598 research outputs found
Comparing the production of a formula with the development of L2 competence
This pilot study investigates the production of a formula with the development of L2 competence over proficiency levels of a spoken learner corpus. The results show that the formula
in beginner production data is likely being recalled holistically from learnersâ phonological
memory rather than generated online, identifiable by virtue of its fluent production in absence
of any other surface structure evidence of the formulaâs syntactic properties. As learnersâ L2
competence increases, the formula becomes sensitive to modifications which show structural
conformity at each proficiency level. The transparency between the formulaâs modification
and learnersâ corresponding L2 surface structure realisations suggest that it is the independent
development of L2 competence which integrates the formula into compositional language,
and ultimately drives the SLA process forward
The grammar of immersion: a social semiotic study of nonfiction cinematic virtual reality
Cinematic virtual reality (CVR) is an audio-visual form viewed in a virtual reality headset. Its
novelty lies in the way it immerses its audience in highly realistic 360° visual representations.
Being camera-based, CVR facilitates many of the practices of conventional filmmaking but
fundamentally alters them through its lack of a rectangular frame. As such, CVR has garnered
scholarly attention as a âframelessâ storytelling medium yet to develop its own language. The form
has gained traction with producers of nonfiction who recognize CVRâs capacity to transport
audiences to remote social worlds, leading to claims that equate CVRâs immersion with a social
and emotional response to its filmed subjects. A strand of CVR scholarship has emerged,
grounding nonfiction CVR theoretically and critiquing such deterministic claims. Broadly
speaking, these parallel strands of inquiry point to a common concern with CVRâs semiotics; as
the meaning potential of the 360° format, and the social aspects of its use in documenting reality.
Currently however, there appears to be a lack of systematic analyses that foreground CVRâs
semiotics.
This study addresses this gap by using social semiotic methods to complement these threads of
inquiry, subsuming them into a holistic account of CVRâs semantics. Utilizing systemic functional
methods, multimodal discourse analyses were performed on nonfiction CVR texts addressing
core research objectives. The first objective is the systematic description of CVR as a semiotic
technology, and the configuring of discourse through its novel 360° modality. The CVR spectator
is described for their role in the real-time construction of low-level meanings. Higher-level
concepts further characterize CVR texts as technologically enabled, virtual sites of social
discourse. The second research objective concerns clarifying the implications of CVR for
nonfiction practitioners. Nonfiction discourse is conceptualized as the negotiation of semiotic
autonomy, independence, and control, between viewing spectator, filmed subject, and CVR author
respectively. The third objective concerns the development of an analytical approach tailored
specifically for CVR. Extant systems from image, text, film, and action analyses are reflexively
applied, appraised, and adapted for use in the study of CVR and new frames are presented to cater
for the 360° modality.
The findings show CVR to be an inherently logical, contextualizing form, where the spectator has
a degree of sense-making autonomy in the construction of representational and social meanings.
This semantic autonomy is found to camouflage the deeper textual constructions in what appear
as âreality experiencesâ. The repercussions for the CVR producer are the indeterminacy of
meanings which are âat riskâ in particular ways when conventional framing methods cannot be
utilized, and when the spectator is given reflexive agency to make meaningful connections across
the 360° image. Systemic functional analytical methods prove flexible enough to be applied to the
texts, and open enough for the study to present additional systems and frames for a more fulsome
approach to the analysis of CVR
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Spanish language teachers' mediation practices in Higher Education
The discussion of the concept âmediationâ in foreign language education has rapidly increased over the last few years. However, mediation from the teacherâs point of view and their agency in mediation processes in the foreign language classroom is a field that still requires further exploration. In response to the need to get a better understanding of how language teachers actually create opportunities for their learners to establish connections between languages and cultures, this thesis aims to explore the explicit mechanisms used by Spanish teachers in higher education (HE) when they mediate target language and culture in online and face-to-face teaching practices.
For this research, a deliberately small sample of four Spanish practitioners in HE was selected, and a first-hand corpus of naturally occurring instances of mediation in the classroom is analysed through an inductive constructivist approach informed by thematic analytic methods. The methodology applied follows an interpretive inquiry model using qualitative methods and it includes different tools: classroom observations, stimulated recall (SR) sessions and interviews. The analysis of the examples of mediation practices in the classroom indicate that the strategies used are overlapping and multilayered which allow the creation of an effective, multidimensional way to facilitate mediation for students.
Hence, this study offers empirical and detailed evidence of real instances of mediation strategies in language classrooms in HE in the UK, and it breaks new ground by discovering how this is achieved in practice through combining different strategies together. It finds that mediation has multiple implications for language teacher education, and discusses the further implications for foreign language teacher training in the light of the results of this research
âJaysus, keep talking like that and youâll fit right inâ- an investigation of oral Irish English in contemporary Irish fiction
This project is an interdisciplinary and comparative investigation of the reproduction of linguistic features of Irish English (IrE) present in contemporary IrE fiction. To do this, a corpus of over 1 million words comprising 16 works of fiction published in the Republic of Ireland by 8 authors was compiled: the Corpus of Contemporary Fictionalized Irish English (CoFIrE).
The goal of this thesis, therefore, is to determine 1) which are the most frequently reproduced features of IrE orality in contemporary IrE fiction, 1a) how realistic is their fictional portrayal when contrasted against real spoken uses, 2) what does the use of the most frequently reproduced features in the corpus encode with regard to speaker identity, and 3) in what manner may modern Irishness be encoded through the reproduction of pragmatic items in fiction. Utilizing a variety of interdisciplinary methodologies, including Corpus Stylistics, Corpus Linguistics, Sociolinguistic, and Pragmatic techniques, the thesis identifies signature linguistic features that are thought to be representative of IrE in the corpus via quantitative and qualitative, comparative corpus analysis. To evaluate the level of realism inherent in the fictional rendition, the findings are contrasted against the Limerick Corpus of Irish English and the BNC2014. A second corpus comprising books by one of the CoFIrE authors, i.e. Paul Howard, was also compiled. Thus, the Ross OâCarroll-Kelly Corpus (CoROCK) was created given this seriesâ reputation for being a chronicler of modern Ireland and because of the high frequency of IrE orality reproduction these books were found to contribute to CoFIrE. Two case studies on non-standard, non-traditionally IrE high frequency intensifiers are conducted on CoROCK to better answer the research questions regarding the potential indexation of modern Irishness through speech reproduction in fiction. Finally, by evaluating the type of speaker identity these features may index when used in contemporary fiction, this thesis determines the type of modern Irishness that appears to be encoded through fictional speech representations.N
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