Space is one of the most basic semantic domains in language, and one which is routinely exploited in metaphor. This study explores how static space (place and position) is used in the academic talk ...of an EMI research seminar on theory building, investigating not only the metaphorical spaces evoked but also the ways in which participants in the seminar communicate their relationship with spatialized concepts. Three main configurations of space are used in this data, corresponding to the container, centre-periphery, and link image schemas. Each can be viewed objectively or subjectively; and it is in the subjective viewpoints that we discover how speakers position themselves with respect to their discipline, borrow ideas from others, seek to draw disparate concepts together, and discuss the difficulties they experience in their spatial relations with academic concepts and within academic groups.
•Spatial metaphors are routinely used in the communication of stance in academic talk.•Stance is expressed as proximity (centre-periphery) and group membership (containers).•container metaphors enclose disciplinary areas but also cut them off from outside.•The centre-periphery structures subjective experiences of attraction and agency.•The link schema is associated with barriers rather than connections.
This commentary attempts to offer a practitioner's perspective on the use of hypothetical reported speech in business negotiations and how it might be explored in a Business English learning ...environment to help learners with English and negotiating skills. Some textbook materials on negotiations were reviewed for this purpose and some suggested activities are provided.
•A functional focus on teaching negotiation skills.•A communicative approach to language learning.•Provision of some tasks in the classroom which reflect learner realities.•A practitioner's commentary on Koester's article (2014) on Hypothetical Reported Speech.•Revision of some textbook material for Hypothetical Reported Speech.
Metadiscourse (MD) allows instructors to organize classroom discourse and reflect their own style while delivering the content. MD has been studied for years, especially with a focus on written ...contexts even though the number of studies conducted on spoken contexts in different educational settings has a tendency to increase. With the increasing spread of English medium instruction (EMI) across the world, the role of MD in EMI classroom discourse has become a field of research that is worth investigating. Concerning the Turkish context, MD has recently been a popular research area, but there are limited number of studies conducted the examination of MD in spoken interactions in the Turkish context. To this end, the current study aims to investigate the distribution and lexicogrammatical realizations of metadiscourse markers employed by the lecturers in the spoken discourse of different EMI courses. A corpus-based discourse analysis was carried out by referring to
framework of metadiscourse. The qualitative and quantitative analyses of the corpus collected from 36 hours of lesson observation have revealed some variations in both the distribution and realization of metadiscursive categories in different EMI courses.
Based on
interpersonal model of metadiscourse, this study explores MOOC video lecturers’ use of metadiscourse and compares it to traditional university lecturers’. Disciplinary variation in ...metadiscourse in the MOOC video lectures has also been investigated. The MOOC corpus consists of sixteen MOOCs across three disciplinary areas, including Arts and Humanities, Engineering and Physical Sciences, and Social Sciences. The results suggest that despite slight differences, the most frequently appearing metadiscourse in the MOOC corpus resembles the patterns found in university lectures, which reveals the remarkable similarities in using metadiscourse between MOOCs and traditional face-to-face lectures. However, different instructional contexts and teacher-student relationships indeed contribute to the variance in the employment of metadiscourse. Overall, MOOC video lecturers employed more interactive metadiscourse but less interactional metadiscourse than university lecturers. Cross-disciplinarily, the use of metadiscourse in MOOC video lectures is considerably influenced by disciplinary features. MOOCs containing more discipline-specific content and requiring intensive cognitive effort tend to use more interactive metadiscourse and engagement markers; while for MOOCs that may include more perspectives than basic facts, boosters and attitude markers seem to be employed more frequently. Possible reasons and purposes of the differentiated use of metadiscourse across disciplines are discussed in detail.
This research paper was conducted to investigate and report the phonological problems that Master One English as a Foreign Language students at the university of Adrar face when they listen to spoken ...discourse, especially when they try to perceive and interpret words that undergo sound modifications at word boundaries, namely assimilation, elision, intrusion, linking and weak forms. The sample comprised a class of Master One with 20 students who were subjected to a small text which is used for two purposes; first, as a cloze dictation test to measure students’ ability to recognize words undergoing sound modifications, and the same text was transcribed and given to students where they were asked to provide any instance of reduced forms processes. The results revealed that students had a lot of difficulties in breaking up words into their individual sounds (i.e., lexical segmentation) due to the occurrence of reduced forms that blurred the ends and beginnings of words. With the transcribed text, students produced very few instances of the required reduced forms. The results of the investigation beg the teachers of English to handle and use native-like English. Résumé Ce travail de recherche a été mené pour étudier et rapporter les problèmes phonologiques auxquels sont confrontés les étudiants du Master Anglais comme Langue Etrangère de l'université d'Adrar lorsqu'ils écoutent un discours parlé, en particulier lorsqu'ils tentent de percevoir et d'interpréter des mots qui subissent des modifications sonores aux limites des mots, à savoir l'assimilation, élision, intrusion, liaison et formes faibles. L'échantillon était constitué d'une classe de première année Master de 20 étudiants qui ont été soumis à un petit texte utilisé à deux fins : d’abord, comme teste de dictée pour mesurer la capacité des étudiants à reconnaître des mots subissant des modifications sonores, et le même texte a été transcrit et remis aux étudiants où il leur a été demandé de fournir toute instance de processus de formes réduites. Les résultats ont révélé que les étudiants avaient beaucoup de difficultés à diviser les mots en leurs sons individuels (c'est-à-dire la segmentation lexicale) en raison de l'apparition de formes réduites qui brouillaient les fins et les débuts des mots. Avec le texte transcrit, les étudiants ont produit très peu d’exemples des formes réduites requises. Les résultats plaident les professeurs d'anglais soient prêts à maîtriser et utiliser l'anglais comme un locuteur natif.
Background. In modern linguistics the phenomena of oral speech are actively studied, in particular the functioning of the discourse markers (units that play a crucial role in organizing the narrative ...and structuring the generated by the speaker discourse) in it. The purpose of this work is to describe the forming of new functions of discourse marker znachit to identify contextual and prosodic features that allow to classify the uses of the word znachit in natural oral speech. Materials and methods. The material of an analysis was taken from the oral and multimedia corpora of the National Corpus of the Russian Language. The total amount of material selected for the study consists of approximately 8500 words, 200 uses of the discourse marker znachit were analyzed. The method of the discourse analysis, the comparative method and quantitative method were used during the research. Results. The results of the study show the development of the functions of the discourse marker znachit in the natural oral speech: znachit fulfills the «starting function», the speech error marking function, and the quotation marking function. Via the Praat program the prosodic features of the discourse marker znachit were analyzed in the above-mentioned functions. In the course of the analysis of the prosodic features znachit in the different groups we managed to reveal that in the 3rd group contexts (in the situation of quoting) znachit is pronounced shorter than in the examples from the 1st, 2nd and 4th groups. The uses of znachit in the examples of the 2nd (the situation of the speech error) and 4th (the beginning of a new part of discourse) groups have an approximately equal duration range, but differ in the tone movement and pause locations in relation to the discourse marker. In the 2nd group of examples znachit is pronounced longer than in the other groups. Practical implications. The results of the study can be used to specify the definition of this unit.
This paper aims to draw reliable conclusions regarding yes-no questions and wh-questions in English and Albanian spoken discourse. The study outlines the differences and similarities in these ...question types between the two languages.The corpus of the study includes seven Meet the Press (NBC News) interviews (totaling 2 hours and 51 minutes) with the former President of the USA, Donald Trump which contribute to the English spoken corpus. Additionally, there are two Rubikon (KTV) interviews (totaling 2 hours and 51 minutes) with Hashim Thaçi, the former President of the Republic of Kosovo that are part of the Albanian spoken corpus. A qualitative method is employed to compare, analyze, and draw conclusions based on the findings of the conducted research. The study finds that the English yes-no questions feature the inversion of auxiliary and modal verbs to the subject position. However, the Albanian yes-no questions are characterized by the interrogative particle ‘a’, which may be positioned as the initial or final element or be absent altogether. The results also offer compelling evidence of the differences in the number of wh-words used to ask wh-questions in English and Albanian. They also highlight the most frequently used wh-words and the respective functions of wh-questions in both English and Albanian.
Little is known about the similarities and differences between the vocabulary in hard-sciences (e.g., Maths, Engineering, Medicine) and soft-sciences (e.g., Business, Law, History), especially in ...spoken discourse. To address this gap, a Soft Science Spoken Word List (SSWL) was developed for second language learners of soft-sciences at English-medium universities. The list consists of the 1,964 most frequent and wide-ranging word-families in a 6.5 million word corpus of soft-science speech, which represents 12 subjects across two equally-sized sub-corpora. The list may allow learners to recognize 94%–97% of the words in academic speech of soft-sciences. A comparison of the SSWL with Dang's (2018) Hard Science Spoken Word List revealed that although the most frequent 3,000 words are important for comprehending academic speech of both soft- and hard-sciences, the value of these words in soft-sciences is greater than in hard-sciences. Pedagogical implications related to this nature of vocabulary in hard- and soft-science speech are provided.
•Establishes first spoken wordlist for students of soft-sciences.•Compares vocabulary in hard and soft-science speech.•List may allow learners to achieve 94%–97% coverage of soft-science speech.•Most frequent 3,000 words important in both hard and soft-science speech.•Value of these words greater in soft-sciences than in hard-sciences.
For English teaching practice, it is important to deliberate productive talks that spur students’ comprehension, creativity, and problem solving ability. This research aimed at finding out the spoken ...discourse based on six phases of macrostructure in English classrooms. In this study, the writers employed observation guide sheets to collect the data and it was employed to 2 English teachers in Aceh Besar. The guide was developed based on Van Dijk (1980) on macrostructure in discourse society. The theory was adopted and adjusted based on the classroom spoken discourse. The data were analyzed using the interactive model analysis by Miles, Huberman, and Saldana (2014). The steps were data condensation, data display, and data verification by using a percentage formula. The findings indicate that two teachers conducted the process of teaching and learning activities according to the lesson plans that they had previously designed. Even though both of them had different teaching strategies, but the lesson plans had a complete structure with 6 steps in macro-phases.
The Academic Spoken Word List Dang, Thi Ngoc Yen; Coxhead, Averil; Webb, Stuart
Language learning,
December 2017, Letnik:
67, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
The linguistic features of academic spoken English are different from those of academic written English. Therefore, for this study, an Academic Spoken Word List (ASWL) was developed and validated to ...help second language (L2) learners enhance their comprehension of academic speech in English‐medium universities. The ASWL contains 1,741 word families with high frequency and wide range in an academic spoken corpus totaling 13 million words. The list, which features vocabulary from 24 subjects across four equally sized disciplinary subcorpora, is graded into four levels according to Nation's British National Corpus and Corpus of Contemporary American English lists, and each level is divided into sublists of function words and lexical words. Depending on their vocabulary levels, language learners may reach 92–96% coverage of academic speech with the aid of the ASWL.
Open Practices
This article has been awarded Open Materials and Open Data badges. The composition of the corpora, the Academic Spoken Word List, and sublists are publicly accessible via the Open Science Framework at https://osf.io/gwk45 and the IRIS digital repository at http://www.iris‐database.org. Learn more about the Open Practices badges from the Center for Open Science: https://osf.io/tvyxz/wiki.
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