Types Of Language Use Research Articles

How Much Exposure to English Do International Graduate Students Really Get? Measuring Language Use in a Naturalistic Setting

Abstract:Many believe that the best way to learn a language is to study it in a country where that language is widely spoken. Underlying this belief is the assumption that study in a naturalistic setting will provide learners with ample opportunities for exposure to the target language and interaction with native-speakers of that language. This article reports the findings from a longitudinal study of the quantity and quality of exposure experienced by 17 Chinese graduate students at a Canadian university. Exposure was measured using a computerized log that participants completed once a month for one week, over a six-month period. Our findings show a general trend toward receptive rather than interactive use of English, and considerable variation among individuals in terms of the amount and type of language use. The discussion explores possible reasons for participants’ relatively low amount of oral interaction in English in this naturalistic setting.

Entering into politics: Interdiscursivity, register, stance, and vernacular in northern Italy

AbstractThis article focuses on how specific types of language use connect socially, geographically, and temporally distant speakers and span face-to-face and mediated language contexts. It examines one variety of political language (the Northern League register in Italy) in order to analyze how the interdiscursive potentials of register and stance-taking enable such connections. It also presents the metapragmatic effects of engaging in types of talk such as political language, which are less about individual expression or political participation, but are rather part of a complex of stance-taking and alignment of self within local and national political debates. Based on long-term ethnographic and linguistic research in Bergamo, Italy, this article introduces the concept of the interdiscursive trap, showing how the Northern League register functions in this capacity, forging indexical links to particular ideas and stances that some speakers find undesirable. (Political language, interdiscursivity, register, stance, Italy, Europe, Northern League, media)*

Interaction Through Poetry in English Literature Class Rooms

Teaching is an interactional process. It is a system of activities that are likely to result in learning. It is a task-oriented process, a process to achieve certain pre-determined objectives. The main objective of all English as Foreign Language(EFL) literature students is to bring out effective communication along with developing literary efficiency to understand and appreciate literature. Poems serve as valuable materials that expose the learners to different registers and types of language use, and being rich in cultural references, they provide a wide scenario of learning opportunities. Poetry does not exist on the pages of a book, it is an interaction. Being a facilitator, a teacher should help the students to personalise the poem. Class activity strategies should be categorised as pre-reading activities, reading activities and post-reading activities. For all these activities, arm-chair method is the best-suited method. Such a method creates a relaxed atmosphere for intellectual work. The teacher should motivate the students to gain a proper insight into the material. The teacher must aim to bridge the gap between the classroom and the universe outside, but never overprotect the learner. Fruitful strategies will provide a unique forum where the students can weave the variegated threads of life and may fly on their own.

On assertion without free speech

Disallowance of free speech and equitable speech exchange is apparent in not merely silence where one would normally have an expectation of speech, but also in a very particular type of language use on those occasions when speech is ventured. In this paper, I will suggest that the speaker verbally disenfranchises the hearer, or rescinds the right to free speech, by using a realization of a particular type of pragmatic assertion, one I will refer to as the assertion of linguistic ‘disempowerment’. I will suggest that a felicitous pragmatic act of assertion is performed as a social contract that is put in place by conformity to certain felicity conditions, which are each a reflex of the right to free and equitable speech. When one or more of these conditions is violated, the assertion becomes infelicitous and an act of linguistic disempowerment is implicated. This implicated act is either an assertion in which the speaker linguistically disenfranchises the hearer, indexing, through this act, a taking on of the identity of the powerful. Or, it is an assertion in which the speaker linguistically disenfranchises himself/herself, indexing, through the act, the assumption of the identity of the subservient. Different kinds of infelicities implicate subtly different acts of speaker or hearer disempowerment, and index somewhat different kinds of assumed power or subservience.

Power and Pragmatics

AbstractLanguage is an important means through which power relations are created and negotiated. In addition to everyday choices speakers make about their own language use, variations in ways of talking are related to local theories of power, status, identity, self, ethnicity, class, and gender. Grammatical and lexical choices, choices in forms of address and reference, turn‐taking, narratives of cause and effect, genre, and stylistic performance, as well as the organization of space for talk and participation, embodied behaviors, and silence are used as elements in the distribution of power. Power and language are connected through the marking of certain encounters and contexts as requiring particular types of language use, the privileging of certain types of language, who may or may not speak in certain settings, which contexts are appropriate for which types of speech and which for silence, what types of talk are appropriate to persons of different statuses and roles, norms for requesting and giving information, and practices for alternating between speakers. Pragmatic uses of language are an important tool for constructing social difference and distinctions between individuals in terms of efficacy and power.

Taalproduktie en -Ontwikkeling

The question that is addressed in this contribution is: to what extent does the language production mechanism in children differ from that in competent adult speakers? It is assumed that utterance planning in adults is a hierarchical process, in which relatively autonomous processing components successively build conceptual, syntactic and phonological representations. Each component of the production system, however, makes use of the same basic processing algorithm, the so-called frame-and-filler mechanism. The developmental question can thus be rephrased as follows: (a) Do the representations constructed at the various levels change as a function of age? (b) Do the basic planning algorithms change? Three longitudinal studies of spontaneous speech production in 1.5 to 4-year-old children are reviewed. The first study presented a child in which the transition from telegraphic speech to a morpho-syntactically more mature type of language use led to a temporary increase in speech disfluency (interruptions, repetitions, self-corrections etc.). It is argued that the disfluency peak reflects a re-arrangement of syntactic planning, which is necessitated by the development of the child's morpho-syntactic knowledge. The second study compared slips of the tongue in adults and children, particularly word and sound substitutions. Basically, the patterns found were similar for adults and children. Not only in the adults, but also in the children the linguistic elements that interact in speech errors are inherently or contextually similar. This suggests that the frame-and-filler mechanism is developmentally invariant. The third study investigated the optional realization of metrically weak syllables and morphemes in children's utterances. The results indicate that this phenomenon can be related to a constraint on phonological planning frames, viz. that only trochaeic feet are allowed. The conclusion that can be drawn from this review is that in the development of language production, the representations (planning frames) change, but the planning algorithms remain essentially the same.

The English Language Needs of Thai Computing Professionals

The study surveyed the English language skills most needed by the computing professional in the Thai context. The purpose was to obtain empirical information to validate the type of language use and skills emphasized in the existing commercial ESP materials in the area of computer science as well as to generate implications for language pedagogy in this specialized discipline with regard to course/syllabus design, materials development, and teacher training. Structured interviews with the use of a questionnaire constructed for the study, were conducted with 25 subjects from 22 firms . Data obtained from the interviews showed consistency in the subjects' answers on the most needed skills: speaking skills were of great importance in almost all positions, followed by reading and writing respectively. Practical suggestions about the direction of language pedagogy for students in computer science were also given by the subjects.

The Question of French Dubbing

Abstract In order to analyze how "international messages" such as films are appropriated by a specific target system, I studied the French dubbed versions of a number of films. This analysis revealed a set of norms which seem to be at work on various text levels in the dubbed translations: a linguistic standardization, which affects three types of language use, a naturalization strategy, in which visual synchrony plays an important role, and a strategy which aims in various ways at making the translation more explicit than the original. The presentation of this tentative set of norms proposes a first synthetic view of the policy concerning dubbing in France.

Types of language use: A notion relevant to the writing of literary history?

The paper pursues a line of thought as to possible contributions of semiotics and linguistics to the writing of literary history. Independent of the present discussion, a distinction of five (or six) types of language use has been suggested: Conversation, narration, recitation, teaching of language (particularly in a classroom context), inscription (and, possibly, soliloquy). These types are briefly delineated and some arguments for distinguishing them are presented. Of the six types listed three types — narration, recitation and inscription — bear special relevance to the history of literature. Those three types intersect with literature each in different ways and the intersections are not identical with the ones between literature and the oral and written manifestations of language. After a basic pragmatic characterization of the various types some uses of recitation and narration are characterized with regard to specific linguistic properties. It is suggested that such differentiating linguistic properties play a role in historical developments of literature, particularly with regard to boundaries of literature and boundaries of types of language use. Drama and its modern development is singled out as a particular striking example. That trend in modern drama which most closely corresponds to conversation is viewed as a particular instance of developments in recitation as a mode of literature.