Analyzing Use of Thanks to You: Insights for Language Teaching and Assessment in Second and Foreign Language Contexts

This investigation of thanks to you in British and American usage was precipitated by a situation at an American university, in which a native Arabic speaker said thanks to you in isolation, making his intended meaning unclear. The study analyzes use of thanks to you in the Corpus of Contemporary American English and the British National Corpus to gain insights for English language instruction /assessment in the American context, as well as English-as-a-lingua-franca contexts where the majority of speakers are not native speakers of English or are speakers of different varieties of English but where American or British English are for educational purposes the standard varieties. Analysis of the two corpora revealed three functions for thanks to you common to British and American usage: expressing gratitude, communicating "because of you" positively, and communicating "because of you" negatively (as in sarcasm). A fourth use of thanks to you, thanking journalists/guests for being on news programs/talk shows, occurred in the American corpus only. Analysis indicates that felicitous use of thanks to you for each of these meanings depends on the presence of a range of factors, both linguistic and material, in the context of utterance

Unscrambling jumbled sentences: An authentic task for English language assessment?

Jumbled sentence items in language assessment have been criticized by some authors as inauthentic. However, unscrambling jumbled sentences is a common occurrence in real-world communication in English as a lingua franca. Naturalistic inquiry identified 54 instances of jumbled sentence use in daily life in Dubai/Sharjah, where English is widely used as a lingua franca. Thus it is seen that jumbled sentence test items can reflect real-world language use. To evaluate scrambled sentence test items, eight test item types developed from one jumbled sentence instance (“Want taxi Dubai you?”) were analyzed in terms of interactivity and authenticity. Items ranged from being completely decontextualized, non-interactive, and inauthentic to being fully contextualized, interactive, and authentic. To determine appropriate assessment standards for English tests in schools in this region, the English language standards for schools and English language requirements for university admission in the UAE were analyzed. Schools in Dubai/Sharjah use Inner Circle English varieties of English (e.g., British or American English) as the standard for evaluation, as well as non-native-English-speaker varieties (e.g., Indian English(es)). Also, students applying to English-medium universities in the UAE must meet the required scores on standardized English tests including the IELTS and TOEFL. Standards for evaluation of communication in English involving tasks of jumbled sentences in classroom tests must reflect the language learning goals of the school and community. Thus standards for classroom assessment of English in Dubai/Sharjah are determined by local schools’ and universities’ policies

The role of context in transactional English: spoken utterances and public signs in the UAE

Transactional and interactional English communications tend to be on a continuum rather than a dichotomy, with some communications having characteristics of both, yet others tending more toward one type of communication or the other. In general, written communication tends to be more informative (transactional) than spoken communication, which tends to include more interactional communication. Using insights from geosemiotics and linguistic analysis, this study analyzed spoken English-as-a-lingua-franca (ELF) communication observed in Dubai/Sharjah and written communication in public signs in Al Ain, looking at how contextual influences play a role in facilitating hearer/reader understanding of the meaning being communicated. From identified ELF communications in Dubai/Sharjah and photographed public signs with English text in Al Ain in the UAE, 10 spoken and eight written instances of transactional English were selected to be analyzed in terms of patterns in the role of context in hearer/reader understanding of intended meaning. Comparing/contrasting contextualization of these spoken and written transactional English communications revealed the influence of the context on hearer/reader awareness of spatiotemporal aspects, background schemata (social/societal, cultural, economic, and religious aspects), prior communications, and ELF mutual accommodation of meaning in terms of understanding and interpreting intended meaning, as well as identifying aspects of contextualization common to both spoken and written transactional English

The Progress of Rafael in English and Family Reading: A Case Study

This case study describes four aspects of a Mexican immigrant\u27s life in the USA as he works on learning a new language. We see Rafael to be a hardworking employee, an active community member, an inquiring student, and a caring family man