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

Pragmatic awareness in ESL and EFL contexts: Contrast and development.

The study reported on in this article set out to replicate and extend Bardovi‐Harlig and Dörnyei's (1998) investigation of pragmatic awareness by addressing two research questions: (a) Do learners in English as a foreign language (EFL) and English as a second language (ESL) contexts display differences in their recognition and rating of pragmatic and grammatical errors?(b) Do ESL learners increase their pragmatic awareness during an extended stay in the target environment? The data were elicited using Bardovi‐Harlig and Dörnyei's video‐and‐questionnaire instrument accompanied by post hoc interviews. The 53 participants in the study included 16 German students studying at a British university, 17 German students enrolled in a higher education institution in Germany, and 20 British English native‐speaking controls. The data show that the German EFL participants were less aware of pragmatic infelicities than the ESL group and that the ESL learners increased their pragmatic awareness significantly during their stay in Great Britain

May you speak louder maybe?:Interlanguage pragmatic development in requests

This paper presents the results of a longitudinal study into the pragmatic development of German learners of English. The data were elicited with the newly developed “Multimedia Elicitation Task” (MET), which contains 16 request scenarios investigating different status and imposition conditions. The 27 participants included 12 German adults studying at a British university for one academic year and an English native speaker control group of 15 students. The data were collected at three distinct points of the Germans’ stay in Great Britain: shortly after their arrival, in the middle of their stay and shortly before their return to Germany. The results provide evidence both for temporal patterning and for individual variation in the learner group. Generally, internal lexical downgraders seem to be acquired earlier than syntactic downgraders, and external modifiers can be assigned to four main groups: the first group contains supportive moves that had already been acquired by all the participants before the first data collection session and the remaining three groups comprise external modifiers whose first occurrence in the corpus displays a correlation with the length of stay in the target environment

The development of ESL learners' pragmatic competence : a longitudinal investigation of awareness and production.

The present paper presents the results of a longitudinal study into the development of ESL learners‟ pragmatic awareness and their productive pragmatic competence. The data for the investigation of the learners‟ pragmatic awareness were elicited with Bardovi-Harlig and Dörnyei‟s (1998) seminal video-and-questionnaire instrument and semi-structured interviews, while the data for the investigation of the learners‟ productive pragmatic competence were collected with the Multimedia Elicitation Task (MET) that had been specifically designed for this study. All ESL learners were German native speakers who attended an English university for the duration of one academic year. Sixteen ESL learners provided the data for awareness part of the investigation and nine of those sixteen took part in the productive part of the study. The results indicate that two factors seem to influence learners‟ pragmatic development in the L2 context: the temporal effect of exposure to the L2 as well as individual learner variation