Interaction Strategies Used in an Online Learning Medium by Tertiary Level Students in English for Specific Purposes Course

Negotiated interaction could be one crucial factor which can facilitate the English for Specific Purposes (ESP) learners to achieve their goals both academic and professional domains in the future. This study, therefore, aims to examine two major aspects: the negotiation for meaning strategies that ESP students used in the Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC) interaction as well as to explore the ESP students’ perceptions toward using the CMC, whether it leads to their Macro and Micro skills perceptions or not. The data were collected from 25 Business Writing students who are Thai, majoring in English. The study was conducted by using Facebook (FB) group and FB messenger as a CMC medium for the communication; therefore, the comments from pictogram postings and chat logs from FB messenger interactions were used as the main sources in the data analysis process. The Computer-Mediated Discourse Analysis (CMDA) proposed by Herring (1996) was employed in the data analysis. Furthermore, coding framework was processed by applying the negotiation for meaning strategies taxonomy that obtained by Samani, Nordin, Mukundan, and Samad (2015). Additionally, the researchers also conducted a focus group interview in order to get the perceptions of students toward what they have encountered. Findings can be revealed into two main parts. Firstly, it revealed that there are nine strategies occurring in the CMC medium: elaboration, confirmation, elaboration request, reply elaboration, confirmation request, reply confirmation, clarification request, correction/self-correction, and reply clarification, respectively. Aside from nine strategies, paralinguistic features, appeal for help, vocabulary request, and reply vocabulary were also found as additional strategies. However, vocabulary check was not found in this study. Secondly, it was found that the ESP students perceived both Macro and Micro skills perceptions toward implementing CMC in the ESP teaching and learning. Therefore, to conclude, the negotiated meaning strategies were used by the students while they were interacting to each other via CMC interaction in order to achieve the discussion activities and also solve some difficulties in such conversations. Additionally, applying this medium could be able to facilitate the learners’ knowledge and increased the practical experiences which are professional domains in the future workplace.

The Use of Verbal Rhetorical Devices to Construct Readers’ Ideology in Online News Headlines

Headline editorials have their merit to create inventive language choices to meet a targeted discourse. This paper serves as an understanding on how news discourse can be elaborated by taking both meaning and effects of language use in the production and interpretation of a text into account. Gathering the key instrument from 139 relevant online news headlines under the discourse of Gerwani, a debarred women’s organization in Indonesia’s New Order regime from various online news websites publication year 1999-2016, this research aims to: 1) identify verbal rhetorical devices (alliteration, parallelism, testimonial, metonymy, irony, quotation out of context, rhetorical question, and antithesis) used in the headlines, and 2) elaborate the use of verbal rhetoric devices and how they serve the readers with persuasive manner toward their ideology, including beliefs, opinions, and value systems, regarding with Gerwani-related case. The analysis proved that the use of verbal rhetorical devices in online news headlines contributed to create relevance of the topic, thus, aided the readers to perceive intended meaning, which might influence the establishment of power to construct their ideology. Consequently, the use of language can never be separated in socio-cultural contexts of a particular society, driving a persuaded manner for headline-oriented and language practitioners to notice how important it is to use verbal rhetorical devices as one of incorporating attitudes in delivering messages in public sphere ensuring a variety of contents and contexts to be perceived.