1,720,993 research outputs found
ELF ‘Awareness’: Student Attitudes Towards Accents in a Context of English as an International Language
Full text linkThe term 'ELF aware' (Sifakis 2019) has gained currency in recent years to refer to teaching and learning contexts in which the ability to communicate in an international environment, between non native speakers, is recognised as a desired outcome of the course. In this chapter we present the results of a survey administered to incoming undergraduate students of languages at the University of Venice Ca' Foscari to determine their attitudes towards non native accents when English is used in an international context. We go on to compare the results with a similar study administered to students in two MA courses, in English language and literature, and in International Relations, to determine whether MA students are more 'ELF aware' than undergraduates, and whether students of International Relations have a more pragmatic, instrumentally motivated approach to ELF than their peers who are specialising in English language and literature
Introduction
Full text linkIn recent years, endorsed by the updated (2018) version of the Common European Framework, intelligibility has replaced native-like pronunciation as a primary objective in foreign language teaching. But accent and pronunciation continue to be central issues for university students of languages. This volume presents the results of an investigation into the attitudes of some 370 first-year students at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, the first such study in Italy, involving students of 13 languages, the principal ones being English, Spanish, French, German and Russian. The survey investigated the importance given to pronunciation in the foreign language, the motivation students have to improve it, and the possible conflict of identity which the acquisition of a ‘foreign’ pronunciation might incur. Students were invited to reflect on the quality and variability of their pronunciation in the two foreign languages they were studying, on their ability to assess it, on affective aspects linked to pronunciation, and on their awareness of phonetic features. They were also asked for their opinions about the pronunciation of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) and about Italian when spoken with a foreign accent. The contributions in this volume describe the linguistic background of respondents, present and analyse the attitudes which emerge, verify the role of some independent variables (gender, plurilingualism, motivation for enrolment, languages studied, level of proficiency), and (in the case of ELF) report the findings of a follow-up study of master’s level students. The result is an overall picture likely to be of interest to anyone working in the field of university language teaching and who wishes to have a better idea of what students think about foreign language pronunciation
Accents and Pronunciation. Attitudes of Italian University Students of Languages
Full text linkIn recent years, endorsed by the updated (2018) version of the Common European Framework, intelligibility has replaced native-like pronunciation as a primary objective in foreign language teaching. But accent and pronunciation continue to be central issues for university students of languages. This volume presents the results of an investigation into the attitudes of some 370 first-year students at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, the first such study in Italy, involving students of 13 languages, the principal ones being English, Spanish, French, German and Russian. The survey investigated the importance given to pronunciation in the foreign language, the motivation students have to improve it, and the possible conflict of identity which the acquisition of a ‘foreign’ pronunciation might incur. Students were invited to reflect on the quality and variability of their pronunciation in the two foreign languages they were studying, on their ability to assess it, on affective aspects linked to pronunciation, and on their awareness of phonetic features. They were also asked for their opinions about the pronunciation of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) and about Italian when spoken with a foreign accent. The contributions in this volume describe the linguistic background of respondents, present and analyse the attitudes which emerge, verify the role of some independent variables (gender, plurilingualism, motivation for enrolment, languages studied, level of proficiency), and (in the case of ELF) report the findings of a follow-up study of master’s level students. The result is an overall picture likely to be of interest to anyone working in the field of university language teaching and who wishes to have a better idea of what students think about foreign language pronunciation
English as a Lingua Franca and wikis as new affordances for the language classroom. The case of cooperative writing and fanfiction
No full textThe academic debate around the nature of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) is intimately connected to its implications in the field of English Language Teaching (ELT). Therefore, a major challenge for applied linguists and educators
involved in ELT is to incorporate today’s glocal emergence of ELF into the traditional school curriculum, which entails
redefining English as a subject, its goals and its pedagogic approaches. The aim of this paper is to present a research project whose main purpose is to overcome the artificiality of communication within the narrow limits of the English
classroom, and allow Italian high school students to use ELF as a sociocultural affordance to carry out authentic communicative activities online, through cooperative writing and fanfiction. This study has shown that web-mediated
learner’s performance serves as a catalyst for the convergence of the scholastic study of English as a foreign language and the effective use of ELF
Blogging ELFers
No full textEnglish as a lingua franca (ELF) has become a vibrant area of research in the last decade, investigating language use in plurilingual communication settings in different areas, from phonology to lexicogrammar, code-switching and pragmatics. English is indeed increasingly present in young people’s lives in Europe, who communicate in international contexts, both real and virtual, via English as a shared lingua franca. Blogs in particular have become an important self-expression and interaction place, where English is employed to address an international audience This paper aims to investigate the presence of ELF features and communication processes in a corpus of blogs produced by Italian young adults, using English as the lingua franca of interaction to communicate internationally with people from different L1s. Exemplifications from findings, such as instances of lexical innovations and code-switching, will illustrate how ELF is employed to effective communication in the international blogosphere
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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