Linguistic Theory Applied to Teaching Practice: Looking Through Linguists\u27 Eyes at an Urban ESL Classroom

The quality of instruction in English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) programs is of utmost concern to urban educators as more and more non-native speakers settle in urban areas and need better language skills to participate fully in American society. Training of ESL instructors is often difficult, given the limited resources of most programs. In ESL, a close study of classroom discourse has long been considered particularly useful, but undirected classroom observation is of limited use because what novices notice in the classroom is often inaccurate or irrelevant. Ways are needed to focus beginning teachers\u27 observations. Over several decades, discourse analysts have devised methods for describing discourse, many of which have focused on the classroom. This study chose three distinctly different methods of describing classroom interaction. It was hypothesized that if the insights gained through these methods are congruent with the insights of experienced teachers, they might be used to focus student teachers\u27 observations. Twelve sessions of a listening-speaking class were videotaped, and transcripts made. After examining the data, the teacher shared with the researcher his insights into the classroom interaction. Two student teachers were then presented with selected data, and their observations noted. The experienced teacher\u27s conclusions and observations differed considerably from those of the novices. Parts of the data were then analyzed using the three previously selected methods. The analyses proved to be congruent with the experienced teacher\u27s viewpoint, suggesting their potential use as a teacher training tool. The study showed one drawback to such use: transcription of classroom data is technically difficult and time-consuming. In spite of that drawback, more such studies are recommended, as a means of bringing the insights of linguistic research into the classroom

Analyzing Navajo Discourse: Investigating Form and Function of Intonational Units in Referential Discourse

Extensive research has been conducted on the Navajo verb complex (prefix morphology) and specific constructions (i.e. relative clause structure, subject-object-inversion), but to date the proposed establishment of a method to analyze actual discourse from a functional or usage based approach has not occurred. The goal of this study is twofold. The first is to establish a method to analyze spoken Navajo using the Intonation Units (IU) as a measure as it occurs in natural, uninterrupted speech, according to the parameters outlined by Chafe (1994), and show the influence of the morphological complexity of Navajo on the size of the IU. Secondly, analyzing the function of the IU within discourse from the intonation-as-information-flow\u27 approach (Couper-Kuhlen 2005) including deliberate manipulation by speakers in a sequential manner and the framing in which story threads are woven together expressing various points of view within a single text. IUs (Chafe 1994, DuBois et al. 1993) are portions of speech occurring under a single prosodic contour that reveal how speakers naturally segment their speech. Prosodic structure, including the suprasegmental phonetic cues of intonation, pitch, rhythm, duration and pauses, has been studied in many languages, but to date, there has not been an analysis of Navajo that has attempted to define an IU and its function in discourse. The hope is the research presented will leave the reader with a better understanding of communicative process, how syntactic structural features are interrelated to cognitive constraints and interlocutor motivation which ultimately may influence and impact actual performance which are revealed via various voices (Dinwoodie 1999) represented within a text. By proposing a unit larger than the morphologically complex verb for analysis, a specific type of clause (i.e., relative or subordinate), or even a culturally relevant structure (i.e., subject-object inversion), the desire is the results presented will both foster and aid subsequent Navajo discourse analysis studies and ultimately positively impact Navajo language education efforts

The genre and the genre expectations of engineering oral presentations related to academic and professional contexts

This research was done to find out if engineering oral presentations (EOPs) are a genre, if there are systematic differences between EOPs delivered by native speakers (NSs) and non-native speakers (NNSs) of English, if there are systematic differences between EOPs delivered by novices and experts and, if the engineering discourse community (DC) members have beliefs concerning what constitute 'good' EOPs. One engineering seminar and four engineering conferences carried out in Malaysia and the UK between March and September 1994 were participated. From this participant observation exercise, 100 questionnaires were gathered and responses analysed; sixty-eight EOPs delivered by NSs and NNSs were transcribed and analysed using Genre Analysis frameworks. Results from the analysis of EOPs were counterchecked with the responses in the questionnaires. It was found that EOPs did have describable characteristics which qualify them as a genre; There were few differences between EOPs delivered by NSs and NNSs of English because the latter tend to follow the former; There were describable differences between EOPs delivered by experts and novices. The engineering DC members did have their genre expectations but not all of their beliefs concerning what constitute 'good' EOPs were possible to materialise in actual occasions because of certain unavoidable constraints. These constraints were found to be affecting the variants of the genre more than the invariants. These variant-invariant elements were found to be related to the characteristics of exemplars, prototypes, prestige markers and the patterns of imitations of NNSs and novices of the engineering DC members. 'Ecological validity' was pointed out to be one of the ways of achieving the reliability and the validity of the research. Potential teaching implications were also discussed. Unavoidable limitations of the research were pointed out and finally immediate and longer term research projects have been identified

Proceedings of the VIIth GSCP International Conference

The 7th International Conference of the Gruppo di Studi sulla Comunicazione Parlata, dedicated to the memory of Claire Blanche-Benveniste, chose as its main theme Speech and Corpora. The wide international origin of the 235 authors from 21 countries and 95 institutions led to papers on many different languages. The 89 papers of this volume reflect the themes of the conference: spoken corpora compilation and annotation, with the technological connected fields; the relation between prosody and pragmatics; speech pathologies; and different papers on phonetics, speech and linguistic analysis, pragmatics and sociolinguistics. Many papers are also dedicated to speech and second language studies. The online publication with FUP allows direct access to sound and video linked to papers (when downloaded)

A study of the use of discourse particles in English-to-Chinese simultaneous interpreting by trainee interpreters

PhD ThesisDiscourse particles are known to be of significance to discourse management and organization. Much work has been devoted to understanding the use of discourse particles in Chinese spontaneous speech (SP). However, in the field of simultaneous interpreting (SI), they have remained under-researched. This thesis sets out to fill this gap and to investigate differences in particle usage between Chinese SP and English-to-Chinese SI. Literature on discourse markers, pragmatics, information processing, and interpreting studies is reviewed with an attempt to provide a holistic view of the research framework of the present study. A pilot study was first carried out to find any different tendencies in the use of discourse particles between SP and SI. The main subject population was interpreting students at Newcastle University. In my mixed-method approach of the main study, data was collected and analyzed through on-line parser, interviews, a mock-conference, and questionnaire surveys. Both the frequency count and the qualitative analyses were carried out to explore the reasons behind the different tendencies in use initially found, and the effects of using the surveyed discourse particles for perceived fluency in Chinese SP and English-to-Chinese SI for comparison. The findings show that the most frequently utilized type of discourse particles in Chinese SP are conjunction particles (e.g. Ranhou), whereas in English-to-Chinese SI, they are quantifier particles (e.g. Na). The discourse functions of the surveyed particles are very context-sensitive. These findings are generally in line with previously reported findings about particle usage in SP, and the present study is the first empirical study to report particle usage in SI. As regards the perceived effects, the overall fluency rating of sentences in which surveyed particles were identified is higher in SI than in SP perceived by all listeners from two different backgrounds (i.e. interpreting vs. non-interpreting students). Implications of the present study for interpreting studies and discourse analysis, followed by suggestions for possible future research, are discussed

Toward summarization of communicative activities in spoken conversation

This thesis is an inquiry into the nature and structure of face-to-face conversation, with a special focus on group meetings in the workplace. I argue that conversations are composed of episodes, each of which corresponds to an identifiable communicative activity such as giving instructions or telling a story. These activities are important because they are part of participants’ commonsense understanding of what happens in a conversation. They appear in natural summaries of conversations such as meeting minutes, and participants talk about them within the conversation itself. Episodic communicative activities therefore represent an essential component of practical, commonsense descriptions of conversations. The thesis objective is to provide a deeper understanding of how such activities may be recognized and differentiated from one another, and to develop a computational method for doing so automatically. The experiments are thus intended as initial steps toward future applications that will require analysis of such activities, such as an automatic minute-taker for workplace meetings, a browser for broadcast news archives, or an automatic decision mapper for planning interactions. My main theoretical contribution is to propose a novel analytical framework called participant relational analysis. The proposal argues that communicative activities are principally indicated through participant-relational features, i.e., expressions of relationships between participants and the dialogue. Participant-relational features, such as subjective language, verbal reference to the participants, and the distribution of speech activity amongst the participants, are therefore argued to be a principal means for analyzing the nature and structure of communicative activities. I then apply the proposed framework to two computational problems: automatic discourse segmentation and automatic discourse segment labeling. The first set of experiments test whether participant-relational features can serve as a basis for automatically segmenting conversations into discourse segments, e.g., activity episodes. Results show that they are effective across different levels of segmentation and different corpora, and indeed sometimes more effective than the commonly-used method of using semantic links between content words, i.e., lexical cohesion. They also show that feature performance is highly dependent on segment type, suggesting that human-annotated “topic segments” are in fact a multi-dimensional, heterogeneous collection of topic and activity-oriented units. Analysis of commonly used evaluation measures, performed in conjunction with the segmentation experiments, reveals that they fail to penalize substantially defective results due to inherent biases in the measures. I therefore preface the experiments with a comprehensive analysis of these biases and a proposal for a novel evaluation measure. A reevaluation of state-of-the-art segmentation algorithms using the novel measure produces substantially different results from previous studies. This raises serious questions about the effectiveness of some state-of-the-art algorithms and helps to identify the most appropriate ones to employ in the subsequent experiments. I also preface the experiments with an investigation of participant reference, an important type of participant-relational feature. I propose an annotation scheme with novel distinctions for vagueness, discourse function, and addressing-based referent inclusion, each of which are assessed for inter-coder reliability. The produced dataset includes annotations of 11,000 occasions of person-referring. The second set of experiments concern the use of participant-relational features to automatically identify labels for discourse segments. In contrast to assigning semantic topic labels, such as topical headlines, the proposed algorithm automatically labels segments according to activity type, e.g., presentation, discussion, and evaluation. The method is unsupervised and does not learn from annotated ground truth labels. Rather, it induces the labels through correlations between discourse segment boundaries and the occurrence of bracketing meta-discourse, i.e., occasions when the participants talk explicitly about what has just occurred or what is about to occur. Results show that bracketing meta-discourse is an effective basis for identifying some labels automatically, but that its use is limited if global correlations to segment features are not employed. This thesis addresses important pre-requisites to the automatic summarization of conversation. What I provide is a novel activity-oriented perspective on how summarization should be approached, and a novel participant-relational approach to conversational analysis. The experimental results show that analysis of participant-relational features is

Proceedings of the 42nd Australian Linguistic Society Conference - 2011

ANU College of Arts & Social Sciences, School of Language Studies; ANU College of Asia and the Pacific, School of Culture, History and Languag

English as an Academic Lingua Franca in Spanish Tertiary Education: An Analysis of the use of Pragmatic Strategies in English-Medium LectureS.

Durante la última década, un cambio lingüístico ha sido especialmente notable en los contextos de educación superior debido al creciente uso del inglés como medio de instrucción (EMI) en las universidades europeas. Por ello, existe una innegable necesidad de saber más sobre las prácticas diarias de quienes participan en actividades académicas internacionales usando el inglés como vehículo de comunicación. Numerosos estudios se han realizado previamente en relación al inglés utilizado como lengua franca (ELF) en el ámbito académico. Sin embargo, existe una relativa falta de estudios empíricos sobre este uso del inglés en las universidades españolas en comparación con estudios similares en instituciones académicas europeas (Mauranen, 2006b; Björkman, 2010, 2011b, 2013). Esta investigación pretende estudiar las prácticas de inglés como medio de instrucción en diferentes disciplinas en la Universidad de Zaragoza (España), centrándose en el tipo de estrategias pragmáticas que utilizan los participantes para facilitar la comprensión. Estas prácticas lingüísticas son analizadas en este estudio con el fin de arrojar luz sobre el impacto que tiene el inglés en la eficacia comunicativa en estos entornos de enseñanza-aprendizaje.Los resultados derivan del análisis de un corpus de 12 clases magistrales impartidas en inglés como medio de instrucción que fueron grabadas en dos titulaciones diferentes. Estas se complementan con entrevistas semiestructuradas con los profesores y un pequeño corpus de diapositivas de presentaciones en formato PowerPoint que los mismos profesores utilizaron para impartir sus clases. Para analizar estos tres conjuntos de datos se ha utilizado un enfoque discursivo-pragmático y una metodología de orientación etnográfica. Por lo tanto, en este estudio se utiliza la triangulación de datos y la triangulación metodológica, ambas derivando en resultados tanto cuantitativos como cualitativos. Los resultados del estudio muestran 13 estrategias pragmáticas diferentes utilizadas en las sesiones magistrales grabadas para cumplir funciones comunicativas tales como potenciar la explicitud, aclarar y negociar el significado y/o el uso aceptable del lenguaje. El análisis de datos revela que las estrategias pragmáticas observadas en el corpus se utilizan principalmente para evitar posibles problemas comunicativos, pero también para remediar problemas de producción que obstaculizan abiertamente la comunicación y para co-construir la comprensión. Respaldando los estudios existentes sobre el inglés utilizado como lengua vehicular para la instrucción, los resultados revelan un uso altamente contextual y situacional de estrategias pragmáticas.<br /