TESL Canada Journal
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Determinatives Again: A Response to Lenchuk and Ahmed
No full textIn their reply to Reynolds (2013), Lenchuk and Ahmed deny that determina- tives can participate in the partitive construction as described and claim that the set of independent possessive pronouns (e.g., my, your, its, etc.) are actually determinatives. Their arguments hinge on a very peculiar understanding of the word can and a failure to recognize that words in different categories may share a shape; they do not succeed. Nevertheless, I agree with Lenchuk and Ahmed that a consistent distinction between function and category should be maintained. ESL grammars don’t do this, and they should.Dans leur critique de Reynolds (2013), Lenchuk et Ahmed nient que les détermi- nants puissent participer à la construction partitive telle que décrite, et affirment que l’ensemble de pronoms possessifs indépendants (par ex. my, your, its, etc.) sont en réalité des déterminants. Leurs arguments reposent sur une interprétation bien particulière du mot can ainsi que sur un manque de reconnaissance que les mots de différentes catégories puissent partager une même forme; leurs arguments ne sont pas convaincants. Toutefois, je suis d’accord avec Lenchuk et Ahmed qu’il faudrait maintenir une distinction cohérente entre la fonction et la catégorie. Les grammaires en ALS ne le font pas, et elles devraient le faire
English for the Workplace: Doing Patient-Centred Care in Medical Communication
No full textCanada, like other first-world countries, relies in large part on professional im- migrants trained in other cultures and languages to complement its workforce in a wide range of professions, including medicine. International medical graduates (IMGs) who are nonnative English-speaking (NNES) and who have trained in different medical contexts are often unfamiliar with the sociopragmatic norms underlying both general communication and medical practice in their new host countries, and as a result they can have difficulty using the pragmalinguistic resources needed to strike the appropriate interpersonal note in patient-centred approaches to communication. In this article we used data collected through role-plays performed in an Australian setting by practicing, locally trained, native English-speaking (NES) doctors and NNES IMGs to identify the features of patient-centred medical communication that the latter can find challenging. This approach allowed us to use the discourse to highlight those features of approachability that are likely to be relevant to immigrant professionals in both Canada and Australia. It also helped us to illustrate how discourse data can be used to identify culturally appropriate ways of communicating that can, in turn, contribute to an accurate evidence base from which culturally appropriate communication courses for IMGs and other professionals may be developed
"Please consider my request for an interview": A Cross-cultural Genre Analysis of Cover Letters Written by Canadian and Taiwanese College Students
No full textIn this study, similarities and differences among generic structures in 80 cover letters written by Taiwanese and Canadian college students were investigated, adopting Upton and Connor’s (2001) framework. The results demonstrated that Canadian students tend to write longer letters, use a greater variety of word types and sentence structures, and choose more professional words than do Tai- wanese students. From the moves-based analysis results, the study revealed that to achieve the main communicative purpose of a cover letter, which is to be con- tacted for an interview, the Canadians employed lengthy sentences and various strategies to demonstrate their qualifications. By contrast, Taiwanese students employed different communicative elements, including direct strategies to ex- press their desire for an interview and uses of formulaic expressions that were not observed in the Canadian corpus. The research findings suggest that the move- structural and rhetorical differences are due to writers’ differences in cultural backgrounds and their rhetorical and lexical knowledge of the particular genre. The results of this study provide implications for teaching English for specific purposes to nonnative speakers
The Relationship Between Instructor Feedback and ESL Student Anxiety
No full textThis correlational study, conducted in intermediate English as a second language (ESL) high school classes in Quebec, investigated the relationship between in- structor feedback and student anxiety. The participants were 53 ESL students in their last year of secondary school who were required to take an integrative- writing exam as part of their graduation requirements. Throughout a 5-month pe- riod, students took 2 practice integrative-writing tests, received written corrective feedback, and completed 5 questionnaires about their language learning anxiety, L2 writing anxiety, and perceptions about instructor feedback. The results showed a significant negative correlation between students’ perceptions of feedback and test anxiety. The findings indicated that students with more positive perceptions of instructor feedback had lower anxiety.Cette étude corrélationnelle, qui a eu lieu dans des classes d’ALS au secondaire au Québec, a porté sur le rapport entre la rétroaction de la part de l’enseignant et l’anxiété chez les élèves. Les participants, 53 élèves d’ALS en secondaire 5, devaient passer un examen de synthèse portant sur la rédaction de sorte à répon- dre aux exigences d’obtention de leur diplôme. Au cours d’une période de 5 mois, les élèves ont écrit 2 examens de synthèse de pratique, ont reçu de la rétroaction corrective par écrit et ont complété cinq questionnaires portant, d’une part, sur leur anxiété face à l’apprentissage d’une langue et la rédaction en L2 et, d’autre part, sur leurs perceptions de la rétroaction par l’enseignant. Les résultats in- diquent que les élèves ayant des perceptions plus positives de la rétroaction de l’enseignant souffraient moins d’anxiété
Teaching Pragmatics and Intercultural Communication Online
No full textEnglish in the Workplace (EWP) programs are increasingly surfacing across Can- ada to assist internationally educated professionals (IEPs) with the challenges of integrating into the Canadian workplace. One critical topic of these courses is targeted pragmatics (soft skills) instruction. By learning these skills, IEPs gain valuable tools for communicating effectively and appropriately with their Cana- dian-born colleagues and leaders. The workplace is also becoming increasingly culturally diverse, broadening the required skillsets of IEPs to include intercultural competence—the ability to adapt both cognitively and behaviourally across cultures to achieve communicative goals (Bennett, 1993). As an EWP instructor in a medium-sized institution in Alberta, I worked on the redesign of an EWP course with both pragmatics and intercultural components to be offered online. The course results showed learner development in both pragmatics and intercul- tural competence. In this article, I outline the theory that informed the course design, content, and assessment tools; discuss results of a sample of learners from four pilot offerings; and provide considerations for instructors and instructional designers tasked with the development of online courses of this nature
The Neglected Combination: A Case for Explicit-Inductive Instruction in Teaching Pragmatics in ESL
No full textA substantial part of interlanguage pragmatics (ILP) research has contrasted ex- plicit and implicit teaching designs, generally finding that explicit approaches— those featuring metapragmatic rule provision—are more effective than their implicit counterparts, which are characterized by the absence of metapragmatic information. A second dichotomy used to characterize instructional designs, that of deductive vs. inductive approaches, has received somewhat less attention. Con- cerned with the sequencing of the instruction rather than the criterion of whether or not to provide rules, this concerns the question of whether to choose (deductive) rules or (inductive) language use as the starting point of the instruction. Although the two dichotomies are interrelated, they are often unjustifiably merged, with the labels deductive and explicit, on the one hand, and inductive and implicit, on the other, being used interchangeably. This article illustrates the reasons for this oversimplification and argues that the resulting focus on the contrast of explicit-deductive and implicit-inductive designs has led to overlooking a third possible constellation: the explicit-inductive framework. Adopting a classroom perspective, the article further attempts to point out the advantages that this neglected combination can have for the teaching and learning of pragmatics in ESL
