifically to a specific professional world where students are being educated for their future careers. Specifically, a college of hotel management education in the south of Ireland is the locus of research. Students complete a four-year Business Degree in International Hotel Management during which time they gain academic and theoretical knowledge along with practical industry experience during placement internships in the industry. Data collection using oral recordings spanned a twelve-month period and two academic years. This allowed for a comprehensive matrix of recording events encapsulating the full gamut of college academic life across the three years of student presence on campus. Recordings included a variety of hotel-specific and business lectures, practical working sessions, language classes and some miscellaneous events, thus creating a one-million word spoken corpus devoted to this sector. The primary research question concerns the identification and quantification of the discourse specific to this academic and professionally-oriented environment, using corpus linguistics methodologies. Parallel to and supported by this specialised linguistic repertoire lies the development of the emergent identity among the students themselves and their place and future careers within the international hotel management sector. This aspect will be analysed within Wenger’s (1998) framework of community of practice and Lave and Wenger’s (1991) initial theory of legitimate peripheral participation. In addition, an ethnographic lens will be employed to shed light on the day-to-day operations of this college and how the totality of this unique community, expressed through its discourse, but not only so, establishes and fosters an environment where the students develop their future professional identities supported by the academic professionals who are experienced industry practitioners in the field of international hotel management.N

Challenging the 'Native Speaker' Ideal: The Impact of Native Speakerism on Language Education

Native-Speakerism has emerged as a prominent element of contemporary TESOL discourse and a frequent talking point when it comes to issues of language-related prejudice and discrimination. It does so by building on a diverse range of sources and intentionally slanting toward amusing the trendy. It is suggested that the ideological conception of native-speakerism applies retroactively to the coveted victimization and the narrative of indignation that goes along with it to people who identify as "nonnative speakers.” The researchers used a literature review through six steps to unravel challenging the native speaker ideal: the impact of native speakerism on language education. The reason behind choosing this topic is to find out how deep the ideology of getting advantages that the native-speakers are having in every stage where the nonnative speakers are having trouble including different perspectives as well. It is shown how the fortress of victimization then allows those inside through or the people who have been harmed. In this article, the distinction between native and non-native speakers in terms of teaching and learning the English language, The idea that a "native speaker" is inherently more competent to instruct English than a "non-native speaker" is known as the "native speaker's fallacy" as well as strengths and weaknesses of both the characteristics shall be described in detail

Personal long-term memory aids

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, February 2005.MIT Institute Archives Copy: p. 101-132 bound in reverse order.Includes bibliographical references (p. 126-132).The prevalence and affordability of personal and environmental recording apparatuses are leading to increased documentation of our daily lives. This trend is bound to continue and it follows that academic, industry, and government groups are showing an increased interest in such endeavors for various purposes. In the present case, I assert that such documentation can be used to help remedy common memory problems. Assuming a long-term personal archive exists, when confronted with a memory problem, one faces a new challenge, that of finding relevant memory triggers. This dissertation examines the use of information-retrieval technologies on long-term archives of personal experiences towards remedying certain types of long-term forgetting. The approach focuses on capturing audio for the content. Research on Spoken Document Retrieval examines the pitfalls of information-retrieval techniques on error-prone speech- recognizer-generated transcripts and these challenges carry over to the present task. However, "memory retrieval" can benefit from the person's familiarity of the recorded data and the context in which it was recorded to help guide their effort. To study this, I constructed memory-retrieval tools designed to leverage a person's familiarity of their past to optimize their search task. To evaluate the utility of these towards solving long-term memory problems, I (1) recorded public events and evaluated witnesses' memory-retrieval approaches using these tools; and (2) conducted a longer- term memory-retrieval study based on recordings of several years of my personal and research-related conversations. Subjects succeeded with memory-retrieval tasks in both studies, typically finding answers within minutes.(cont.) This is far less time than the alternate of re-listening to hours of recordings. Subjects' memories of the past events, in particular their ability to narrow the window of time in which past events occurred, improved their ability to find answers. In addition to results from the memory-retrieval studies, I present a technique called "speed listening." By using a transcript (even one with many errors), it allows people to reduce listening time while maintaining comprehension. Finally, I report on my experiences recording events in my life over 2.5 years.by Sunil Vemuri.Ph.D

Investigating the role of connotation in communication and miscommunication within English as a lingua franca and consequent implications for teaching

The thesis explores the importance of connotation within English as a lingua franca (ELF) and the implications for teaching ELF. The importance of such research is that should connotative meaning be shown to be of crucial importance, this must be taken into account in the development of a methodology for ELF. This is particularly important as tìie understanding of ELF is only now emerging, together with a related pedagogy. As a starting point the thesis explores the views of high school teachers and university lecturers in Thailand aâ an example of a country where ELF is an important issue for pedagogy. The focus is on issues related to the teaching and use of ELF, including linguistic imperialism. The literature on intercultural communication is then discussed with particular reference to English as a lingua franca. From this discussion a hypothesis is developed for testing, that "successful intercultural communication using ELF cannot take place without a substantial similarity in connotative meaning between interlocutors in relation to key words and phrases used in discourse”. Given that there has been no previous attempt to explore connotative meaning within ELF, one of the contributions of this thesis is the development of the research instruments designed to test the hypothesis. Research instruments used were questionnaires; recorded interviews based on the responses to the questionnaires; video-recorded dialogues between informants; separate tape- recorded "stop-start" interviews of informants whilst viewing the video recordings of the dialogues; semantic differential testing of key words and phrases selected from the dialogues; and word association testing of such key words and phrases. The thesis explains the rationale behind such instruments and their application in a research pilot with subsequent refinements for the main study. The analysis showed that overall, 81% of the communication events that were able to be categorized provided some form of support for the hypothesis, compared to 19% of such events providing evidence tending to contradict the hypothesis. The conclusion reached was therefore that connotative meaning was indeed, extremely significant in successful communication in ELF and the implications of this finding for theory, research methodology and practice are considered

Language and Linguistics in a Complex World Data, Interdisciplinarity, Transfer, and the Next Generation. ICAME41 Extended Book of Abstracts

This is a collection of papers, work-in-progress reports, and other contributions that were part of the ICAME41 digital conference

Language and Linguistics in a Complex World Data, Interdisciplinarity, Transfer, and the Next Generation. ICAME41 Extended Book of Abstracts

This is a collection of papers, work-in-progress reports, and other contributions that were part of the ICAME41 digital conference

Designing Embodied Interactive Software Agents for E-Learning: Principles, Components, and Roles

Embodied interactive software agents are complex autonomous, adaptive, and social software systems with a digital embodiment that enables them to act on and react to other entities (users, objects, and other agents) in their environment through bodily actions, which include the use of verbal and non-verbal communicative behaviors in face-to-face interactions with the user. These agents have been developed for various roles in different application domains, in which they perform tasks that have been assigned to them by their developers or delegated to them by their users or by other agents. In computer-assisted learning, embodied interactive pedagogical software agents have the general task to promote human learning by working with students (and other agents) in computer-based learning environments, among them e-learning platforms based on Internet technologies, such as the Virtual Linguistics Campus (www.linguistics-online.com). In these environments, pedagogical agents provide contextualized, qualified, personalized, and timely assistance, cooperation, instruction, motivation, and services for both individual learners and groups of learners. This thesis develops a comprehensive, multidisciplinary, and user-oriented view of the design of embodied interactive pedagogical software agents, which integrates theoretical and practical insights from various academic and other fields. The research intends to contribute to the scientific understanding of issues, methods, theories, and technologies that are involved in the design, implementation, and evaluation of embodied interactive software agents for different roles in e-learning and other areas. For developers, the thesis provides sixteen basic principles (Added Value, Perceptible Qualities, Balanced Design, Coherence, Consistency, Completeness, Comprehensibility, Individuality, Variability, Communicative Ability, Modularity, Teamwork, Participatory Design, Role Awareness, Cultural Awareness, and Relationship Building) plus a large number of specific guidelines for the design of embodied interactive software agents and their components. Furthermore, it offers critical reviews of theories, concepts, approaches, and technologies from different areas and disciplines that are relevant to agent design. Finally, it discusses three pedagogical agent roles (virtual native speaker, coach, and peer) in the scenario of the linguistic fieldwork classes on the Virtual Linguistics Campus and presents detailed considerations for the design of an agent for one of these roles (the virtual native speaker)