Subordinate’s Imperatives in Faculty Meetings: Pragmalinguistic Affordances in Tagalog and Local Academic Conditions

Subordinate’s imperatives are generally known to be a sort of a deviant speech act, especially when employed for a person in authority to do something. This paper explores two major dimensions that underpin the possible forbearance of the subordinate’s imperatives. Firstly, it is shown that the Tagalog basic imperative has pragmalinguistic properties that may be followed or broken based on some socio-pragmalinguistic affordances. Secondly, a number of contextual factors such as power, distance, and ranking, including the Filipino cultural and academic orientation of pakikisama or smooth interpersonal relationships are described. The study employed Conversation Analysis and socio-pragmatic analytic approach. The imperatives came from five meetings from three departments in a private university in Manila, Philippines. The meetings lasted for 5 hours and 50 minutes. Results show Tagalog Basic Imperative has pragmalinguistic properties that may be followed or broken based on the following likelihood: the awkwardness, indirectness and insincerity of mitigated imperatives; and the level of urgency for the hearer to do something. The giver’s socio-pragmatic conditions also hasten the production of imperatives. These results draw into the conclusion that local conditions are negotiated in during turns at talk. Within the sphere of a faculty meeting, subordinate’s imperatives are socio-pragmalinguistically legitimate, acceptable and non-deviant. Subordinate’s imperatives play an indispensable pragmatic role in the realization of the purpose of the meeting. Although the analyses are parochially based on Tagalog, implications of these microscopic findings bear out cross-linguistic, universal and cross-cultural relevance

CORRELATING WRITER’S BLOCK AND ESL LEARNERS’ WRITING QUALITY

Despite the importance of writing in the language learners’ development, there are difficulties faced by English as a Second Language (ESL) learners that stem from various factors. One of them is the presence of writer’s block that could affect writing quality. Therefore, this study aims to describe writer’s block, along with a statistically-laden analysis of the possible correlation between the blocking experiences of 55 Filipino ESL learners and the levels of easability and readability of the essays they had written.  This research employed a descriptive-correlational design using The Questionnaire in Identifying Writer’s Block (QIWB) to gauge the extent of occurrence of writer’s block and the Coh-Metrix Common Core Text Easability and Readability Assessor (hereafter Coh-Metrix T.E.R.A.), an online computational tool, to measure the levels of easability and readability of the essays. The result shows that the learners generally experienced writer’s block, and their essays collectively showed high levels of easability on the basis of narrativity, referential cohesion, and deep cohesion. However, the essays were low in syntactic simplicity and word concreteness, while the level of readability computed exceeded that of the reading ability of 10th-grade learners. Test of correlation revealed that there exists negligible relationship between writer’s block and the overall easability and readability levels of the essays, though a significant but a weak relationship was documented between lateness and word concreteness and with premature editing and deep cohesion, respectively

Question-declaration coupling in a university meeting talk: Discourse of social inequality and collegiality

Conversation Analysis (CA) deals with the description of the microscopic and corpus-driven data in an ‘unmotivating looking’ analytical fashion. As long as there are new, interesting, or deviant features from the data, they are always worthy of a micro analysis. For this paper, we report the ‘question-declaration coupling’ in meeting talks as a new feature and explicate it through the discourse of social inequality and collegiality in the academe. The data came from a total of five recorded meetings from three departments, such as Education, Arts Science, and Social Work, in a private university in Manila, Philippines. The meetings lasted for five hours and 50 minutes. From adjacency pairs of question-answer, the sequential pattern shows that the questions deserve conspicuous answers from the subordinates, but the Chair automatically couples them with declarative sentences and other utterances that serve as continuers. The pattern is categorised as a strategic turn-suppressing mechanism to hold back the members from possibly challenging the existing policies of the institution. It is also seen as a strategic mechanism to deprive the members of extending the litanies of possible counter-arguments. From a positive perspective, we argue that it is through the air of social inequality and collegiality that people are able to know their boundaries in an ongoing interaction. Toward the end, we state the implications of the results for teaching and learning socio-pragmalinguistics. We also recommend future cross-linguistic comparisons for these microscopic features under study, considering the small corpus of this study

Turn-taking model for Filipinos’ high-context communication style from no-answered and non-answered questions in faculty meetings

Interrogativity is a linguistic property in all world languages. It is inherently related to the ‘question-answer’ tandem of turn-taking. One notable feature of turn-taking is the adjacency pairs, where the question-and-answer sequences are part of. The canonical turn-taking model by Sacks et al. (1974) highlights the obligation to answer the questions. In this paper, however, we report the many cases of no-answered and non-answered questions in faculty meetings using the analytical framework of Conversation Analysis. We show that the Filipinos’ high-context communication style has impinged on the occurrences of these types of answers. We then illustrate a turn-taking model for this type of communication, wherein a straightforward answer is no longer obligatory, but becomes optional within the frame of high-context communication style of the Filipino context. The questioning party can just “let it go” and accept the indirect response as a legitimate and true answer to the question. Towards the end, we argue that the results may convey that the faculty meeting, which is considered as an institutional talk, has resembled ordinary mundane conversations, where questions are oftentimes taken for granted

The second language classroom practices in selected areas of the Philippines: An assessment

This study generally aimed to assess how aware the language teachers are about the use of communication language teaching in the classroom. Specifically, it sought to: (1) determine the type of activities initiated by the teachers in English language classes; (2) describe the communication opportunities enjoyed by the learners in their day-to-day discussions; and (3) investigate the roles performed by the teachers in the classroom. Data of the study were obtained by recording 15-40 minutes of discussions in ten language classrooms across levels. Participants were all Filipinos teaching English to elementary, high school and college students. Some have post graduate units; others were bachelor\u27s degree holders only. The recording was overt but the observer\u27s paradox was practiced by excluding the first 15 minutes of the classroom proceedings. Since the study used naturalistic data, it was deemed relevant in language teaching because it described what really transpires in the classroom. It pointed out the strength and weaknesses of the English classes which somehow paved the way for the realization of the possible classroom practices today. Results revealed that the activities initiated by majority of the teachers in the classroom were not really communicative. What prevailed was the traditional lecture method followed by exercises that develop accuracy. Classrooms were still teacher-fronted rather than student-centered. Instead of being facilitators of learning, teachers appeared to dominate the classroom discussion depriving the learners of the real life communication opportunities and interactions necessary to develop their fluency in language

Paradigm shift in grammar: Should ESL classrooms adopt?

Language is dynamic. Not only in form but also in function does language transform. In grammar, some basic principles in categorizing words are abandoned by some linguistics; yet, some language teachers ESL adopt. This paper provides an overview on the two possible paradigms in the teaching of grammar. Specifically, it will answer the following; (1) how does the traditional paradigm differ from minimalist in terms of taxonomizing words, phrases, and clauses; (2) should the Philippine educational system provide policy to change the pradigms in grammar teaching; (3) should teachers be oriented about the emerging minimalist paradigm? Serving as framework are Chomsky\u27s TGG and Radford\u27s (2005) Minimalist Paradigm. School administrators and faculty members from both government and public educational institutions minimalist paradigm? Preliminary findings seemed to establish the difference between auxiliaries and verbs: two categories which are used interchangeably by traditional English teachers. Concepts like prenominals, pronominals, determiners, complementizers and others were also noted. Educators seemed to suggest the need for revisiting the grammar concepts they have learned

The Philippine bilingual education policy and the spoken discourse performance of the learners in English classes

The study was conceived to partly clarify the issue on the deteriorating proficiency of the Filipinos in English. On the assumption that a strong language policy contributes in the spoken discourse proficiency of the learners, the Philippine Bilingual Education Policy was described in details. The spoken discourse performance was examined by recording English language classes both in teacher-fronted lessons and small group discussion. Data revealed that Filipino learners could still speak in English in teacher-fronted and small group discussions but only on phrase or sentence level, after which they tend to code-switch. Said spoken discourse performance could be attributed to the Philippine Bilingual Education policy which allows learners to use the first language as medium of instruction in certain subject matters like Social Sciences, Physical Education and others thereby decreasing the domains of language use