1,720,998 research outputs found
PRAGMATICS AT UNIVERSITY LEVEL? A SURVEY OF ITALIAN EFL STUDENTS’ PERCEIVED INSTRUCTIONAL EXPERIENCE AND LEARNING GOALS
Full text linkResearch into L2 pragmatics has investigated various aspects of language use conducive to the mastery of interactional skills, but without fully
exploring L2 learners’ motivations, goals and awareness of their educational experience. This chapter considers students’ awareness of received instruction in pragmatics and conscious learning goals in English for General Purposes (EGP) university education. An online survey was conducted
with 109 undergraduate English as a Foreign Language (EFL) students at Padua University. It examined the participants’ perceived experience of
and interest in nine commonly taught initiating speech acts and ten responding ones, plus nine commonly used teaching methods/materials. A
majority of the respondents stated they had received instruction about most of the above-mentioned pragmatic topics, but more frequently about initiating speech acts than responding ones. They also stated that they wished they could receive more instruction about such face-threatening
speech acts as complaints and apologies, while expressing less interest in face-sustaining ones like greetings and responses to offers. The students
also reported that the most extensively used teaching method, in their views, was feedback on correctness, and that what they desired the most in teaching was a focus on feedback on the effects of their discourse. Followup interviews with five students stressed an interest in receiving feedback on their language performance, especially its appropriateness. Our findings suggest that students who are not exposed to pragmatics-focused instruction may be aware of the relevance of pragmatics to their learning experience and goals; this supports the view that pragmatics should play a prominent role in the design of EGP syllabi
Introduction: English linguistics
No full textThis introduction gives an overview of the contributions to the volume relevant to the field of English linguistics, which address the theme of 'thinking out of the box' rom various perspectives – by choosing as research topics linguistic phenomena often regarded as marginal or irregular (Mattiello and Gesuato) or which exemplify reactive rather than initiating discourse (Meledandri); by looking into a range of potential conditioning environments (e.g. formal and semantic) to account for those phenomena (Mattiello); by exploring both the most frequent and the most typical instantiations of those phenomena (Mastrofini and Bagli); by adopting mixed methods of investigation (Mastrofini and Bagli; Meledandri) or drawing on multiple theoretical frameworks (Mastrofini and Bagli); and finally, by presenting studies at the intersection between English language research and other fields of investigation: UK legislation (Pennisi), multimodality in TV series (Arizzi), and British literature (Turci and Luporini).
The examination of “niche”
linguistic phenomena provides a deeper understanding of the workings of
the grammatical system of English; complex linguistic phenomena benefit
from triangulation of data, mixed-method approaches and cross-fertilization
with other disciplines; linguistic patterns that manifest themselves at one
grammatical level may have to be accounted for with reference to a combination
of grammatical levels; and motivated hypotheses about English language use,
grounded on previous findings, have to be tested against empirical data. The
contributions show that some of the areas recently explored by these scholars
are: linguistic phenomena (i.e. English creative morphology and phraseology);
multimodality in movies (i.e. hand movements); local cultural phenomena
(i.e. tourism in Sicily); British political issues (i.e. Brexit, UK legislation); and
linguistic aspects of English literature (i.e. Naturalism)
Introduction
Full text linkAfter outlining the relevance of pragmatic skills to successulf and socially appropriate communication, and the need for pragmatics-informed language pedagogy and assessment practices, the Introduction provides an overview of the contributions to the volum
Design and collection of the Bimodal Italian Learner Corpus of Chinese (BILCC)
No full textThis article presents a new methodological resource for L2 Chinese acquisition research, BILCC (Bimodal Italian Learner Corpus of Chinese). BILCC was created to fill two major gaps in the literature: first, the absence of data from Italian learners in existing L2 Chinese corpora; second, to support research on L2 Chinese acquisition by Italian learners, given the growing interest in Chinese language learning and the flourishing research community devoted to L2 Chinese acquisition in Italy. BILCC has been constructed according to strict design criteria and collects written and spoken data from 106 Italian L2 Chinese learners at beginner, intermediate and advanced levels. It is a specific-purpose corpus, as it was specifically designed to explore the pragmalinguistic knowledge of Chinese shì...de clefts by L1 Italian learners. The written subcorpus consists of 53,437 Chinese characters and the spoken subcorpus of 54,212 Chinese characters. BILCC also includes an equivalent native speaker subcorpus, which collects data from 35 L1 Chinese speakers. The learner corpus, which is fully documented with rich metadata, is annotated at the error and pragmatic levels
The armchair and the machine: Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies
No full textAn overview with case studies of corpus-assisted discourse researc
Students' pragmatic proficiency in written interaction: Spontaneous and elicited email requests to faculty in L1 Italian and L2 English
No full textThis paper examines corpora of spontaneous and elicited student email requests to faculty in L1 Italian (120 texts; about 9,000 words) and L2 English (120 texts, about 9,700 words). Four dimensions were considered: structure and interaction management, content, requestive strategies, and form, each comprising a set of features. Most features were rated with binary values (positive vs negative) except for accuracy, which was rated on a 3-point scale (positive vs fair vs negative). Three findings emerged: the Italian sub-corpora were given slightly higher values than the English ones for communicative effectiveness, but not for email structure; also, spontaneously produced Italian and English texts and Italian elicited texts were rated better than English elicited texts; however, all the sub-corpora revealed problems in paragraphing and illocution-specific strategies. In general, all the sub-corpora were less than ideal in their structure, strategies and form
Multimodal Corpora with MCA
No full textThe study presented in this article is part of an ongoing research strand that investigates how multimodal corpora, and multimodal concordancing in particular, can be integrated into university syllabuses (Baldry et al., 2005; Coccetta, 2004; Grunther, 2005; Ackerley and Coccetta, in press; Dalziel and Metelli, in press; Baldry, forthcoming; this volume). The article is based on previous work in the use of corpora and concordancers in the language classroom to analyse lexicogrammatical patterns (Johns, 1991; Partington, 1998; Gavioli and Aston, 2001), but discusses their limitations in the investigation of multimodal texts, focusing mostly on spoken texts. In particular, it reports on research which is being carried out on the Padova Multimedia English Corpus (Padova MEC) and suggests how spoken corpora can be exploited to promote communicative language competence. In so doing, it introduces the concept of functional-notional concordancing and moves away from what Baldry (forthcoming; this volume) defines as monomodal form-oriented concordancing towards meaning-oriented concordancing. Finally, the article presents the online multimodal concordancer MCA (Multimodal Corpus Authoring System, Baldry, 2005), the tool used to investigate parts of the Padova MEC for functions and notions, and gives some practical examples of functional-notional concordancing
'Try to Say Things Straight, without Being Offensive, Obviously': Investigating the Pragmatics of Online Peer Review
No full textThe aim of this chapter is to explore the pragmatic strategies adopted by university language students in online comments on their peers’ written production in an English for Academic Purposes (EAP) writing module. The paper addresses the following research questions: the extent to which learners mitigate the criticism in their peer review messages with praise for their peers’ work; whether students tend to use more positive or negative politeness strategies in their comments; whether they transfer the use of hedging expressions (see, for example, Myers 1989) from their academic writing to their peer reviews; what kinds of messages the learners themselves wish to receive from their peers in terms of pragmatics. In order to answer these questions, the chapter examines a corpus of 170 online peer review messages collected between 2015 and 2017 along with a number of replies to a task in which students were required to define “good” peer review. The findings reveal that in the vast majority of texts (91%) students include both compliments and criticism, while it is extremely rare for peers to give merely critical comments (1%). The results of the study may be useful to instructors of academic writing who would like to address the issue of the pragmatic features of online peer review, while at the same time allaying some of the students’ possible fears in commenting on their peers’ work
Declining an Invitation: The Pragmatics of Italian and Colombian Spanish
No full textIn this chapter we compare Italian and Colombian Spanish cross-culturally with a focus on the speech act of declining an invitation. The study originates from the observation that there are differences in the refusal behaviors of Italians and Colombians. Such differences may easily lend themselves to stereotyping if not adequately interpreted in the frame of cross-cultural pragmatics. Data were collected through a questionnaire which combined open and multiple-choice Discourse Completion Task (DCT) items, and assessment questions. The questionnaire was filled out by 63 Italians from the urban area of Rome and 63 Colombians from the urban area of Bogot . The findings suggest that the Colombians in our study perceived the expected behavior in the ritualized act of refusing an invitation in a slightly different way from the Italians. In particular, our
Colombian informants showed a higher preference for the use of a mitigated refusal, whilst our Italian informants preferred to postpone their response, using demurral as a strategy. As for the inviter’s expectancy that an invitee actually takes part in the event after accepting the invitation, the Colombians in our study more frequently expected that the invitee would not show up, whereas the Italians expected a last-minute cancellation. Some pedagogical implications are discussed based on these findings
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