Leading by example and giving teachers a voice: Alan Waters’ contribution to ELT

This tribute to Alan Waters, who passed away in the summer of 2016, was written for the ELT Symposium in his honour that took place at Lancaster University on 24th February 2017

Towards a model of group-based cyberbullying: combining verbal aggression and manipulation approaches with perception data to investigate the portrayal of transgender people in seven newspaper articles

This article proposes a two-step analysis of group-based cyberbullying that combines a) features of verbal aggression (incl. impoliteness components and speech acts) and manipulation analysis, and b) an analysis of the targeted group’s perception and evaluation of the investigated texts. The group focused on in this cases study are transgender people. In comparison to other LGBTIQA (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, questioning, asexual) groups, transgender issues and the portrayal of transgender people have been rarely focused on in linguistic studies. The analysis of seven articles published in British mainstream media between 2001 and 2015 by two authors, shows that they employed a wide variety of pragmatic and manipulation strategies to influence the opinion of the public on trans people and to cause offence to transgender individuals. The analysis of reactions to one of these articles by members of a transgender charity will show the impact these verbal aggression and manipulation strategies had on targeted individuals

Study abroad and its effect on speech act performance.

Although the effect of the study abroad environment on foreign language learners’ speech act performance had been underexplored for many years, a number of studies have been published in the last decade that help to shed light on the impact of study abroad sojourns on language learners’ pragmatic competence. In this chapter, I will review and discuss investigations examining the effect of study abroad on language learners in a variety of study abroad contexts (e.g. Canada, United States of America, Latin America, France, Germany, Great Britain) and involving a variety of native and target language combinations (e.g. Chinese – English, English – French, English – German, English – Spanish, German – English, German – French, Japanese- English). The speech acts investigated are: advice, apologies, leave-taking, offers, refusals, requests and suggestions

Interlanguage pragmatic development of German learners of English : a longitudinal multimedia investigation

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Finding the right words in the study abroad context : the development of German learners' use of external modifiers in English.

This paper examines the pragmatic development of nine German university students in a study abroad context over the period of one academic year. The investigation focuses on learners' ability to soften the illocutionary force of request utterances by employing a range of external modifiers. Data for the present investigation were elicited at three distinct points of the learners' sojourn in the target language environment: shortly after their arrival, in the middle of their stay and shortly before they returned home to Germany. The data were collected with the help of the Multimedia Elicitation Task (MET) which had been specifically designed for the present study. The MET is a computer based instrument that contains 16 request scenarios. The study examines whether learners varied the use of external modifiers according to the status of their interlocutors and/or the imposition of the request. It also investigates whether their choice of modifiers over time seems to have been influenced by exposure to their L2 in the study abroad context by comparing the data of the German learners of English in England to data collected from 13 German learners of English in Germany with no study abroad experience and also to 15 British English native speakers