Eastern Avenue, The University of Sydney October 10 - 11,...
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Eastern Avenue, The University of Sydney October 10 - 11, 2009
Transcript of Eastern Avenue, The University of Sydney October 10 - 11,...
Eastern Avenue, The University of SydneyOctober 10 - 11, 2009
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Introduction and WelcomeWe welcome you to the 3rd International Free Linguistics Conference.
The FLC is the first conference of its kind, and it was organised on a number of prin-ciples that were originally envisioned over a cup of coffee – as many good things are. This vision included providing a linguistics conference that is highly accessible in that it is completely free of fees, which are often staggering and prevent students and schol-ars from attending; and a conference that provides a forum for linguists in all areas of research to come together and share their diverse perspectives, ideas, and issues in an environment free of set themes and borders.
Based on the continued success of the FLC initiative, we look forward to offering you another accessible and diverse conference. This year, our 2-day program includes 60 full presentations, 3 colloquia, 1 workshop, 4 hot topic presentations, and 4 poster ses-sions. Our focus speakers this year are travelling from across the globe to support the FLC, and they include: Luciana de Oliveira from Purdue University in the United States; Enric Llurda from Universitat de Lleida in Spain; Christian Matthiessen from Hong Kong Polytechnic University and Jonathan Webster from City University of Hong Kong; along with Diana Eades from University of New England and Nick Reimer from University of Sydney in Australia. Their presentations, along with those in our program, will cover an array of linguistic fields from language pedagogy and forensic linguistics to philosophy of language and multimodality.
This year is also a unique one for FLC because both Naomi and I have been away from Sydney for long stretches of time. We are therefore highly grateful to our dedicated conference committee and volunteers who worked independently and with great energy to keep the conference program and preparation on track. There are many people that we would like to thank; in particular, we would like to acknowledge the efforts and time of the following committee members (in alphabetical order): Amanda Chau, Shosha-na Dreyfus, Sally Humphrey, Marina Lauer, James McElvenny, Alexander Stanley, Veronica Wagner, and Devrim Yilmaz.
Once again, thank you very much for your interest and participation in this conference. It is only with your continued support that the FLC initiative continues to grow. We hope you enjoy the conference and look forward to seeing you at the 4th International Free Linguistics Conference in 2010!
All the best,
Dr. Ahmar Mahboob and Naomi K. Knight
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This programme outlines the timetable of presentations (pages 12 – 13) and abstracts (pages 7 – 46). Further information can be found at www.freelinguistics.org.
Presentations are outlined as follows:
• Focus presentations will be presented in one-hour slots throughout each day in the Eastern Ave Auditorium (pages 6 – 10);
• Paper presentations will be allotted 30 minutes for presentation and 10 minutes for questions and are held in various rooms at the venue (pages 15-29, 29-51);
• Hot topics will be allotted 10 minutes for presentation and 10 minutes for discus-sion and will be held in Room 310 each morning (pages 52-54);
• Colloquia will be allotted 85 minutes for presentations inclusive of each paper and discussion period and will be held in various rooms at the venue (pages 12-14).
Also included in the conference schedule are: a catered book launch, the Conference Dinner, and the free Conference Social.
The book launch on Saturday, and the Conference Social on Sunday, will each be held in the foyer of the auditorium complex. We warmly welcome you all to attend, to celebrate the launch of Studies in Applied Linguistics and Language Learning, and the completion of the third annual International Free Linguistics Conference, respectively, at these free, catered events.
This year’s Conference Dinner – a chance to meet the Conference organisers and focus speakers – will be held on Saturday night at Rowda Ya-Habibi’s on King Street. Fol-lowing the booklaunch, a walking party will depart from the foyer to make the short journey to the restaurant together. Registration and payment for this, at a cost of $40 per person, close at noon on Saturday; to book please ask at the registration desk.
Lunch breaks are open for participants to find their own meals. We have, for your con-venience, arranged lunch deals with a local café, Café Ottimo. You may choose and pay for your meal at the registration desk (please do so by 9am each morning; orders may continue for latecomers until 11am). Your lunch bag will then be distributed to you from the registration desk at lunchtime. Alternatively, you may find lunch in one of the many restaurants in nearby Newtown and Glebe; a local restaurant guide may be found on pages 57.
Please do not hesitate to contact any of our student volunteers (with white Linguistics Society shirts and green-barred name tags) should you require assistance.
All the best, FLC Conference Committee
Announcements
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PAYPHONES • Outside Fisher Library; • Outside Ralph’s Café, Arena Sports Centre; • Outside the Carslaw Building Complex; • Level 2, Manning House; • Wentworth Building.
PHOTOCOPYING
Fisher Library (down Eastern avenue).Telephone: (02) 9351 2993Opening Hours during FLC: Saturday 9am-5pm; Sunday 1pm-5pm.
Officeworks1 Ross Street, Glebe, NSW 2037Telephone: (02) 8572 8300Sat : 8am - 6pmSun : 9am - 6pm
ATMS
NAB ATM: Broadway Shopping Centre
CBA ATMs: Holme Building and the Broadway Shopping Centre
ANZ ATM: Ground Level, Wentworth Building, Outside Hermann’s Bar
Unicom Credit Union: ATM Courtyard, Manning House
Westpac ATM: Broadway Shopping Centre
Frequently Asked Questions
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A LINGUISTIC APPROACH IN CULTURALLY AND LINGUISTICALLY DIVERSE CLASSROOMS
Luciana de Oliveira, Purdue University, United States.
The presenter describes the challenges and successes of applying a linguistic approach to the teaching of science in a 4th grade classroom. Drawing on different data sources, including classroom lessons and planning meetings between a teacher educator and a teacher, the presenter identifies patterns of discourse that enable language development and science learning.
SOCIOLINGUISTIC INVESTIGATIONS OF INEQUALITY IN THE LEGAL PROCESS
Diana Eades, University of New England, Australia.
This talk will address the question: what can sociolinguistic research reveal about inequality in the legal process? In answering this question, I will draw on studies which show how talk is used to control, coerce or dominate participants in courtroom hearings. Moving beyond situated power relations, I will address two wider questions of sociolinguistic concern: what are the social consequences of these situated inequalities? how do language ideologies enable discursive practices within legal contexts which perpetuate social inequalities?
WORKING ON THE INTERCULTURAL LANGUAGE TEACHEREnric Llurda, Universitat de Lleida, Spain.
This talk will bring to the front different trends that are converging in contemporary applied linguistics and language teaching research with the aim of drawing implications for the training of future language teachers. The questioning of native speaker authority in applied linguistics, together with the formulation of intercultural communicative competence as the natural aim of first and second language learners have appeared in an increasingly globalized context in which the former notions of national language, monolingual speaker and native speaker are called into question at the same time as the uses of languages for international communication are ever more frequent.
In the area of second language teaching, the teacher has ceased to be the central figure in the language classroom, as the focus in language pedagogy has shifted towards learner-centred approaches. However, the teacher still remains a fundamental element in language teaching, and the training of language teachers poses a challenge to training programmes and institutions, since the successful outcome of language education
Focus Presentations
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efforts still greatly rely on the skills of the language teacher.
The fundamental purpose of this talk is to discuss the results of empirical research dealing with the characteristics of the intercultural language teacher and present ideas for the training of such a teacher, emphasizing the need for a de-nativized de-centred and de-standardised perspective on language and language teaching, while making a strong case for the qualities of non-native high-awareness multicompetent intercultural teachers.
THE LANGUAGE OF SPACE: NOTES ON THE CONSTRUAL OF OUR EXPERIENCE OF MOTION THROUGH SPACE
Christian M.I.M. Matthiessen, Hong Kong Polytechnic University
All languages provide their speakers with the resources for construing their experience of the world around them and inside as meaning (cf. Halliday & Matthiessen, 1999). They model their experience of different phenomenal realms as meanings — as seman-tic models, more specifically as the ideation base of the semantic model or meaning base of a language (op cit.); and they do this prototypically in dialogic interaction, beginning with the onset of construing experience in the life of young children (see Painter, 1999). The construal of experience is thus intersubjective rather than simply subjective (cf. the work by Colwyn Trevarthen, e.g. 1987). Language has thus made it possible for humans to operate with a “collective brain” (see e.g. Christian, 2004).
In construing these semantic models of different phenomenal realms, speakers draw on the experiential resources of language, but obviously they also draw (1) on other semi-otic systems such as gesture, drawing, and mathematics, the particular mix of resources depending on the context of construal, and (2) on the bio-semiotic system of perception.
Here I will be concerned with one particular phenomenal realm of experience — the realm of space. In terms of phenomenal realms, space is a feature of physical systems, i.e. systems of the first order of complexity in a typology of systems ordered in com-plexity (see e.g. Halliday & Matthiessen, 1999: Ch. 13; Matthiessen, 2007), , but it is “manifested” within all systemic orders. (i) In biological systems, space is part of the physical world in which life unfolds: organisms “model” space, using the bio-semiotic systems of perception to develop neural models of space that they can use to navigate around space. (ii) In social systems, space is given social value; it is constructed socially in terms of the territory of a community, personal and public space, and so on (cf. Hall, 1966, and more recently the “sociology of space”) and the organisms engagement with space — position in and movement through space — is also constructed socially. (iii) In terms of semiotic systems, space is construed semantically as part of our ideation
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base (see Halliday & Matthiessen, 1999), where it is modelled as a spatial ontology (see Bateman et al., 2008).
The semantic model of space construed in a language is also the most holistic model of space in human engagement with space. This follows from the general principle that language is the one system that serves to bring together and to integrate various other human systems that can be located neurologically in different parts of the brain. This point has been developed and emphasized in the last couple of decades by scholars com-ing from different disciplines and different traditions (e.g. Bickerton, 1995; Deacon, 1997; Edelman, 1992; Halliday, 1995; Halliday & Matthiessen, 1999); Michio Sugeno has made the point that language is the only human system into which we can “trans-late” other human systems.
Not surprisingly, languages vary considerably in how they construe space, although broad generalizations are no doubt possible. Thus languages vary in how they construe both static location in space and dynamic motion through space (cf. Lemmens, 2005), and in how these two different “phases” of location in space complement one another in the construal of motion through space (see Slobin, 2004a: Sections 2.6.2, 4.1). In the construal of motion through space, languages seem to vary in how the two modes of construing experience in language, the logical and experiential modes, complement one another (cf. Halliday & Matthiessen, 1999: Ch. 7; Matthiessen, 2004) and they also vary with respect to the division of labour between spoken language and gesture (cf. McNeill, 2000; Slobin, 2004a,b).
Against this background, I will explore certain aspects of the language of space in this talk. I will draw on ongoing research by a group of us in the Faculty of Humanities, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. The exploration will include centrally a discussion of the construal of our experience of motion through space (investigated in topographic procedures in Matthiessen, 1998) — an area of intense research, much of it inspired by Talmy’s work (e.g. 1983, 1985, 1991, 2000, 2007) and also by Slobin’s work (e.g. 2004a,b), and reference to the deployment of the semantic model of space to non-spatial domains of experience (cf. Dreyfus & Jones, 2008).
Focus Presentations
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SEMANTIC REPRESENTATION AND NATURAL MEANINGNick Riemer, University of Sydney, Australia.
Semantics is distinctive among the core linguistics disciplines in the general lack of agreement over the basic theoretical questions at its centre. Langacker’s (1987: 32) complaint about ‘the striking lack of consensus about the proper characterization of even the simplest or most fundamental linguistic phenomena’ applies to questions of meaning even more than it does in other linguistic subfields, and theoretical proliferation in the years that separate us from 1987 has only increased the diversity of approaches available. From one point of view, this diversity is a major source of semantics’ vitality and interest. But given most investigators’ goal – the construction of a naturalistic theory of language – the field’s inability to reach agreement on even the most basic questions is highly discouraging. In this talk I venture some suggestions about possible causes of, and repairs for, this situation. I suggest that the impasse in current semantic theorizing stems from two widely made assumptions linguists bring to the analysis of meaning. The first assumption compromises the representational naturalness of the semantic structures posited in linguistics. Many theorists claim that semantic structure and conceptual structure are identical, but do this without any serious effort to characterize non-linguistic conceptual structure independently. I suggest that research needs to bring about a closer alignment between the semantic representations assumed to underlie language, and the types of representation required to explain non-linguistic cognition. Only if this happens can the claim that semantic and conceptual structure are identical be non-vacuous, and constraints be placed on the types of possible semantic representation discerned in language. The second assumption concerns the discourse naturalness of semantic representations. Linguists’ tacit assumption that semantic structure is constant over different discourse contexts is, I suggest, implausible. Instead, it seems likely that semantic structure varies as a function of the factors (degree of attention, planning, formality, etc.) known to affect most other levels of linguistic structure. A fruitful direction for semantic research may, I suggest, entail greater attention being given to these two dimensions of naturalness.
Focus Presentations
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WHAT WE CAN LEARN FROM AN INCARNATIONAL PERSPECTIVEJonathan Webster, City University of Hong Kong.
The linguist’s theoretical account of language provides a conceptual tool for analyzing not only language but also other forms of human semiosis, including images, the visual arts and music. The theoretical approach taken here aims at the description of language as a social semiotic system, focusing on its role in defining human experience, and en-acting social relationships.
Thinking semiotically gives us a new vantage point from which to pursue a knowledge of phenomena around which the human mind perpetually seems to circle but which it never attains. Once we begin to think in terms of meaning, however, it all begins to make sense. Meaning is a prerequisite for reflection and interaction. Meaning enables us to ‘contemplate, in thought, as in a Picture, the image of a greater and better world’, and to share that thinking with others.
An emphasis on meaning is evident in W.K. Wimsatt’s The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry. O’Donoghue, in an essay on Wimsatt Verbal Icon, describes how Wimsatt “attempts to trace the link between form and meaning, overcoming the tradi-tional assignment of each element to one or the other (metre to form, literary history to content, and so on)” (O’Donoghue 2002:146). In the case of rhyme, for example, Wimsatt “argues that the traditional assigning of rhyme to form as a kind of separate collaborator with sense fails to recognize the ways in which the choice of rhyme is of-ten influenced by the demands of meaning” (149) O’Donoghue goes on to say: “It may not be putting it too strongly to call his project partly theological; an attempt to see the ‘hylomorphic union’ of content and form – defined in Christian theology as the essence of divinity – as informing the whole of literary culture” (2002:146).
This unity of content and form, abstract and concrete, thoughts and things, is revealed in the incarnational aesthetic of Flannery O’Connor, the American novelist and short-story writer, whose art sought to “reunite what the modern mind has severed” (Bieber 1999). In her dissertation entitled “The Incarnational Art of Flannery O’Connor”, Christina Marie Bieber writes, “For O’Connor, art, like the Incarnation, presents a grotesque body instead of making an abstract argument; it reveals through the concrete, particular, un-tidy and communal nature of human experience – not in spite of it” (ibid.).
Meaning and matter are joined in the activity of conscious and communicative human beings in community. To put it another way, meaning and matter come together in the mix of human interactivity. Neither meaning or matter exist apart from the other, nor can either be fully known apart from knowing what it means to be human.
Focus Presentations
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ENGLIGH FOR ACADEMIC PURPOSESThis workshop is sponsored by ATESOL (NSW)
This workshop is designed to develop teachers’ skills in teaching English for Academic Purposes (EAP). During this workshop we will discuss perceived English language needs as reported by EAP students and their teachers through their responses to ques-tionnaires completed after a pre-sessional academic literacies intensive program. Based on the results of this analysis and on the responses that experienced EAP teachers pro-vided to another questionnaire, this workshop will focus on the skills that teachers re-quire in order to teach EAP programs effectively. Special attention will be given to the teaching of critical thinking (including looking at activities that work) and writing skills within the framework of an academic literacies approach to program design and imple-mentation. Samples of materials used to scaffold the acquisition of these skills will be showcased as a point of departure for further discussion on the types of activities that students find useful.
Session Time: 1 Students’ perceived needs (report on students’ and teachers’ responses to ques-
tionnaires completed after a pre-sessional academic literacies intensive pro-gram) 15 min;
2 Teacher’s perceived needs in order to teach EAP effectively (report on teach-ers’ responses to questionnaires) 15 min;
3 Teaching critical thinking (activities that work) 30min;4 Teaching writing following the academic literacies approach (syllabus content
and effective methodology) 1h 30min.
This workshop shall be presented by Cintia Agosti.
Workshop
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PUTTING HALLIDAY’S MODEL OF VARIATION IN USE INTO USEAnnabelle Lukin, Macquarie University, Australia;
Alison Moore, Macquarie University, Australia;Wu Canzhong, Macquarie University, Australia;Maria Herke, Macquarie University, Australia;
Rebekah Wegener, Macquarie University, Australia.
In this colloquium we revisit Halliday’s description of register as “a variety of language, corresponding to a variety of situation”, with situation interpreted “by means of a conceptual framework using the terms ‘field’, ‘tenor’ and ‘mode’” (Halliday and Hasan, 1985/89: 29, 38) in order to reflect on the theoretical work the term ‘register’ does within the SFL paradigm, and to illustrate how a register approach can illuminate crucial issues in media, medical and educational discourse.
We will also link these accounts to recent developments in context modelling (e.g. Hasan 1999, in press) which arguably help to operationalise Halliday’s concept of register. At least one significant development in this work has been the argument for, and demonstration of, the viability of modelling context paradigmatically, through system networks (Hasan, 1999, 2004, in press). Invoking the term ‘contextualization systems’ for the description of ‘relevant context’, Hasan argues that this approach has “the distinction that instead of taxonomising realized meanings, [contextualization systems] actually systematize the realization-instigating contextual features and attempt to relate context to wording via meaning which acts as the interface between the two” (in press).
An important issue for discussion is how SF linguists pursuing register descriptions interpret and represent the range of phenomena, and their relations, so as to provide a coherent picture of a register, including the regularities and variation. Individual presentations will include studies of particular registers, and more general papers concerning historical development and the possibilities for computing and displaying results.
Colloquia
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NEGOTIATING MEANING THROUGH THE VERBAL GROUP IN DIFFERENT LANGUAGES
J.R. Martin, University of Sydney, Australia;Ernest Akerejola, Macquarie University, Australia;
Zhila Bahman, University of Sydney, Australia;Alice Caffarel, University of Sydney, Australia;
Mira Kim, Macquarie University, Australia, Australia;Abhishek Kumar, Macquarie University, Australia.
This colloquium attempts to explore the typological organizations of the verbal group in four languages - Òkó, Persian, French and Bajjika - from the perspective of the Systemic Functional Linguistics theory (SFL). Within SFL, language is interpreted as meaning potential. One key aspect of the content levels of language is metafunctional diversification, which allows the simultaneous creation of three different kinds of meaning: ideational, interpersonal and textual. Another important aspect of the theory is the systemic dimension, and it is the system that provides the semiotic environment for structural description in SFL. A consequence of this is that “typology has to be typology of particular systems (such as TENSE, ASPECT systems), not typology of whole languages” (Halliday 1966: 166-168). In other words, we explore what systemic features are similar across languages and what features are particular to specific languages. Then we will focus on the choices and interaction of elements in realising meaning in the verbal group.
The colloquium, therefore, is specifically concerned with the verbal group and will explore how the verbal group, through its morphology, particles and affixes, realises different kinds of interpersonal and/or experiential meaning.
The colloquium aims to foreground how the verbal group signals different meanings across different languages and how it can represent different aspects of the systems of MOOD, MODALITY and TRANSITIVITY.
Colloquia
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STOP, REVIVE, SURVIVE!: LESSONS FROM THE HEBREW REVIVAL APPLICABLE TO THE RESUSCITATION OF NO-LONGER SPOKEN
ABORIGINAL LANGUAGESGhil‘ad Zuckermann, University of Queensland, Australia;
Michael Walsh, University of Sydney, Australia;Jane Simpson, University of Sydney, Australia;Rob Amery, University of Adelaide, Australia;
Kevin Lowe, Inspector, Aboriginal Education, NSW Office of the Board of Studies, Australia.
This colloquium will examine whether there are lessons applicable from the Hebrew revival in the Promised Land to current attempts to revive - and post-vernacularly maintain - no-longer spoken Aboriginal languages in the Lucky - or is it unlucky? - Country.
The fin-de-siècle Hebrew revivalists had several advantages compared with Australian revivalists, e.g. (1) zealousness and Hebrew consciousness and scholarliness, (2) extensive documentation, (3) Jews from all over the globe only had Hebrew in common, and (4) Hebrew was considered a most prestigious language (as opposed to Yiddish, for example).
And yet the Hebrew revivalists, who wished to speak the ancient tongue, failed in their purism, the result being a multi-layered and multi-sourced Israeli language. We therefore predict that any attempt to revive an Aboriginal language will result in a hybrid, combining components from Australian English, Aboriginal English, and Aboriginal languages.
That is of course not to say that we should not revive dormant languages. On the contrary! This colloquium will encourage revival activists to be more realistic about their goals. We shall explore what components of language are more revivable than others.
For language revival to be credible in the eyes of fluent speakers of Aboriginal languages it is important to pay attention to salient aspects of language, especially pronunciation. Use of English loanwords can be seen as an admission of defeat, whilst borrowings from neighbouring languages might be viewed as theft. Whilst there are pressures, both internal and external, for linguistic purism, influence from English is unavoidable and use of neighbouring languages can be highly beneficial.
Some indigenous Australians do not find it necessary or important to revive their comatose tongue. We, on the other hand, have always believed in Australia’s very own roadside dictum: ‘Stop, revive, survive!’
Colloquia
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THE STATUS OF ENGLISH IN MALAYSIA: REVISITED ISSUESFatimah Ali, Monash University, Australia.
The political history of English due to British colonisation for more than 100 years has made the role of English a complex issue in Malaysia. Pennycook, in his book entitled ‘The Cultural Politics of English as an International Language’ (1994), maintains “…that English is seen by the Malays as a threat to the national language, Bahasa Malaysia, Malay identity and Islam”. Now, fifteen years after this claim, it is important to revisit this question and explore a number of related questions. For example, do Malays currently regard English negatively, for example as a Western imperialism or Christian hegemony? This paper examines these issues by looking at the current attitudes and perceptions of Malay Muslims towards English. Nineteen English language educators and 21 language learners in tertiary educational institutions were recruited to participate in a mini-focus group interview. Data from 8 interview sessions show that although educated Malay Muslims recognize the importance of English language, they strongly believe in the prestige of Bahasa Malaysia as the national language. Modern Malay Muslims also contend that English can be the language for the Muslim world.
MODELLING AND VISUALISING DISCOURSE PATTERNSBandar Almutairi, University of Sydney, Australia;
Michele Zappavigna, University of Sydney, Australia.
Texts can be intractable. As discourse analysts, we are limited by the extent to which our perceptual systems can detect long-range and complex patterns in discourse, even where we have manually annotated the data. Since a text is more than a bag of words, clauses or any other structure (Martin, 1985) we need technology that can assist the analyst in achieving both a synoptic and dynamic perspective on their text analyses. This paper develops a text visualisation strategy that leverages periodicity, how information is organised as a text unfolds (Halliday, 1985; Martin & Rose, 2007). Since periodicity is “concerned with information flow - with the way in which meanings are packaged to make it easier for us to take them in” (Martin & Rose, 2007: 188), we argue that the intangible time of a text can be measured by a complex unit based on this concept.
We use mathematical interpolation to produce representations of waves of periodicity that can be used as a time reference helping us to visualise the distribution of other linguistic systems (e.g. Appraisal, Process-Type etc.) throughout the text. We use this method to detect patterns in these features in terms of their relative distance from the peaks of the waves. The method can be used recursively (e.g. nested functions; functions of functions) to create waves of waves corresponding to patterns of patterns at the same
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stratum or generalized to include components from higher or lower strata in language. We apply the method in a pilot study to compare the unfolding of prosodies of evaluative meaning in two texts annotated using Appraisal Theory (Martin & White, 2005). A long term aim of this project is to develop a metalanguage, as Zhao (forthcoming) has suggested, for describing the kinds of logogenetic patterns, in other words, patterns of unfolding meaning, that are possible in texts.
DOES ADDITIONAL LANGUAGE TEACHING ENCOURAGE LEARNERS TO PASS AS AN OTHER? ISSUES IN ADDITIONAL
LANGUAGE IDENTITY DEVELOPMENTWilliam S. Armour, University of New South Wales, Australia.
In a previous essay (Armour forthcoming), I began a process of reconceptualising the theoretical concept of ‘identity slippage’, a term emerging out a study of the topical life histories of six Anglo-Celt Australians who had been learning Japanese as an additional language (see Armour (2008) for the complete study). As part of my ongoing reconceptualisation of ‘identity slippage’, this presentation aims to use the already theorised notion of ‘passing’ as a point of departure to determine if additional language teaching (specifically Japanese as a foreign language) encourages learners to pass as an Other. For example, as a Japanese language teacher I correct my students’ pronunciations, lexico-grammar and non-verbal language choices. Why? Am I merely following the requirements of the educational institution I work for? Or, am I involved in identity change where the corrections are pitched towards effectively presenting learners as other than who they understand themselves to be?
GRAMMATICAL METAPHOR AND THE DEGREE OF ABSTRACTION AND/OR OBJECTIFICATION IN SCIENTIFIC AND HISTORICAL TEXTS
IN PERSIANZhila Bahman, University of Sydney, Australia.
The concept of grammatical metaphor, as a specific phenomenon rooted in the grammar of a language, has been introduced in the framework of Systemic Functional Linguistics (Halliday 1985, 1994; Halliday and Matthiessen 1999; Martin 1993; Rose 2001) and its role as a means of exploiting the grammatical resources has been investigated in languages with elaborated forms of scientific, administrative and legal discourse.
To explore the concept of grammatical metaphor and nominalization in Persian, this paper first attempts to represent a functional study of Persian verbal groups with an emphasis on the functional roles of the embedded and nominalised verbal groups in
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different text types, and further compares and contrasts various scientific and historical texts in Persian with regard to their degree of abstraction and objectification.
SPITTING AND SEDUCING: INTERPERSONAL MEANINGS AND COMPLEMENTARITY IN POP RAP
David Caldwell, University of Sydney, Australia.
Pop rap, comparable with other rap styles such as Gangsta rap and Old-School rap, contrasts the rapping voice with strong melodic hooks, often produced through a singing voice. Moreover, Pop rap follows the basic ‘pop’ music structure of verse and chorus, where the verse is rapped, and the chorus sung. This paper will apply social semiotics to a corpus of popular rap with an aim to investigate both the rapping voice and singing voice in terms of their interstratal complementarity. In other words, I will analyse the relationship between the meanings made at the expression stratum and the meanings made at the discourse semantic stratum. More specifically, I will analyse the embodied, interpersonal meanings at the level of expression in both the rapping and singing voice and their respective meanings in the interpersonal discourse semantics in the verse and chorus. For the expression analysis I will apply principles from van Leeuwen’s (1999) music semiotics. And at the level of discourse semantics I will apply Appraisal (Martin & White 2005). Those findings will be summarized and discussed from a number of related perspectives including Bonding (Martin & Stenglin 2007), Commitment theory (Hood 2008) and Semantic Gravity (Maton 2008). In addition, the overall composition of the Pop rap song will be analysed in terms of the way in which the meanings expressed in the rapping voice compare, contrast and complement the singing voice.
ASSESSING GOOD CITIZENS IN AUSTRALIA, BRITAIN, FRANCE AND CANADA
Maria Chisari, University of Technology Sydney, Australia.
What constitutes a good citizen? What knowledge does a good citizen require? How is this competency to be measured? In some liberal-democratic nations, these questions are being addressed through the introduction of citizenship tests. Canada, Britain, the Netherlands, USA and Australia are amongst a group of nations that have, in recent years, introduced citizenship tests that assess knowledge about civic rights and responsibilities for migrants and refugees who want to gain citizenship in their adopted nations. Increasingly, the contents of these tests also requires knowledge about the history, customs and core values that are purported to represent a nation’s unique identity. In France and Australia, recent arrivals must sign statements promising
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to respect the values and customs of their adopted countries. As with the tests, these statements are promoted as a means of ensuring social cohesion among the native-born citizens and migrant citizens where integration is the desired outcome.
In this paper, I present a comparative analysis on the current official texts being used to prepare prospective candidates to ‘integrate’ into the societies of Britain, Canada, France and Australia. Using discourse analysis, I examine how these texts are used to promote government-sanctioned notions of national identities, history, customs, rights and responsibilities. I problematise notions of integration, national identity and core national values and explore their implications for government policies relating to immigration, multiculturalism and second language learning.
WORK OR PLAY? SPORTS TRAINING DISCOURSE AND THE TRANSMISSION OF VALUES.
Nayia Cominos, University of Adelaide, Australia;Peter Mickan, University of Adelaide, Australia.
The conscious transmission of values is an accepted and expected function of social structures such as the family, religious organizations, and in educational institutions such as schools and universities, as part of their academic curricula. This may be formalised in mission statements and charters, or conveyed by the type of language used when initiating new members into an existing community of practice. Sport is a discipline which has the particularity of being included in the school syllabus, but also existing in other formal and informal structures in the wider community. Despite its stated primary role of training and the development of particular skills, the discourse used in sporting contexts also appears to contain implicit and explicit messages about values and culture. This paper examines and compares two communicative events – a state club basketball training session and a primary school physical education lesson. Analysis of the lexical data reveals that effectively, the discourses used by the teacher and coach are laden with the socio-cultural values of their respective communities of practice, both explicitly through clearly judgemental statements, and implicitly through the choice of vocabulary and the use and frequency of certain grammatical elements.
HOW DIFFERENT CAN IT BE? EXPLORING THE PROCESS OF BECOMING AN ESL TEACHER
Michele de Courcy, University of Melbourne, Australia.
As researchers and teachers, we have particular beliefs about the world and how it works, and about classrooms and how they work. Borg notes that “beliefs colour
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memories with their evaluation and judgment, and serve to frame our understanding ofevents” (p. 187). When students in our graduate program, learning to be TESOL teachers, undertake their compulsory supervised practice teaching in TESOL settings, they are confronted with just how different their new discipline is. Using former students’ reflections on their placements as data and discourse analysis and critical discourse analysis as the research tools, this research project aimed to uncover what novice ESL teachers experience during the “praxicum” (Pennycook, 2004). What do they have to learn in order to experience success in the ESL classroom? What do they have to unlearn?
PERCEPTIONS OF AND ATTITUDES TOWARDS ENGLISH: A STUDY OF STAFF AND STUDENTS AT YOGYAKARTA UNIVERSITIES
Anita Dewi, Monash University, Australia.
There has been a tremendous increase in the number of English speakers around the world, with the dominance of non-native speakers using diverse varieties of the language. In its history, English has spread through a number of processes ranging from colonialism to globalisation, leading to various relationships between English and community. The language has also spread to Islamic countries, whose religious teachings are embedded with local or national cultures resulting in non-homogeneous Islamic communities across the globe.
Since both English and Islam develop through diversification, it is an oversimplification to conclude that English stands as an opposite to Islam. This reflects the importance of studies on perceptions of and attitudes towards English across Islamic countries. As the fourth most populated country and the largest Muslim community in the world, Indonesia has become one of the main targeted contexts for such a study. Accordingly, this study will examine perceptions of and attitudes towards English, focusing on staff and students at Yogyakarta universities.
This study will employ a mixed-methods approach, with social status and religious backgrounds as its variables. The study will be carried out at seven prominent universities of different ‘aromas’ – nationalist and religious, public and private. Six different groups of participants are involved in individual interviews and questionnaire surveys. The first five groups, for individual semi-structured interviews, consist of rectors, vice rectors, English lecturers, non-English lecturers, and students. The last group, for questionnaire surveys, consists of students.
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EMPOWERING USERS OF ENGLISH AS A SECOND LANGUAGE THROUGH ONLINE FEEDBACK
ON GRAMMATICAL METAPHORYilmaz Devrim, University of Sydney, Australia.
The purpose of this study is to examine whether students use grammatical metaphors effectively in their assignments with the help of online feedback. Grammatical metaphor, suggested by Halliday (1985), remains a fundamental characteristic of written language, specifically that of academic genres in which tertiary level students are expected to construe meaning in more incongruent and abstract ways. Subjects of this study are the undergraduate students enrolled at the department of Electronic Engineering at a Hong Kong university. Prior to assignment submission, the students are provided feedback for their first and second drafts by tutors at an Australian university. The rationale behind this process is to provide the students with scaffolding to help them improve their written work. The study particularly focuses on the use of effective grammatical metaphors with the help of tutor feedback. Specifically, the study is designed to provide answers to the following research questions: (1) How are grammatical metaphors manifested in relation to discourse organization? (2) Are grammatical metaphors used effectively through online feedback? This study thus highlights the significance of grammatical metaphor in empowering the speakers of Hong Kong English, which is regarded as an emerging variety, with implications for the fields of linguistics and education.
MULTIMODALITY AND LEGITIMATION IN POWERPOINT’S ONLINE HELP AND DESIGN
Emilia Djonov, University of Technology Sydney, Australia.
As a dominant technology in business and education, PowerPoint has already attracted considerable attention. Existing research, however, focuses either on its design or on its use, while ignoring their interdependence (see reviews in Craig & Amernic, 2006; Farkas, 2006). This paper addresses this gap by presenting an initial step from a research project exploring the interaction between PowerPoint’s design, its use in higher education and corporate settings, and the normative discourses that regulate this use. In particular, it explores how specific ways of using the software are privileged in demonstration videos from PowerPoint 2007’s online help and in the development of the software’s design from 1992 to now. Drawing on social semiotic principles for visual and multimodal discourse analysis (Kress & Van Leeuwen, 2001, 2006 [1996]), this exploration examines whether and how Van Leeuwen’s (2008) framework for analysing legitimation in verbal texts may be adapted to multimodal discourse analysis.
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VISUAL ENGAGEMENT: EVOKING EVALUATION VIA INTERTEXTUALITY IN NATURALISTIC NEWS PHOTOS
Dorothy Economou, University of Sydney, Australia.
This paper reports on one aspect of my PhD research – a study of evaluation in ‘factual’ broadsheet news photos. These photos are the captioned naturalistic colour photos that appear with daily news stories in which ‘congruent’ visual ideational meanings predominate.
PHATIC COMMUNION IN MINANGKABAU LANGUAGE: ITS UNIQUENESS IN COMPARISON TO ENGLISH
Elfiondri, Faculty of Humanities, Bung Hatta University, Indonesia.
The paper discusses phatic communion (PC) in Minangkabau Language (ML) based on the research conducted on ML, a language spoken by the Minangkabau tribe in West Sumatra. It describes ethnography of PC, its uses, its types, and shows its uniqueness. The uniqueness is elaborated by making comparison with English. The result of the research is that in the Minangkabau speech community, PC is a piece of flexible and typical language use, easily and customarily uttered. It is elaborated as routine conversation, greetings, courtesy, sweet nothing, social mode utterance, and tight of harmonization and solidarity. Its formal features are realized into impositives, commisives, expressive, and declaratives. In uttering PC, the community has norms of speaking which consist of no-mute duration, no-overlap, honorifics, mutual care-giving, and normal distance. The norms are ruled out by the four-type of language use in ML called “Kato Nan Ampek”. The four-type is language in which there are four uses, which are: to speak with younger listeners, with older listeners, with the same-age speakers-listeners, and with all ages by allusion. Speaking participants who do not obey it are considered to be violating tradition. Pragmatically, the use of phatic communion is ruled out by cooperative and politeness principles with their maxims. Sociolinguistically, PC in ML also has several variations such as elaborated and restricted codes and formal and informal codes. The more elaborated the codes, the more formal the PC is, and the more restricted the codes, the more informal the PC is. PC in ML can be classified into two types – pure PC and polar PC. The first is used spontaneously, regularly, automatically in a certain speech situation. This type occurs in modes of greeting and courtesies. It fits to reality depicting to it. The second type is simply depicted in terms of asymmetry nature. It does not physically fit reality. PC in ML has uniqueness when compared to that of English. The uniqueness is indicated by PC topics and uses. The specific topics are identity, activity, destination, place of living, jobs, and education. English PC does not have the topics. The specific uses are shown by the typical utterances which are found in English.
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A PROCESS ANALYSIS OF LANGUAGE AS PARTICLE, WAVE AND FIELD
Peter Farleigh, Macquarie University, Australia.
In the late 1950s Kenneth Pike lamented that “in the twentieth century we should still be viewing language almost entirely from a static, particle-like view rather than in a dynamic fashion”. He outlined three broad views of language—as either a construction of separate particles, or, in contrast, as overlapping waves, or as functions in a field. Here he is clearly developing metaphors or models inspired by science, particularly physics. Michael Halliday later developed “Pike’s important insight” arguing that experiential structures are particulate, interpersonal structures are field-like while textual ones are wave-like. In this paper I will examine then extend this analysis appealing to system theories—primarily, theories of systems of events and processes.
LEARNING THROUGH L1 AND L2: THE CASE OF SLOVAK-ENGLISH BILINGUAL STUDENTS
Dana Gablasova, University of Auckland, New Zealand.
Studying in an additional language is demanding both linguistically and cognitively. Despite this fact, the number of students participating in various forms of bilingual education is on the increase. In this paper, I will discuss learning of new content knowledge in the context of bilingual education. Implications for assessment of bilingual students will be also considered.
Many of the prior studies investigating the effect of bilingual education have focused either on measuring students’ general linguistic development (proficiency) or stressed the content knowledge dimension. In this study, I will argue for an approach which would consider subject matter knowledge and language development as inherently interdependent.
In the present research, 24 Slovak high-school students were given two academic-type texts: one half of the students received the texts in Slovak (their L1), the other half in English (their L2). All students were then tested on their content knowledge (information contained in the texts) both in English and in Slovak. Correct answers were counted and compared across the two languages. Moreover, the language of the students’ answers was analysed.
The findings suggest that with regard to the content accuracy, the difference between the groups instructed in their L1 and their L2 was not so prominent. However, the language of the Slovak-instructed students showed greater sophistication. This points
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to a difference in the nature of learning through L1 and L2 which needs to be taken into account in bilingual programmes.
“AS HARD AS IT GETS”: A PRELIMINARY ANALYSIS OF NEWS REPORTS OF THE INTERNAL CONFLICT
ON THE COLOMBIAN PRESSAlexandra Garcia, Macquarie University, Australia.
The turn of the century marked an escalation of the violence of the Colombian conflict by both Marxist guerrillas and right wing paramilitaries. However, popular perception of each group contrasts sharply with the statistics on responsibility for criminal acts. Since the press is one of the main sources of information on the conflict for the general population, analysing the way in which it reconstructs these events may provide some insights into this phenomenon.As an initial step in this process, two pieces of ‘hard’ news on violent acts perpetrated by each group reported in ‘El Tiempo’, the leading Colombian newspaper, in December 1998 are analysed. Within a Systemic Functional Linguistics framework, this analysis contrasts the lexicogrammatical realisations of the experiential, interpersonal, and textual functions. Regarding the experiential meanings, it contrasts who the participants are in each text and how they are nominated, what types of processes they carry out, and how explicitly causation is attributed. The analysis of the interpersonal function focuses on modality, specifically the expressed degrees of certainty and the writer’s attitude towards the subject reflected in the choice of adjectives, adverbs, and nouns, which overlaps with the appraisal resources as expressed by the systems of affect and judgment (Martin, 1996, 1997, 2000). In relation to the textual function, the aspects of theme and lexical cohesion are examined.
A DUAL-REPRESENTATION APPROACH TO DECOMPOSABILITY/NON-DECOMPOSABILITY OF ENGLISH IDIOMS IN L1 AND L2
Shekoofeh Hajialikhani, Islamic Azad University Of Najaf Abad, Iran.
In order to investigate the mental representation of English idioms in L2, a study was conducted in which a group of Iranian learners of English who had been studying for five years or more was compared with a group of native English speakers on their judgment of the decomposability status of one hundred English idioms. The learners were also asked to rate their familiarity with the idioms. The analysis of the data obtained from the questionnaires indicates that the two groups are significantly different in that the natives tend to rate many more idioms as non-decomposable, which means that they have more idiom entries and that learners tend to rely on the comprising constituents of the idioms
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to rate them. The results also show that, although the amount of time the learners spend using English outside class (frequency) is positively correlated with their degree of familiarity, neither frequency nor familiarity have significant bearing on the number of idioms the learners tend to rate as non-decomposable. This can be further evidence that learners have different mental representations of English idioms, and that they probably draw on conceptual metaphors more often than do native speakers to process idioms.
INVESTIGATION OF INTERLANGUAGE OF ENGLISH ARTICLE SYSTEM
Feifei Han, The University of Sydney, Australia. English article system is surprisingly complicated; this is partly attributed to the fact that there is no one-to-one form-meaning correspondence, and partly because these function words are normally unstressed and consequently affect the availability of input from spoken language. This complexity poses a great challenge for L2 learners. As a result, it is generally acknowledged that despite early introduction to English article system, L2 learners cannot use English articles properly even for those advanced learners. The presentation reports a study on interlanguage of English article system of two advanced Chinese EFL learners by conducting error analysis on their academic assignments. The errors of the participants were categorized by Bickerton’s Semantic Wheel framework. Different from traditional error analysis, the study also employed a retrospective interview method to gain a deeper insight into the participants’ metalinguistic explanation of their choice of articles. In general, the present study supported the findings of previous L2 studies on [-article] learners that their non-native like article uses are attributed to L1 transfer, confusion of specificity and definiteness, and misjudgement of countability of noun phrases. The present study also found some unique patterns, such as the directed translation from first language misguided learners from selecting correct articles; and the complexity of tasks influenced the linguistic choice of articles. Although the present study of Chinese learners’ errors in the use of English articles only involves a small sample size, it attempts to at least raise TESOL practitioners and learners’ awareness to the status quos so that enough attention will be given to explore new pedagogy of more efficient ways of English article instruction.
HOW MUCH GRAMMAR ENGINEERING IS BEHIND A STATISTICAL PARSER?
Matthew Honnibal, University of Sydney, Australia;James Curran, University of Sydney, Australia.
A statistical parser is a program that makes automatic grammatical annotations by
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making inferences from a large sample of pre-annotated sentences. This approach is less knowledge intensive than parsing with a manually constructed grammar, because ambiguity and coverage do not need to be manually managed - the grammar is simply read off the corpus. This has led to a general lack of interest in linguistic annotation in the statistical parsing community. Known errors in the source corpus go uncorrected for long periods of time - twenty years and counting - while research focuses on developing better statistical techniques.
We argue that there is an overlooked need for grammar engineering for statistical parsing. Statistical parsers would benefit from more consistent, well-principled annotation on the source corpus. We explore this issue by making a number of adaptations to CCGbank, a corpus of approximately 40,000 sentences annotated with combinatory categorial grammar derivations. We show that the performance of a state-of-the-art statistical parser trained on this corpus is very sensitive to the quality of its annotation scheme. Suboptimal annotations disrupt its performance substantially, and well principled corrections improve the parser’s speed, accuracy and coverage.
The current assumption is that correcting a corpus teaches us little, because it does not generalise beyond that corpus. Our work implies a very general conclusion: we should work as hard on our linguistic theories and their implementation as we do on our statistical techniques. In other words, computational linguistics needs better linguistics.
CEREBRAL LOBES AT WORK IN INTERPRETER EDUCATIONSYoshinori Inoue, Language Laboratory of Inoue, Japan.
Understanding of an ante-utterance process in interpreter education is the first and foremost challenge for the author. The empirical hypothesis, VANA formula and POSH methodology generalizes about the acquisition of interpreting and translation skills. The induction-based hypothesis explains perceptive correlations between four parts of speech and four cerebral lobes as neurological functions. The parts, verb, adverb, noun and adjective, or VANA, are communicable pillars upheld to form a three-dimensional image or visualization in words. Verbs drive story-building due to the parietal lobe at work to perceive analogy, adverbs implicate emotions due to the temporal lobe that inspires mirroring phonological expressions of a speaker, nouns provide with arrays of knowledge because of the frontal lobe that organizes clear understanding, and adjectives depict diverse degrees of objective image due to the occipital lobe that sketches out a backdrop. Semantically speaking, audiences naturally try clinging to the VANA rather than to the CIPP (conjunction, interjection, preposition and pronoun) for capturing knowledge and message given by a speaker. The POSH, parts of speech highlighted,
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sophisticates the message-skimming skill of interpreters. Understanding of ante-utterance machinery will blaze in a new discipline leading to the grand theory GLINT, Global Languages IN common Theory. New multi-disciplinary collaborations among interpreters, translators, neurologists, corpus linguists, mathematicians, and others are dream projects. The author’s presentation with the lobe-specific training philosophy will also respond to the question of an innovative interpreter education without inter-language borders.
TRUST AND THE CORPORATE WORLD - A COMMUNITY STAKEHOLDER PERSPECTIVE
Heather Jackson, Macquarie University, Australia.
Underpinning successful organisations today is the need to cultivate relationships with a range of stakeholders that are high in trust. However, when stakeholders are externally based and have no formal contractual relationship with an organisation, the establishment of such relationships can be particularly challenging. Organisations often do not have the tools to establish effective relationships with stakeholders whose interests, values and expectations might differ from their own (Iedema 2003).
One area in which this challenge arises is that of community stakeholder engagement, which is prominent in the current corporate trends of: corporate sustainability, corporate citizenship and CSR. These trends rely for their success on the formation of mutually beneficial relationships between corporations and stakeholders in the local and global environments in which the organisation operates (Bruning and Ledingham 1998, Zadek 2003, Roper 2005).
What constitutes mutually beneficial relationships and how these are established is not clearly understood in the context of community stakeholders. What is clear, however, is that to be effective, these relationships must be based on trust which is cultivated over time ‘through speech, conversation, commitments, and action’ (Solomon and Flores 2001). This presupposes an interactional quality to trust building and makes it an ideal candidate for a discourse analytic research approach.
This paper takes such an approach and analyses data taken from a series of meetings held between a community stakeholder group and a design and construction organisation. It draws conclusions about how a relationship of high trust has been discursively established within the group.
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ACCOUNTING FOR UNTOWARD EVENTS: HOW THE GRAMMAR OF REASON AND PURPOSE BECAME
THE GRAMMAR OF CAUSE AND EFFECTAlan Jones, Macquarie University, Australia.
Scientific and technological thinking advances by identifying necessary and sufficient causes for natural phenomena. In this paper I argue that such causal reasoning is a secondary development. I develop the sociological concept of “accounts” (Scott & Lyman, 1968; Firth, 1995) to reveal the origins of scientific and technological reasoning in everyday practices - practices that function to reproduce social norms. I demonstrate that the grammar of reason and purpose pre-dates the grammar of cause and effect, both ontogenetically and phylogenetically. I begin by recapitulating suggestions in Hasan (1986) and Painter (1999) regarding the role of explanation in child language development, linking explanations/reasons to justifications for commands and prohibitions. Then examples of language use in a small-scale traditional New Guinea society are used to show how reasoning is used to attribute blame for what Scott and Lyman called “untoward events.” Here too commands and prohibitions are typically justified in terms of speaker purpose. Finally it is suggested that certain patterns underpinning textual practices in our own society are grounded in such everyday reasoning practices. These practices can be identified in spoken and media genres, but they are also reflected/refracted in institutional and academic genres involving practices like problem-solving and goal-setting (see Hoey, 1983, 2005). Also in academic texts “small acts of reformulation and exemplification” function as covert accounts, “weaving” abstraction, theorisation and interpretation into other sense-making functions of texts (Hyland, 2007).
STRATEGIES IN RESPONDING TO COMPLIMENTS: A STUDY OF MALAY UNDERGRADUATES
Nor Suharti Abdul Karim, Monash University, Australia.
This study investigates how Malay undergraduates respond to Malay compliments given between friends, family members and between speakers of different status. Using the discourse completion tasks given to 150 students and open role-plays conducted by 40 students, more than 2000 compliment response tokens were collected. Adopting the framework suggested by Yu (2004), it is found that the preferred strategy in Malay compliment response is acceptance, followed by amendment. This is in contrast to what has been mentioned in previous literature in Malay discourse in that rejection is the preferred norm in responding to compliments, in adherence to the Malay social emotion and cultural value of malu. Such findings seem to reflect a tendency for a shift away from Malay traditional discourse to a more Western style of accepting compliments.
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However, a much closer investigation reveals that even in accepting a compliment, elements of malu still persist in that Malay speakers maintains a preference to shy away from upgrading the praises or would simply amend the complimentary force conveyed to them.
STORY GENRES AND GENDER IDENTITIES IN KOREAHyun Su Kim, University of Sydney, Australia.
The aim of this paper is to compare story genres and examine the construction of gender identities in Korean society through media. The theory for the argument is based on Critical Discourse Analysis that “studies the way social power abuse, dominance, and inequality are enacted, reproduced, and resisted by text and talk in the social and political context (Van Dijk, 2001, p.352). Texts for the data have been extracted from news stories by BBC NEWS and Korean media companies, which deal with adultery of a Korean actress in 2008. According to the news stories, the Korean actress Ok So-Ri was given a prison sentence of eight months for damaging social order, even though the actress tried to get the constitutional court to overturn the law. The data will be evaluated in terms of the register variables suggested by SFL, specifically, an analysis of grammatical metaphors for the field, a voice analysis for the tenor, and finally a theme analysis for the mode in order to explore how the texts unfold in the construction of these news stories. This research study particularly aims to explore the stages of the news stories from different sources and how gender identities are constructed in a patriarchal society in terms of power relationship, hegemony, and social inequality. The research will be able to expand the scope of genre by comparing discourses in different social contexts and give insights into power relations that play a significant role in reproducing social inequality behind the media.
INTERNATIONALISATION AND MULTILINGUALISM IN HIGHER EDUCATION:
WHEN LINGUISTIC TENSIONS ARISEDavid Lasagabaster, University of the Basque Country, Spain.
Content-based teaching in a foreign language is a rather new phenomenon in the vast majority of Spanish universities. Since there are currently no guidelines (from either national or local governments) concerning the use of foreign languages at tertiary level, universities have autonomy when it comes to deciding on their curricula. This is the case of the University of the Basque Country, the public university of the Basque Autonomous Community in Spain, a bilingual community in which both Basque and
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Spanish are official languages and, therefore, present in all university degrees.
In an attempt to foster the internationalisation of our university, during the 2005-06 the Multilingual Progamme was put into practice, with the aim of fostering the use of foreign languages as means of instruction in the different degrees. Despite the initial bid to include different foreign languages, the fact is that English reigns supreme. In this presentation the objectives, procedure and results of this Multilingual Progamme will be briefly put forward. Through this plan undergraduates are given the possibility to join subjects in English which run parallel to the groups taught in either Basque or Spanish. Finally, the results obtained in a survey carried out among students who could have participated in the plan (but finally did not) will be analysed. The results happened to bring to light linguistic tensions due to two main reasons: the lack of competence in English and the coexistence of a minority (Basque) and an international (English) language.
ON DEFINING THE CLASSES OF PREPOSITIONS AND POSTPOSITIONS IN CHINESE
Alan Reed Libert, University of Newcastle, Australia;Jia Hongge, Independent Scholar, Australia.
There is much disagreement on whether Chinese has prepositions and/or postpositions and on the adpositional status of particular words. For example, the word zai ‘in, at, on’ is called a postposition by Fang (1995) but a coverb by Yang and Kuo (1998), and Chao (1968:749) “define[s] prepositions by enumeration” since he does not have confidence in the criteria that he attributes to this word class. Such problems are not limited to Chinese, as in many languages there are words with the function of adpositions but some properties of members of other word classes. A major cause of such disagreement is the definition of word classes by a variety of sometimes clashing properties, i.e. by semantics, by morphology, and by syntactic behaviour; we shall maintain that the last of these is the most appropriate way of defining adpositions. Another cause of confusion is the fact that many putative Chinese adpositions can also be used as verbs, making some scholars reluctant to label them as adpositions in any occurrence. We however see this as an issue of morphology, and, like other morphological criteria, should not have primary importance, just as the English noun drink is clearly a noun even though there is an homophonous verb. By using syntactic behaviour, e.g. position relative to complements, we shall show that the class of adpositions in Chinese can be clearly delimited, and is larger than some authors have claimed.
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‘IT’S REALLY A GREAT PRESENTATION!’: INTERVIEWERS’ EVALUATIONS OF CANDIDATES IN JOB INTERVIEWS
Caroline Lipovsky, University of Sydney, Australia
It is crucial that interviewers in job interviews make a good impression on candidates so they can attract the right candidate. The large body of literature on job interviews however mostly focuses on interviewers’ impressions of candidates. This study aims at redressing the imbalance by examining interviewers’ impression management strategies. In particular, it explores the ways in which interviewers evaluate candidates and their performances in the course of their interviews.
Drawing on Systemic Functional Linguistics Appraisal theory (Martin and White 2005), this paper examines a set of authentic job interviews in French, or French and English. The interview analyses are complemented by participants’ meta-comments on their interviews. The paper analyses interviewers’ expressions of feelings and beliefs about the candidates and their performance in the interviews, and discusses the effects of their appraisal strategies on candidates’ impressions of their interviewers and interviews.
TOTALLY, LIKE, WHATEVER... : A MULTIMODAL GLANCE AT FACIAL EXPRESSION, GESTURE, STANCE AND LANGUAGE IN
TAYLOR MALI’S TEENSPEAK TEENSPEAK SATIREJ.R. Martin, University of Sydney, Australia;
Sue Hood, University of Technology Sydney, Australia.
Four-time National Poetry Slam champion Taylor Mali’s spoof, available on Youtube, uses a range of linguistic and paralinguistic resources to poke fun at distinctive features of English teenage talk. Youtube also features a mimed version by a young person performing under the name Clintarded, of a closely related performance by Mali; his take consists simply of a head shot, with facial expression recontextualising Mali’s facial expressions, gestures and stance.
In this paper we’ll look briefly at the linguistic resources deployed in Mali’s performance, focusing on graduation, commitment and intonation, and then consider the ways in which these are complemented paralinguistically by Mali and Clintarded. Of theoretical interest here is the place of what are usually termed paralinguistic resources in an SFL-influenced model of language and semiosis.
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THE COMPLEXITY HYPOTHESIS AS AN UNDERLYING EXPLANATION OF VARIABLE RATES OF DIFFUSION
Luke McCrohon, University of Tokyo, Japan.
Following Thomason and Kaufmann (1988) there has been growing acceptance that there are no fixed constraints on which linguistic features can potentially be transferred between languages (Aikenvald 2006). This does not mean that all features are equally likely to be transferred, however, and a number of “Borrowability hierarchies” have been proposed (Curnow 2001, Haspelmath & Tadmor 2009). This paper applies the Complexity Hypothesis of evolutionary biology to give a Darwinian explanation of these hierarchies. The Linguistic Complexity Hypothesis is shown to account for several previously identified factors affecting borrowability patterns, linking these factors together and explaining their relevance.
In biology, genetic borrowing between species follows similar patterns to those observed in linguistics: certain types of gene are more likely to diffuse than others. The “complexity hypothesis” offers a simple and elegant evolutionary explanation for this (Jain et al. 1999). This paper argues that the complexity hypothesis can be generalized to a Universal Darwinian principle (Blackmore 1999) equally applicable to linguistics as to biology. It is not the original biological theorem that is applied, rather a suitably modified linguistic version.
Applying this modified version to linguistic diffusion accounts for the suggested borrowability hierarchies. Interestingly it can also be seen as explaining a number of the factors previously identified as affecting these hierarchies, such as structural complexity and morphosyntactic transparency. Several subtler patterns of borrowing are also predicted by the complexity hypothesis. These are empirically testable and provide a potential way of verifying or refuting the applicability of the complexity hypothesis to linguistics.
EDWARD SAPIR, LINGUISTIC RELATIVITY AND INTERNATIONAL LANGUAGE
James McElvenny, University of Sydney, Australia.
One of the most widely recognised ideas to come out of the work of Edward Sapir would have to be the so-called ‘Sapir-Whorf hypothesis’, a variously interpreted theory of the influence of language on thought. In his writings Sapir never gave a definitive formulation of his theory, although from the comments that he did make it appears he
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felt that the grammatical structures of different languages provide their speakers with certain habitual patterns of thought.
Much less well known is Sapir’s work for the International Auxiliary Language Association, an organisation that was set up to solve the problem of Babel by selecting and promoting a single constructed language that could be learnt by everyone in the world as a second language. Sapir was an active member of the association. Under its auspices he conducted several research projects to establish the criteria that the international language should meet.
How did Sapir reconcile these two strands of his work? The spread of a single international language would surely entail the spread of a single set of thought patterns tied to that language. What particular thought patterns did Sapir think the international language should propagate and why? Sapir is also very well known for his work in documenting and defending indigenous American languages. He clearly saw some value in linguistic diversity. How could he simultaneously value linguistic diversity and advocate a single world language?
SYDNEY SCHOOL PEDAGOGY – AN EXPLORATION OF THE THEORETICAL INFLUENCES AND RATIONALE BEHIND THE
TEACHING LEARNING CYCLELucy McNaught, University of Sydney, Australia.
This paper begins to explore the influences behind the creation of the teaching learning cycle. In particular, it reports on a 2009 interview with Joan Rothery, the creator of the teaching learning cycle, and the influence of Clare Painter’s parent/child interaction (1985) on her work. It also situates the Teaching Learning Cycle in the broader sociocultural orientation to language development by considering the influence of Vygotsky.
IELTS ACADEMIC PREPARATION PRACTICES: A CLASSROOM STUDY OF ORAL ARGUMENTATIVE LITERACY DEVELOPMENT
Sharif Moghaddam, University of Adelaide, South Australia.
This paper reports on a recent study of a formal IELTS (Academic Version) preparation program in Tehran. The purpose of this study is to investigate into literacy practices that generate opportunities for producing oral argumentative texts. The focus is on aspects of oral argumentative literacy development.
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Students whose first language is not English (hereafter referred to as Other Than English as First Language or ‘OTEFL students’ in this study) seek to continue their education in English-medium universities, for example in Australia. They are required by different universities to sit for the International English Language Testing System (IELTS) to show their language proficiency. However, despite meeting the required IELTS band scores, a growing number of them face difficulties and may fail academic requirements. In this ethnographic study the inquirer taught and recorded a formal IELTS academic preparation class over a period of five months. The investigation was conducted in the normal classroom settings. Classroom discourse analysis and IRF and systemic functional theory of language were used to support the analysis. This paper discusses the objectives of the program and addresses the findings. Outcomes of this study can be used to: a) assist English-medium universities achieve desired literacy outcomes of their IELTS academic preparation programs; b) address current criticisms about such programs; c) assist English language professionals and instructors to develop greater insights and understanding of IELTS, and d) discuss probable practical implications of the study for IELTS.
BACK-CHANNELLING IN ARTIFICIAL GESTURAL DIALOGUES
Hiromi Oda, HP Labs, Japan.
Back-channelling was first defined in the context of turn-taking in spoken dialogues and it became an important topic in conversational analysis. It has been frequently observed also in sign language dialogues.
This paper reports on the results of analysis of data obtained from experiments to re-create processes related to back-channelling and other closely related phenomena in an artificial gestural dialogue setting. A method called Gesture Language Game is used to produce gestural dialogues to see how those behaviours emerge in the experimental setting.
Experimental Method: Non-signer subjects are asked to interact only with gestures to describe the locations or movements of few objects (e.g., animals, people, balloons ...) placed in various backgrounds (e.g., school ground, pasture...). The subject pairs must establish basic spatial concepts such as ‘inside’, ‘next-to’, ‘between’... with signs for “YES (raising a hand)” and “NO (waving a hand”) only given at the beginning.
Basic results and observations: The current average success rate is about 70%.
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Back-channelling: Nodding, shaking heads, and other back-channelling gestures observed frequently.
Overlapping: overlapping behaviours increased as the sessions progress
Simultaneous or Synchronized gestures and back-channelling: Overlapping often develops into simultaneous gestures, and sometimes into prolonged synchronized gestural dialogues
Further analysis reveals that back-channelling becomes an indispensable means to communicate whether the synchronized dialogue is going well or not, thus indicating a possibility that back-channelling turns into a functional sub-communication channel.
ASIAN STUDENTS, CRITICAL THINKING AND ENGLISH AS AN ACADEMIC LINGUA FRANCA
Michael Paton, University of Sydney, Australia.
A number of scholars such as Kutlieh and Egege (2003), Atkinson (1997) and Fox (1994) have argued that critical thinking is incompatible with Asian cultural attitudes. Others have disagreed, arguing from different perspectives that critical thinking is not the preserve of Western culture and that the comparative lack of ‘critical’ quality in the academic work of Asian international students in universities where English is the medium of instruction is due to the difficulties of study in the context of edge of knowledge discourse in a second, third or fourth language (Kumaravadivelu, 2003, Paton, 2005, and Lun 2009). In this context interviews were undertaken with both postgraduate and undergraduate students in three major universities in China and one in India to find their perceptions of critical thinking and English as an academic lingua franca.
ARM’S LENGTH: HURRICANE KATRINA AND DISTANCING STRATEGIES IN MEDIA DISCOURSE
Amanda Potts, University of Sydney, Australia.
This research is a critical review of news discourse in the year following the Category Three Hurricane Katrina, which passed across the Gulf Coast of America in August 2005, killing nearly 2,000 and causing US$81.2 billion in damages. Through Critical Discourse Analysis, the opinions engineered and perpetrated through American disaster editorials are examined for discursive cues of underlying socio-cultural ideology. Complemented by Systemic Functional Linguistics Genre theory and Martin & White’s
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Appraisal network, analysis of metaredundant ideological meanings aims to uncover whether the news media perpetrates societal division, specifically through segregationist reporting and application of Social Distancing techniques.
A 1,012,068-word corpus of media discourse was constructed, inclusive of all editorials from ‘major news and business publications’ in the year following the storm, containing the word Katrina. The resultant corpus is analysed in three regards: 1) Collocation between lexical markers of race, poverty, and blame; 2) Intertextual versus Cotextual referencing strategies, whereby discourse of a given Genre and comparable Register may effect varying examples of cultural symbolism; and 3) Lexical isolation of the participant label “Refugee”, including appraisal analysis.
Where previous studies find that media discourse vilifies a ‘them’ social group with a generalised assignment of fault, this analysis finds that in the lack of socially blameworthy events, the media places as much Distance between majority groups and minority groups as possible. Distance serves as an interpersonal buffer, compensating for a lack of “return to normalcy” by asserting that the majority ‘we’ are immune to abnormality throughout the course of unfolding events, and that the plight of ‘them’ is well removed from ‘our’ realm of reality.
TOWARDS A SYSTEMIC PROFILE OF THE SPANISH MOODBeatriz Quiroz, University of Sydney, Australia.
The aim of this paper is to explore the MOOD system of the Spanish clause, as a region of interpersonal meaning studied within the framework of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL). Given the paradigmatic perspective privileged in SFL descriptions, the focus is on the choices underlying the different lexicogrammatical structures used by Spanish speakers in verbal exchanges, in particular, the resources available for the exchange of information and goods and services in dialogue.
A preliminary MOOD system network is outlined, whose features have been motivated by the structures observed in a national variety of Latin American Spanish – Chilean Spanish. Within the lexicogrammatical stratum, the description focuses the major (simple) clause and the (verbal) group. While interpersonal features are mainly addressed ‘from round about’ and ‘from below’, some issues on the interstratal relation with discourse semantics are advanced, as well as the connections between MOOD and other interpersonal systems – i.e. POLARITY and MODALITY. The mapping of the interpersonal organisation of the Spanish clause onto the textual and the experiential structures is also examined in the discussion of specific features in the network proposed.
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Finally, a number of important issues and key notions are considered for further development and research in relation to the Spanish MOOD, including the discussion on the nature of Subjecthood, Finiteness and Modal responsibility.
LANGUAGE, CULTURE AND IDENTITY: ARUNTHATHIYARS DEBATES IN TAMIL NADU, INDIA
Ravi Chandran, English and Foreign Languages University, India.
The paper looks at the language, culture and identity of the Arunthathiyars, a Dalit Community engaged in scavenging and other menial jobs in and around Tamil Nadu. The Arunthathiyars are bilingual – they speak a variety of Telugu at home apart from Tamil, which is the major regional language. It is said that Arunthathiyars originally come from Andhra Pradesh. Some scholars say Arunthathiyars are basically Tamilians but had migrated to Andhra Pradesh and returned to Tamil Nadu. In the wake of Tamil nationalism and the importance of Tamil language in the culture of Tamil Nadu, the linguistic identity of the Arunthathiyars becomes a burning issue. Due to their association with Telugu, other Dalit communities maintain that the Arunthathiyars should be considered as a linguistic minority community and that they should not be given reservation within Schedule Caste category. Thus the Arunthathiyar community is twice discriminated against – first because of their caste and then because of their language.
The paper is an attempt to make an unbiased enquiry into the marginalization and discrimination that the Arunthathiyars face in Tamil Nadu owing to their ascribed linguistic identities. When the demeaning scavenging jobs being carried out by this particular community becomes the criteria for upper castes to discriminate them, their own Dalit brethrens find it more convenient to keep them aside on the linguistic identity being imposed on them by the society. I have also dedicated a considerable part of this paper to discuss the larger language debates which emerged during the first quarter of the post independence period with special reference to anti-Hindi movement in Tamil Nadu. Because the anti-Hindi movement conventionalized the future policies of major political parties, it became a necessity to evoke linguistic identities of the people to base their arguments and counter arguments. Though the mainstream political organisations had the support of the Tamil speakers to oppose Hindi as the national language, in course of time they lost their ground with various caste organizations coming into play. Many of the caste groups regenerated the Tamil Nationalist debates to claim better position in the regional politics. The worst victim of this latest development in the regional politics was the Arunthathiyar community. When various Dalit communities competed with
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each other for better utilization of reservation benefits, the more organized caste groups within Dalits such as Paraiyars and Pallars refashioned the archival Tamil Nationalist debates and demarcated an unauthentic place for Arunthathiyars in the periphery of Tamil nation. They refused to accept the latter as Tamils if not scheduled caste. This paper focuses on these debates and brings forth the unheard voices of Arunthathiyars for a democratic place in the polity of Tamil Nadu.
AGAINST THE MAINSTREAM: CHANGES IN PRESENT PERFECT USAGE IN AUSTRALIAN ENGLISH AND ARGENTINIAN SPANISH
Marie-Eve Ritz, University of Western Australia, Australia;Celeste Rodriguez Louro, University of Melbourne, Australia.
Cross-linguistically, the present perfect (PP) is known for its propensity to change into a past perfective tense, thus losing its link-to-present requirement (Bybee, Perkins & Pagliuca 1994). The standard English PP is one exception to this trend as it has retained the functions of a canonical perfect (McCoard 1978), while the Latin American PP is more restricted in its use and is widespread in durative and iterative contexts (Lope Blanch 1972: 138; Squartini & Bertinetto 2000: 413).
However, these cross-linguistic trends are not uniform across varieties of English and Spanish. In this paper, we analyse uses of the PP in Australian English (AUS) and Argentinian Spanish (ARG), as both differ from canonical usage. Analysis of oral data in both varieties shows that (i) the AUS PP is used in contexts where the simple past tense would be expected (Ritz & Engel 2008); (ii) the ARG PP, although low in overall frequency, is widespread in experiential and indefinite past settings (Rodríguez Louro 2009). We show that the complex semantics of the perfect – or perfect potential (Rodríguez Louro & Howe 2009) – is pragmatically exploited by speakers of AUS and ARG in different ways. While both varieties feature non-canonical perfect usage vis-à-vis the proposed grammaticalisation for English and Spanish – and while both show developments whereby the perfect encodes past-like functions – the AUS PP extends uses in past contexts via its ‘presentness’ through vivid narrative use, whereas the ARG PP narrows down uses by exploiting the ‘indefiniteness of past time’ feature of the PP.
SING ABOUT IT: CHANGING LANGUAGE USE IN POPULAR MUSICNicky Ringland, University of Sydney, Australia;
Dominic Balasuriya, University of Sydney, Australia.
Popular music can be seen as a reflection of young people’s desire to push the boundaries of polite discourse. As such, the lyrics of popular music comprise a rapidly changing
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genre, reflecting changes in society and its use of language. Popular music encourages novel language usage to be quickly incorporated into the mainstream, and allows for the emergence and acceptance of new themes and ideas.
Song lyrics are an easily accessible source of historical language data representing the common vernacular, which may otherwise be difficult to obtain.
Recent work (Dodds and Danforth, 2009) has investigated society’s happiness levels by using the psychological valence scores of particular terms determined by the ANEW study (Bradley and Lang, 1999) to quantify happiness in a number of texts, including song lyrics.
We use statistical methods from computational linguistics to further the analysis of song lyrics, focusing on language use. Specifically, this paper explores changing themes in popular music and the language used to express these themes. We analyse a corpus comprised of over 4000 song texts, which appeared in the Billboard Top 100 American music charts from 1946 to 2008. We consider the frequency of terms associated with various themes, including love, violence and terms of endearment, finding the distribution of songs discussing a topic varies for each topic and changes over time.
Furthermore, we see that the terms used to discuss a theme vary at different points in history, reflecting changing language use. These changes include the introduction of new words and the semantic shift of existing terms. To investigate this, we consider the changing word senses of frequently occurring terms by finding collocations and multi-word expressions which appear more frequently in a certain era. We also observe the introduction of new words by tracking their appearance in our corpus.
MAPPING VARIATION: LINGUISTIC TOOLS IN THE SERVICE OF MEDIA HISTORY RESEARCH
Claire Scott, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia.
This paper demonstrates how an analytical tool from linguistics can be turned to the study of media history to suggest useful parameters for investigating historical variation in the newspaper journalism context. In linguistics, the conditions that motivate a writer’s selection of meanings – the context – have been modelled as a set of parameters: field (the kind of social interaction that is taking place), tenor (the relationship of the participants in the interaction) and mode (what part the language is playing in the interaction) (Halliday & Hasan, 1985). Systemic network models of context have been developed (e.g. Butt, 2004 mimeo.; Hasan, 1999) which enable systematic study of the
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‘motivational relevancies’ of different social processes (Goffman, 1974; Hasan, 1995). These ‘parameters of context’ therefore offer a way of organising historical material for comparative purposes and managing its inherent complexity according to particular domains of the social context. In relation to news reports, these domains include the function and content of the news, the journalist’s role and relationship to the reader, and the role of technology. Newspaper articles from the Sydney Morning Herald reporting the ends of seven wars from 1902 to 2003 have been analysed linguistically using the systemic functional model (see e.g. Halliday & Matthiessen, 2004). This paper will demonstrate how particular areas of the context of situation of news reporting have changed over the period, focusing on the parameter of tenor and the changing significance of news and journalism for a community.
“I SPEAK LONGLISH”: ENGLISH USERS’ SELF-PERCEPTION OF THE VARIETY THEY SPEAK
Farzad Sharifian, Monash University, Australia.
There have been discussions and debates regarding the ‘model for learning’, or which variety(ies) of English language learners should be exposed to, as well as which varieties of English learners say they prefer to learn. However, there remains a need for exploring what users of English from various linguistic backgrounds think about the English they actually speak. The study reported here explored the perceptions of a group of postgraduate students who were majoring either in TESOL or EIL regarding a) the variety(ies) that they identified as speaking, b) what would they call their variety of English and c) whether or not they would want – if at all possible – to change their English to another variety, The responses revealed a wide range of perceptions and attitudes: from some denying they speak any ‘variety’ of English to others viewing their English as a mixture of varieties including the local ones such as ‘China English’. It is apparent that speakers’ attitudes about the varieties that they speaker is informed by a variety of factors such as their cultural and national identity as well as L1 features such as accent. The data shows that speakers’ preferred labels for identifying their own Englishes include either their first name plus English, such as ‘Christine English’, (or a blend of first name and ‘glish’, such as ‘Longlish’) or their nationality plus English, such as ‘Indonesian English’. Some have called the variety that they speak just ‘English’ with no modifier. These results have implications for debates surrounding which model of English to use in ELT.
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COMPARATIVE RESEARCH ARTICLES STUDY: RHETORICAL MOVES ANALYSIS BY NATIVE AND NON-NATIVE ENGLISH WRITERS AND
NATIVE SPANISH WRITElena Sheldon, University of Technology Sydney, Australia.
The increasing domination of Anglophone academia in the world has motivated researchers to communicate new knowledge in this leading medium to obtain wider readership and professional success. The limited presence of Spanish scholars in English-language journal publications suggests that negotiating discipline-specific discourse and audience expectations is a task whose complexity may hinder novice and non-background writers from achieving research publications. In this paper, I examine research articles (RA) in English and Spanish as well as RAs written in English by Spanish background speakers in the fields of Applied Linguistics and Teaching and Learning using Swales (1990, 2004) schemas to focus on the rhetorical moves in the Introduction section. I emphasise how first language writers position themselves in the discourse community through knowledge claims. Since the delineation of moves lacks explicit rules, I add inter-coder reliability so that the full data may sidestep the theory’s potential shortcomings. The results indicate that while the English writers displayed a close affinity to the CARS (2004) schema, the variations in move structure in the Spanish L1 group suggest that the Spanish Introduction genre embodies culturally specific disciplinary practices. On the other hand, the English L2 group appears to be learning to articulate the Introductions for international publications, accommodating the needs of a broader audience. I expect the results of this research to assist Spanish scholars to publish their work in English by facilitating compliance with English rhetorical conventions to achieve worldwide visibility.
CHINESE PIDGIN ENGLISH IN VICTORIA: THE NOTEBOOK OF JONG AH SIUGJeff Siegel, University of New England, Australia.
More than 38,000 Chinese people came to Australia in the second half of the 19th century, mainly to prospect for gold. Most of them originated from the Canton region (now Guangdong), where at that time Chinese Pidgin English (CPE) was an important trading language. While the Aboriginal and Melanesian pidgin languages spoken in Australia are well documented, relatively little is known about CPE. However, a valuable source of data has recently been discovered – a 70-page notebook written in a form of English by a Chinese gold miner in Victoria, Jong Ah Siug. This paper starts off by presenting some background information about Chinese immigrants in Victoria and about Jong’s notebook and the circumstances that led to him writing it. Then it examines the lexical and morphosyntactic features of CPE and other pidgins that are
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present in the account in the notebook, and discusses other features of the text. Some features are typical only of CPE, such as the use of ‘my’ as the first person pronoun. On the other hand, some features are more characteristic of Australian or Pacific pidgins – for example, the use of ‘belong’ in possessive constructions. Still other features have not been recorded for any pidgin, such as the use of ‘been’ as a locative copula. The paper demonstrates that Jong’s account contains a mixture of features from CPE and other pidgins, as well as features of interlanguage, including some resulting from functional transfer from Jong’s first language, Cantonese.
CODE-SWITCHING IN NATURALLY ACQUIRED LANGUAGES VERSUS LANGUAGE TEACHING IN SCHOOLS
S.L. Songxaba, Walter Sisulu University, South Africa;A. Coetser, Walter Sisulu University, South Africa.
In a multilingual environment, children acquire proficiency in other languages in a natural way. This manner of language acquisition often goes hand in hand with code-switching from source language to target language and vice versa. On the other hand, when learners at school learn a language other than their home language, it is expected from them to adopt a purist approach, i.e. no code-switching is permitted; communication is supposed to take place in the newly acquired language only.
In a multilingual situation in a country such as South Africa where there are eleven official languages, speakers of the indigenous languages learn the formal Western languages in different situations from those in which they learn the informal indigenous languages. They are, in general, coordinate bilinguals with regard to the formal Western languages, but compound bilinguals as far as the informal indigenous languages are concerned, as they acquire the indigenous languages from early childhood. The linguistic disparities between classroom practice and natural acquisition practices need to be addressed in a dynamic and environment-realistic way.
This paper will argue that code-switching can be a useful tool to promote second and third language teaching in the classroom, if it is implemented in a well-planned though natural way, in line with the compound bilingual model referred to by Faltis (1989). Data will be presented to indicate that, despite policies to the contrary, teachers apply code-switching in real classroom situations when teaching languages other than the home language.
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TEACHING ANCIENT HISTORY: GENRE IN EDUCATIONA.W. Stanley, University of Sydney, Australia.
The introduction of the internet has generated a demand for information greater than can be processed (Goldhaber, 1997), shaping the ways in which genre, and therefore texts, are rendered. Though some lag inevitably appears, these genre changes appear in parallel to the social reforms, shaping the manner in which people interact with their environments. This paper, through a focus on ancient history in secondary and tertiary levels of education, seeks to demonstrate the specific use of genre in educational institutions. Through the use of these genres, in consort with outlines, marking guides, and course outcomes, a difference in educational values shall be demonstrated. Looking at outlines, guides, and outcomes, it becomes apparent that these genres have been carefully chosen to convey a specific level of depth in line within the current social position (Martin & White, 2007, p. 95). As these different genres present different levels of information – those with orbital carrying less per chunk – genres may be utilised to anticipate the complexity of information conveyed. Thus, by using the genre to anticipate complexity, the differences between the focus of education in secondary and tertiary establishments is considered in order to determine why the demands at these different levels are so distanced, and in order to describe how careful use of genre can be used to either contribute, or counteract, such problems.
“THE FOREIGN TEACHER IS AN IDIOT”: SYMBOLIC INTERACTIONISM, AND ASSUMPTIONS ABOUT LANGUAGE AND
LANGUAGE TEACHING IN CHINAPhiona Stanley, Monash University, Australia.
This paper examines Western teachers’ and Chinese students’ assumptions about second language acquisition and the nature of language itself. It explores the interaction of outward behaviours derived from these assumptions as symbols that may be misunderstood across cultures, using Blumer’s symbolic interactionism as a theoretical framework. Said’s Orientalism (and its mirror image, Occidentalism) inform the intercultural (mis)communication in this context, and possible implications are examined including negative stereotyping about each other by both students and teachers. The context is a public university in Shanghai.
The study found that most of the students understood language to be a set of discrete, quantifiable (learnable, testable) items; this assumption also underpins the Chinese College English curriculum. This appears to inform assumptions about language learning, and most students assumed that language could be learned (about) in the same way as other, “content”, subjects, and/or that it could be acquired by listening to native
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English speakers. Students’ beliefs are at odds with the theories of language and language learning implicit in the (weak) communicative methodology used by the participant teachers. Most participant teachers assumed language to be a holistic, meaning-making system, and that learners using English with the goal of communicating meaning was the best route to language acquisition. However, students perceived this as indicative of foreign teachers’ ineffectiveness and, in some cases, their idiocy.
There are clearly implications for these findings beyond TESOL. As the participant teachers were often the first non-Chinese the students had met, negative evaluations may serve to establish and perpetuate negative Occidentalism more generally.
EMBEDDING ACADEMIC LITERACY: REFLECTIONS ON THE PROCESS
Maree Stenglin, University of Sydney, Australia;Catherine Welch, University of Sydney, Australia;Leanne Piggott, University of Sydney, Australia.
This talk reflects on the process of embedding academic literacy in an UG core Unit of Study in the Faculty of Economics and Business, University of Sydney. The Unit, Business in the Global Environment (CISS 2001), has a truly interdisciplinary teaching team and has pioneered a collaborative approach in which teaching core content sits alongside the teaching of communication skills in a 3 week Teaching/Learning cycle:
Week 1: key conceptsWeek 2: applying key conceptsWeek 3: developing communication skills (intercultural communication and academic literacy)
In the first part of this talk, the focus will be on academic literacy skills, in particular, the strategies we have developed to support students as they negotiate the challenges of independently researching and writing the major assessment task for the Unit: a 3,500 word Country Report. The second part of the talk will involve reflecting on the process of working together collaboratively as an interdisciplinary teaching team. This has required us to be genuinely open as we share expertise, sacrifice content, pool resources and move out of our disciplinary comfort zones to embrace the challenges involved in negotiating and fine-tuning a jointly evolving repertoire of teaching strategies. It has also yielded an amazing synergy: teaching alone, we could not have created the outcomes we have jointly achieved.
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EXPLORING THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN LANGUAGE PROFICIENCY AND ACADEMIC PERFORMANCE IN THE CONTEXT
OF HIGHER EDUCATIONEszter Szenes, University of Sydney, Australia.
This paper investigates the impact of non-English-speaking background (NESB) students’ English-language proficiency on their academic grades and success. It will also show what linguistic resources NESB tertiary students use to construct meaning in their academic writing in a higher education context. Gaining entry to Australian universities based on International English Language Testing System (IELTS) exam scores does not guarantee international NESB students’ ability to cope with their studies (Phakiti, 2008); in order to succeed, these students need access to ‘standard’ Englishes and academic genres that serve as a measure of academic achievement in higher education. Student essays, when graded on the basis of students’ ability to use appropriate linguistic resources in academic texts, indicated that most students from NABA (North America, the British Isles and Australia) countries, who appear to be familiar with the genres of power and ‘standard’ varieties of English, have received high grades, while most international students, who do not seem to possess the linguistic resources that are required to construct abstract academic texts in ‘standard’ English, have been graded low on their assignments.
DOES LANGUAGE SHAPE THOUGHT? TIME ESTIMATION IN SPEAKERS OF ENGLISH AND PERSIAN
Omid Tabatabaei, Islamic Azad University, Najafabad Branch, Iran;Ali Reza Ahmadi, Isfahan University, Iran;
Bahar Assarzadegan, Islamic Azad University, Najafabad Branch, Iran.
This study aims at finding out the effect of language on thought, in general, and the probable differences and similarities of this effect in different languages, here English and Persian in particular. Do speakers of languages with the same way of talking think similarly? Similar metaphors (front/back) are used to talk about time and the order of events in both English and Persian, so this study aims at finding out whether Persian and English native speakers have the same direction of thinking about abstract domains of time and whether this direction is the effect of language. It also intends to find out whether these similarities cause transfer positively, and to find out the effect of writing direction on thinking direction. A group of 90 participated in the study, which was divided in to three groups. The first group consisted of 30 American native speakers of English, the second group 30 Iranian non-native speakers of English whose major is English and the third one 30 Iranian non-native speakers who have not had any
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systematic exposure to English. The results indicate that Persian speakers tend to talk about time horizontally as English speakers do. Also, the different writing directions in these two languages cause their speakers to think differently (right to left for Persian speakers and left to right for English speakers).
THE GENERIC STRUCTURE POTENTIAL OF THE TRADITIONAL DALANG TRAINING: A SYSTEMIC FUNCTIONAL APPROACH TO
JAVANESE SHADOW PLAY Albert Tallapessy, Macquarie University, Australia.
Javanese shadow play is a type of traditional theatre of Indonesia that has been performed for hundreds of years. Traditionally, the tradition is inherited from one generation to other generation by using informal teaching where the process is conducted on an apprenticeship model. As an apprentice, a student learns dalang techniques to perform a whole night shadow play performance.
This paper, as the title suggests, discusses the Generic Structure Potential (GSP) of the traditional training. The teaching process, which involves a dalang as a teacher and students as apprentices, is analysed by using Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL). Following Hasan (1985, 1996) as a genre, the structure of the trainings are analysed in the three strata of language: context, semantics and lexicogrammar.
The structures of the trainings are observed to identify any obligatory and optional elements found on the genre. These elements are, then, formulated in terms of GSP. Some examples of realisation in terms of semantics and lexicogrammar are used to show the network applies on this model.
‘YOU ARE PIGS!’ - NEGOTIATING GENDER ROLES IN MULTIMODAL
STORIESPing Tian, University of Sydney, Australia.
Stories and the telling of stories has long been a subject of study from various perspectives (Barthes 1966/1977, Labov & Waletzky 1967, Linde 1993, McAdams 1993). Targeting young readers, children’s picturebooks tell entertaining and educating tales through the coarticulation of image and text (Doonan 1993, 1996, Nodelman 1988, Whalley 1996). Inevitably some of those stories are ideologically laden in relation to various social issues including gender, race and class etc. (Hunt 2001, Stephens 1992, 2002, Tian in press for 2009). From a social semiotic perspective (Halliday 1978, Halliday and Matthiessen 2007, Kress and van Leeuwen 2006, O’Toole 1994), the current paper
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contributes to the investigation of inter-modal construction and negotiation of gender roles in selected picturebooks. The purpose of this paper is three-folded: it illustrates the choices and combination of semiotic resources (Halliday 1978, van Leeuven 2005), for example, dots, lines and shapes (Adams 2008) in construing facial affect in three imagic registerial subpotentials in the sense of instantiation hierarchy: Minimalist, Generic and Naturalistic (Welch 2005, Tian forthcoming); it discusses how various themes are projected through the use of evaluation/appraisal resources (Martin & White 2005) in different stages and phases of storytelling (Labov & Waletzky 1967, Hasan 1984, Plum 1988, Rothery & Stenglin 1997, Martin & Rose 2008); and it demonstrates the interaction of image and text (i.e. the construal of facial affect in context of story-telling) in leading young readers into the understanding of various discourses, in particular, gender (Halliday 1977, Scollon & Scollon 1995, Blommaert 2005, Martin & Rose 2003). The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications of these findings to the understanding of multimodal story telling.
HOW CAN A POWERFUL LINGUISTIC THEORY BE USED AS AN EDUCATIONAL TOOL?
Van T. H. Tran, University of Wollongong, Australia;Yuki Oe, University of Wollongong, Australia.
This double paper attempts to illustrate two among the wide variety of applications of language theories to educational issues. The papers presented employ Systemic Functional (SF) Theory to examine: a) educational quality issues, and b) foreign language teaching. These papers are presented as models in order to facilitate the discussion. The discussion forum seeks ideas about how to raise awareness of linguistic theories as a powerful tool in education.
Part 1: Postgraduate education in Vietnam is said to be problematic. The questions addressed in this paper are: what the problems are and who should bear responsibility for them. This paper is part of a PhD research on social attitudes towards quality issues of PG education in Vietnam. Using Appraisal Theory as the main analysis tool, the study aims to discover the stakeholders’ attitudes towards the quality issues of PG education in Vietnam. The findings not only expose the views of the interviewed management, teachers and students on problems of Vietnam’s PG education but also reveal the power and authoritative voice of these stakeholders concerning accountability and responsibility.
Part 2: Writing is not easy even in our native language; therefore it can be a very challenging task in a foreign/second language learning situation. In New South Wales,
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Australia, the Year 12 students who study foreign languages are required to write different types of essays in their HSC examination. The essays are marked officially by markers who are high school language teachers using specific marking guidelines. However, the marking guidelines provided for the markers as well as anyone who has access via the Board of Studies website seem quite abstract. In my research, the HSC examination papers are analysed based on their performance bands and are also compared with Japanese native speakers’ essays. SF theory is used to ascertain how and why the markers assign the texts to the various performance bands. The results of the analysis have implications for teaching students to write effective essays in a foreign language.
TYPING FRIENDSHIP INTO BEING: VOCATIVES IN FACEBOOK WALL-TO-WALL CONVERSATIONSAmelia Walkley, University of Sydney, Australia.
A social-network site reflecting pre-existing networks of friends and communities, Facebook allows people to construct an online version of themselves and to engage electronically with their Facebook Friends. Information is broadcast, targeted or a combination of these aspects and may be transmitted primarily via images, videos, hyperlinks or plain text (type). Text-based interactions may be in the form of private message, instant messaging, status updates, comments, or wall-to-wall conversations.
The Facebook wall-to-wall has a unique combination of restraints. As semi-synchronous, semi-public dialogues in plain text, they are restricted to two active participants but visible to many more and can be conceived of as a hybrid of an informal spoken conversation and a personal letter. Consequently, the Facebook wall-to-wall can be treated as a ninth mode of computer-mediated communication, to be added to the eight that Crystal posits as primary communication modes on the Internet (Crystal 2006).
The Internet allows individuals to write themselves and their communities into being (Sundén 2003) (Boyd 2008). Through wall-to-walls, Facebook users can literally type Friendships into being. They simultaneously target linguistic attention to the other active participant as their addressee, and broadcast it to their mutual Facebook Friends as potential overhearers. Instances of vocatives (complimenting, insulting and deferential) in these conversations will be examined, with a focus on politeness, mock impoliteness and mock hyperpoliteness. Data for the present study comes from a corpus of wall-to-walls from users in Facebook communities associated with the University of Sydney (Anglophone) and the University of Lausanne (Francophone, some codeswitching).
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THE USAGES OF DEIXIS IN MANDARIN CHINESEJui-chun Wu, National Hsin Chu University of Education, Taiwan;
Yu-chen Chang, Hsuan Chuang University, Taiwan.
This study aims to investigate the usages of first and second person pronouns as well as social deixis in Mandarin Chinese. Data was gathered by using a digital voice recorder to record the utterances from peddlers in markets of Northern Taiwan. One hundred and twenty Mandarin sentences involving social deixis, first person or second person pronouns were collected. Results suggested that Mandarin peddlers are adept at using first person singular pronoun (wo ‘I’) to show confident personalities and self-awareness. They use first person plural pronoun (women ‘we’) to show their positive politeness, increase power and credibility, represent a group’s opinions, and shorten psychological distance. As for the use of second person pronouns, both referential and non-referential ni ‘you’ were found. Vocatives are used as pre-nominal adjectives to modify the referential ni ‘you’ for the referential usage of bared ni ‘you’ is impolite in Mandarin Chinese. Non-referential ni ‘you’ aims to reinforce addressees’ involvement and is regarded as a courteous label in public. We also found five categories of second person variant forms intending to show politeness and draw customers’ attention. Moreover, Mandarin peddlers tend to employ social deixis to express their appreciative attitudes toward the appearances of male and female customers. They also employ traditional official titles (loban ‘male boss’ and lobanniang ‘female boss’) to show their respectful manners and kinship terms to create the intimate phenomenon. It is hoped that the results of this study can shed light on the functions of personal pronouns and social deixis in Mandarin Chinese.
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SOME DOUBTS REGARDING ‘THE GRAMMARIAN’S DREAM: LEXIS AS MOST DELICATE GRAMMAR’Peter Wylie, Macquarie University, Australia.
Although Halliday rejects what he calls the ‘bricks and mortar’ conception of the relationship between the grammar and the lexicon of a language, it is not clear that he has an alternative any more coherent than it. Since Halliday’s definition of grammar is comparatively formal, we have to glean its function from the content it conveys which he claims is ‘general and systemic,’ which contrasts with the content of the lexicon as ‘specific and openended […] as particular’ (Halliday 2008: 48).
So, for instance, given the claimed ‘complementarity’ and continuity between the two, it is not entirely clear why they should form an especially ‘unified stratum of “lexicogrammar”’. Nor is it clear that the content of the grammar of a language should necessarily be more general than its lexicon; nor does he provide a functional motivation for why this should be the case. And Hasan’s (1987) defense of this conception, for instance, does not address these issues.
Moreover, Halliday’s account of grammar has a particular emphasis on the rank of clause, presumably on account of the limited transferability of the notion of metafunction (in its orthodox form) to other ranks. This raises related issues concerning the role of the metafunctions and functionalism in general at the word and word group ranks. In this paper, I want to consider these issues and how they might be better addressed by a more pragmatic (Malinowskian) conception of the role of grammar in relation to the lexicon.
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ONLINE COMMENTING ON THE BELGIAN LANGUAGE DIVIDE
Timothy Bayl, University of Sydney, Australia.
According to the thehumorarchives.com, “You know when you’ve been in Belgium too long when... you automatically assume that everyone else speaks at least three languages, but refuse to speak more than one yourself.” The disparity between official monolingualism and actual multilingualism outside of Brussels and the reverse situation within the Brussels region continues to cause conflict on political and personal levels. This paper considers the historical context of Belgium from pre-independence through to the present day with a focus on the role of language. The substantial debate around divisions of diverse nature led to a study of online news publications and an examination of how language attitudes are discussed on Belgian francophone news websites. A small number of articles were chosen and the interactivity feature of reader comment posts was explored. Studying reader comments through content analysis as well as for the use of linguistic tools such as forms of appraisal and the attribution of emotion revealed an interesting perspective both on public opinion in relation to highly-charged political debate motivated by linguistic divisions and on the way in which readers of online news publications respond to stimulus articles. Many readers appear to want to influence public opinion themselves, particularly through the use of first person, personal experience and providing solutions to the problem (some less useful than others). This study has wider implications in the nature of language policy development as well as in the politics of multilingual societies, particularly where French is concerned.
THE NURIGEUL WRITING SYSTEM FOR PRELITERATE VAJAO IN THE PHILIPPINES
In Bean Lim, Korea University, South Korea.
This paper analyses the phonemic structure of Vajao, and the Nurigeul writing system for the language is proposed. Vajao is one of the preliterate languages, which is spoken in South-Eastern Asia and has 52,000 native speakers in the Philippines; years ago a linguist, Kemp Pallesen, developed a writing system for Vajao, which unfortunately was not used by the Vajao. In this paper, the phonemic system of Vajao is carefully restudied and the reasons for the failure of Roman alphabet to be used by the people are analysed.
With respect to the reasons for the failure, two problems seem to stand out. The foremost reason for failure is difficulty in learning. Writing systems can sometimes be rejected because of tribal emotions; unfamiliarity sometimes causes not only difficulty
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in learning but also an emotional distance. Another problem is that most native speakers have no chance for formal education. Upon inspection of the reasons, I found that there is a strong need for a writing system which is a much easier to use and more familiar to speakers.
Nurigeul, proposed by Sek Yen Kim-Cho (2003), is an extended version of the Hunmincengeum, the original form of Hangeul, and is used to record all human speech sounds. It is the most scientific writing system, and is easy to learn. Therefore, it fits perfectly for a literacy program, because the basic shapes of Nurigeul alphabets are adopted from the shape of speech organs and basic letters are familiar to the speakers and have no emotional distance.
‘EXCUSE ME, BUT WHAT DOES ‘LIGHT-HEADED’ MEAN?’ – LINGUISTIC CHALLENGES FACED BY INTERNATIONAL MEDICAL
GRADUATES IN MEDICAL ENCOUNTERSMaria Rudloff, Macquarie University Sydney, Australia.
This paper investigates linguistic challenges faced by international medical graduates (IMGs) in doctor-patient communication in Australia.
As the government is trying to strengthen the medical workforce, increasing numbers of IMGs from non-English speaking backgrounds are coming to Australia (cf. Birrell, 2004). Although they have to fulfil certain language requirements, many IMGs still struggle with the language once they have taken up their position (Pilotto, Duncan & Anderson-Wurf, 2007).
With a special emphasis on the role medical terminology, I will address various linguistic challenges that can jeopardize satisfactory communications in medical encounters involving IMGs. For this study, two groups of IMGs were observed for a period of approximately three months during a medical language bridging course offered by the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners (RACGP). Data was gathered in form of fieldnotes. The aim of the course was to prepare participants for the obligatory clinical examination and it therefore made extensive use of role-plays followed by educator feedback.
Overall IMGs faced a wide range of challenges in the role-plays, ranging from problems concerning cultural differences and methodological knowledge about the patient-centred model of care, to language difficulties at the level of pronunciation or vocabulary. In this paper I will present short vignettes to illustrate problematic patterns related to the IMGs’
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linguistic competence in general, and in particular focus on problems surrounding the (non-)use of medical terminology. The potentially serious impact of these commonly observed linguistic problems on consultations as a whole will also be highlighted.
ENGLISH TEACHERS’ BURNOUT AND THE STUDENTS’ ACHIEVEMENT: A CASE IN IRANIAN HIGH SCHOOLSSeyed Omid Tabatabaei, Islamic Azad University, Najafabad Branch, Iran;
Hassan Shafiei, Islamic Azad University, Najafabad Branch, Iran.
The teaching profession is one of the most salient and visible professions in the world. Despite the fact that significant improvements have been made in students’ achievement, society continues to expect more of its teachers. Stress and burnout could be considered as factors that might have direct influence on the students’ achievement. This study aims at investigating the relationship between Iranian English teachers’ burnout and their students’ achievement. A sample of 100 (50 male & 50 female) Iranian English teachers having over five years of teaching experience at Iranian high schools were randomly selected to answer the research questionnaire designed based on the Teacher Burnout Scale by Richmond, Wrench, and Gorham (2001). They were also required to fill in a form reporting the mean score of already administered achievement tests. The statistical analysis of the results revealed that there is a negative relationship between teachers’ burnout level and the students’ achievement. Some other interesting findings were also obtained regarding the relationship between burnout and teaching experience, gender, and to some extent age.
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HOW SATISFYING ARE OUR TECHNIQUES IN VOCABULARY TEACHING?
Dilek Altindas, Anadolu University School of Foreign Languages, Turkey.
COGNITIVE LEARNING THROUGH MEDIA – A STUDYBeena Anil, Madras University, India.
DIFFERENCES IN DESCRIPTIVE USE BY MALES AND FEMALESLisa M. Babcock, California State University Fresno, United States.
A FRAMEWORK FOR EXAMINING COGNITIVE AND METACOGNITIVE L2 GRAMMAR
STRATEGIES OVER TIMEZhiwei Bi, University of Sydney, Australia.
CERTAINTY IN SPOKEN ACADEMIC ENGLISHVaclav Brezina, University of Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand.
THE IMPACT OF PROCRASTINATION CONTROL ON LISTENING ABILITY OF IRANIAN EFL LEARNERS
Farid Ghaemi, Faculty of Humanities, Islamic Azad University, Karaj, Iran;Aman Rassouli, Faculty of Humanities, Islamic Azad University, Karaj, Iran.
SELF-ESTEEM AND ENGLISH LANGUAGE ACHIEVEMENT AMONG THE IRANIAN EFL LEARNERS
Mohammad Hossein Gherami, Islamic Azad University, Soofian Branch, Iran.
DISCOURSE AND MANIPULATIONMaryam Ghiasian, Payam Nur University, Iran.
THE REFLECTION OF THE WEST’S CULTURAL ATTITUDE CONCERNING IRAN
Maryam Ghiasian, Payam Nur University, Iran.
A GENRE ANALYSIS OF RESEARCH ARTICLE INTRODUCTIONS ACROSS PSYCHOLINGUISTICS, SOCIOLINGUISTICS, AND ESP
Pejman Habibie, ATAI, University For Teacher Education;Mahmood Reza, ATAI, University for Teacher Education.
TEACHING INTERCULTURAL COMPETENCE THROUGH THE LANGUAGE OF LITERATURE
Farzaneh Haratyan, Islamic Azad University, Garmsar Branch.
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EXTENDED RIGHT AND LEFT ASSOCIATIONS AND GARDEN PATHP. Toyoko Kang, University of Guam.
UNDERSTANDING JAPANESE EFL LEARNERS’ PHONOLOGICAL NETWORK STRUCTURE FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF VOWEL
SONORITY OF WORDS: A PILOT STUDYHirokatsu Kawashima, Nagasaki University of Foreign Studies, Japan;
Naoki Sugino, Ritsumeikan University, Japan;Simon Fraser, Hiroshima University, Japan;
Chika Ikeda Aichi Prefectural University, Japan;Yuya Koga, Shukugawa Gakuin College, Japan;Naoki Sugimori, Ritsumeikan University, Japan.
STUDENTS’ VS. TEACHERS’ PERSPECTIVES ON BEST TEACHER CHARACTERISTICS IN EFL CLASSROOMSNihta V. F. Liando, Manado State University, Indonesia.
EFL COLLABORATIVE LEARNING IN A VIETNAMESE UNIVERSITYThuy Bich Thi Nguyen, University of Sydney, Australia.
THE EFFECTS OF TEACHER AS A ROLE MODEL IN LISTENINGNilufer Ozgur Anadolu University School of Foreign Languages Turkey.
“I FELT A FUNERAL IN MY BRAIN”: HETEROVERBALISMTahereh Safarzadeh, Razi University, Kermanshah, Iran.
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Special Thanks
advisory CommitteeAmanda ChauShoshana DreyfusSally HumphreyMarina LauerJames McElvennyAlexander StanleyVeronica WagnerDevrim Yilmaz
administration CommitteeAmanda Chau (Co-ordinator)Veronica Wagner
abstraCt revieW CommiteeSally Humphrey (Co-ordinator)Joe BlytheDavid CaldwellJames McElvennyAlexander StanleyMaree StenglinAidan Wilson
CommuniCations CommitteeShoshana Dreyfus (Co-ordinator)Amanda Potts
hospitality CommitteeYilmaz Devrim (Co-ordinator)Jane Pong
programme CommiteeJames McElvenny (Co-ordinator)
teChniCal CommitteeAlexander Stanley (Co-ordinator)Marina LauerVeronica Wagner
volunteer CommitteeMarina Lauer (Co-ordinator)Veronica Wagner (Deputy Co-ordinator)Amanda Chau Alexander Stanley
sydney uni. linguistiCs soCietyAlexander Stanley (President)Sophie Toocaram (FLC Co-ordinator)Marc Hudson (Treasurer)
Student Volunteers:Paulina BarrientosDebbie FungZhuolei Ava GuanVlasta HaubKunLong JinMonica LiMadeleine McCallumShuofeng NaNicky RinglandErisana VictorianoXuan Cindie Zhou
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Studies in Applied Linguistics and Lan-guage Learning brings together new and original studies in the area of criti-cal applied linguistics, language policy and planning, and language learning and teaching. The book, divided into three sections, first offers critical views on various aspects of language in so-ciety, ranging from the construction of national identity, language and justice, racial and identity issues in the ELT industry, to language in business dis-course. It then reports on language pol-icy in the school curriculum, language learning in tertiary education, and Ab-original languages policy. In the third section, it addresses issues in language learning and teaching, such as the role of parents in literacy learning, multiple script literacy, and language learning and maintenance strategies.
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