This paper treats metaphors and terminology or the discourse of tasawwuf Having in mind that tasawwuf is a discipline developed in the scope of Islamic tradition and that its focus is on the esoteric dimension of the ...This paper treats metaphors and terminology or the discourse of tasawwuf Having in mind that tasawwuf is a discipline developed in the scope of Islamic tradition and that its focus is on the esoteric dimension of the Qur'an (ta wil), which relates to the cognition of the highest rank, an approach to such a discourse needs special effort, both intellectual and spiritual. The language of literature belonging to either theoretical or practical tasawwuf is highly symbolic: theoretical tasawwuf deals with ontology and discusses God, world, and human being, while pragmatic tasawwuftries, just as the ethics, to change human being, that is, to ennoble him. Because of its specific way of presentation and its specific discourse, a communication with that discourse is determined by the knowledge of its symbolism, its terminology and, generally, its professional terminology.展开更多
Spoken dialogue systems are an active research field with wide applications. But the differences in the Chinese spoken dialogue system are not as distinct as that of English. In Chinese spoken dialogues, there are man...Spoken dialogue systems are an active research field with wide applications. But the differences in the Chinese spoken dialogue system are not as distinct as that of English. In Chinese spoken dialogues, there are many language phenomena. Firstly, most utterances are ill-formed. Secondly, ellipsis, anaphora and negation are also widely used in Chinese spoken dialogue. Determining how to extract semantic information from incomplete sentences and resolve negation, anaphora and ellipsis is crucial. SHTQS (Shanghai Transportation Query System) is an intelligent telephone-based spoken dialogue system providing information about the best route between any two sites in Shanghai. After a brief description of the system, the natural language processing is emphasized. Speech recognition sentences unavoidably contain errors. In language sequence processing procedures, these errors can be easily passed to the later parts and take on a ripple effect. To detect and recover these from errors as early as possible, language-processing strategies are specially considered. For errors resulting from divided words in speech recognition, segmentation and POS Tagging approaches that can rectify these errors are designed. Since most of the inquiry utterances are ill-formed and negation, anaphora and ellipsis are common language phenomena, the language understanding must be adequately adaptive. So, a partial syntactic parsing scheme is adopted and a chart algorithm is used. The parser is based on unification grammar. The semantic frame that extracts from the best arc set of the chart is used to represent the meaning of sentences. The negation, anaphora and ellipsis are also analyzed and corresponding processing approaches are presented. The accuracy of the language processing part is 88.39% and the testing result shows that the language processing strategies are rational and effective.展开更多
Critical discourse analysis, with its roots in the critical linguistics of East Anglia, is closely connected with systemic func- tional linguistics. This paper focuses on the relationship between systemic functional l...Critical discourse analysis, with its roots in the critical linguistics of East Anglia, is closely connected with systemic func- tional linguistics. This paper focuses on the relationship between systemic functional linguistics and critical discourse analysis, and illus-trates the future trend and significance of research on critical discourse analysis. Critical discourse analysis is increasingly becoming an a-cademic focus in linguistic field, its combination with other subjects contributes a lot to the social progress.展开更多
Language teaching entails the use of varied methods to maximize learning. Most language educators, particularly those teaching foreign languages tend to use lesson review sheets, dialogue practice, drills on grammar, ...Language teaching entails the use of varied methods to maximize learning. Most language educators, particularly those teaching foreign languages tend to use lesson review sheets, dialogue practice, drills on grammar, audio tapes or text recordings. Educators also make use of media to enhance learning while a few language instructors use graded-conversations. Thus, this paper explores ways in which graded-conversations impact language learning. This paper shows how using graded-conversations in a Swahili language classroom enhanced language learning and encouraged students to collaborate in and outside the classroom. More specifically, the findings indicate that while graded-conversations motivated students to communicate with each other beyond classroom and use social media to help each other study, assignments shape the type and quality of students' collaboration. Implications for teaching are presented.展开更多
This paper presents CACA (computer-assisted corpus analysis) conducted by using a compiled representative corpus. As a descriptive study, it explores the written communicative events produced by engineers in the pet...This paper presents CACA (computer-assisted corpus analysis) conducted by using a compiled representative corpus. As a descriptive study, it explores the written communicative events produced by engineers in the petroleum industry in Malaysia. Language use is commonly analyzed for competence and performance. Competence is best described as the internalized linguistic knowledge as acquired by the learners while the notion of"performance" is best defined as the external evidence of language competence. Therefore, the core of this paper is reflecting actual language use of the language learners in Malaysia. The data are drawn from a sample corpus compiled from the written communicative events in three companies of the petroleum industry in Malaysia. The methodology applied is fundamental as it tends to investigate the linguistic constitutions in the genre-specific corpus of the professional discourse produced. Computer-based syntactical studies are limited as they require hard work and long hours in order to key-in the data and then there is the complex analytic method of describing the findings. In contrast, this paper will demonstrate an uncomplicated method of analysis and also encourage the use of existing POS (part-of speech) tagging software available online.展开更多
Power relation can be revealed in discourse. Teacher power, to a large extent, is manifested through teacher talk. This paper attempts to provide an analysis of classroom language from a critical discourse perspective...Power relation can be revealed in discourse. Teacher power, to a large extent, is manifested through teacher talk. This paper attempts to provide an analysis of classroom language from a critical discourse perspective as to uncover the power hidden in teacher talk and of how language contributes to teacher power.展开更多
Types of communicative behaviors consists of verbal communication and non-verbal communication. It is generally believed that the latter refers to concrete language people use to produce an utterance, while the latter...Types of communicative behaviors consists of verbal communication and non-verbal communication. It is generally believed that the latter refers to concrete language people use to produce an utterance, while the latter mainly refers to body language as well as silence in a conversation. Silence is another way of communication and is part of a conversation. In different culture, silence may have different representative meanings and intentions, because of the various cultural background of each country or nation in the whole world. From the perspective ofpragmatics, silence plays an important role in a particular situation, and it has its own functions in communication.展开更多
In recent years, the cultural studies began to take a linguistic turn. This paper employed the three-dimensioned model of Fairclough, a critical discourse analysis (CDA) approach to explore youth subcultures. The cu...In recent years, the cultural studies began to take a linguistic turn. This paper employed the three-dimensioned model of Fairclough, a critical discourse analysis (CDA) approach to explore youth subcultures. The cultural discourse of youth in different periods was examined in terms of discursive strategies, discursive practices, and social practices. The analysis shows that the subcultural groups adopt various discursive strategies to resist mainstream ideologies and construct the subcultural ideology and their collective identity. Meanwhile, their discursive practices build effective interaction mode within the subcultural groups. The examples of subcultures reveal that subcultures often emerge in the time of the social and cultural change and reshape the mainstream ideologies and unreasonable social structure.展开更多
In recent decades, ecological problems are becoming more and more serious, which are focused worldwide. "Eco-[inguistics" (EL) also called "Ecology of Language" emerges in the situation that scholars try their b...In recent decades, ecological problems are becoming more and more serious, which are focused worldwide. "Eco-[inguistics" (EL) also called "Ecology of Language" emerges in the situation that scholars try their best to solve the problems in linguistics. As an emerging interdisciplinary area of ecology and linguistics, eco-linguistics aims at analyzing the ecological phenomenon in language, exploring the relation between language and environment, and looking for the variety of internal patterns of language. At present, scholars at home have made a lot of achievements with the tendency from theoretical studies to practical studies. On the theoretical framework of eco-linguistics and the transitivity method of Systemic Functional Linguistics(SFL), by analyzing two texts excerpted from BBC news reports which involve two kinds of animals, this article tries to explore the relation between human and animals and our attitudes toward different animals, analyze the ecological elements and hidden non-ecological features in the discourses, reveal the essential reasons for ecological disruption---inherent human ideology, interpret the influences on nature. We expect that people pay more attention to the issues of environment protection, change anthropocentrism to ecocentrism which builds the harmonious relation between human and nature.展开更多
Translational discourse requires at least three participants, therefore it is suggested to consider the universal model of the picture of the world, according to which it is much easier for a translator to combine the...Translational discourse requires at least three participants, therefore it is suggested to consider the universal model of the picture of the world, according to which it is much easier for a translator to combine the pictures of the world of an addressee and an author. An addressee is a mental image existing in the mind of an addresser during the creative process. Having defined its parameters, a translator has an opportunity to deliver the thought of an addresser to an addressee as accurately as possible and to select the means of expression that are clear to an addressee. The type of an addressee correlates with "the relation to the new".展开更多
This pilot study explored the linguistic gains of intermediate level Spanish learners who completed community-based learning at a Spanish-speaking seniors center. Leamers had the opportunity, rare in foreign-language ...This pilot study explored the linguistic gains of intermediate level Spanish learners who completed community-based learning at a Spanish-speaking seniors center. Leamers had the opportunity, rare in foreign-language instruction, to discuss topics from their textbook in authentic native/non-native dyads. The interactions also allowed the seniors to fulfill an identified community needed by socializing in Spanish. Analyses of a post-service survey revealed that learners assessed the experience positively, because they spoke Spanish creatively. Seniors were described as cooperative and fun interlocutors, suggesting that age difference minimally affected the interactions. Direct observation revealed that learners managed to produce L2 Spanish output in connected speech for an extended period of time. Likewise, the seniors enjoyed a moment of socialization and first language use while sharing their views on the topics of discussion with the young visitors. Seniors' active participation likely encouraged learners to cope with sudden switches of topics that required negotiating for meaning and pushing the still limited interlanguages. A new service leaming study proposes to investigate the use of native/non-native dyads in Spanish in fulfilling a dual function: socialization and first language maintenance for the seniors at the center and language learning for the students.展开更多
The core of dialogue teaching is dialogue. The dialogue here refers to the way in which the teachers and students based on mutual respect, trust and equal position carry on the two-way communication and mutual learnin...The core of dialogue teaching is dialogue. The dialogue here refers to the way in which the teachers and students based on mutual respect, trust and equal position carry on the two-way communication and mutual learning through conversation and listening. One of the marked differences between dialogue teaching and traditional teaching is that dialogue teaching highlights the essence of the teaching process of communication and cooperation. At the same time dialogue teaching is based on students' psychological demand, which makes the teaching full of strong emotion. Using the dialogue teaching as the background, this paper mainly provides the guiding principles and practical advice for the teachers' classroom language strategies so as to achieve more effective teaching effect.展开更多
As a major criterion for textuality and a prominent term in discourse analysis, discourse cohesion is used on the one hand, to identify the linguistic features that cause the sentences to "cohere", and on the other ...As a major criterion for textuality and a prominent term in discourse analysis, discourse cohesion is used on the one hand, to identify the linguistic features that cause the sentences to "cohere", and on the other hand, is to make the sentences in the discourse display some kind of mutual dependence. The paper has intensively analyzed the radio interview between Edward Heath and an interviewer from the perspective of discourse cohesion. After an in-depth analysis, the paper concludes that the interview is quite structurally cohesive by adopting several grammatical cohesive devices or ties, such as the verbal form, the time relator, the conjunction, the reference, the substitution, and the ellipsis, especially the reference and conjunction展开更多
According to the principals of the Course Standard of English for Ordinary Senior Schools, published by China Education Ministry in 2001, the general goal of English curriculum on the basic education stage is to foste...According to the principals of the Course Standard of English for Ordinary Senior Schools, published by China Education Ministry in 2001, the general goal of English curriculum on the basic education stage is to foster the students' cross-cultural awareness, which is to develop their cross-cultural communicative competence. To achieve this goal, most of all, teachers of English at high school must have a good command of cross-cultural pragmatic competence. By looking through papers in various periodicals and the Internet, the writer finds that most of the studies have coped with pragmatic failures of ESL students but few of ESL teachers'. Therefore, this thesis studies the present situation --- how much do schoolteachers of English know about pragmatics? What about their cross-cultural communicative competence? Can they communicate with the native speakers fluently and appropriately? What are the most serious problems among them in pragmatics? What can be done to solve the problems? With all the questions, this research has collected considerable firsthand data and information. Only after the basic situations are known overall, can actions be taken to solve the problems existing in everyday ESL teaching. So this research is necessary and urgent for the present basic English pedagogy. However, since the present writer's ability and research conditions are limited, it is not possible to make a wider investigation in many places. Therefore, the district --- Bameng League, Inner Mongolia, China, is selected as the basic range of the survey, the situation of which is believed to be able to represent the basic educational ones in the poor and remote districts in the north and the west of China where education is more backward. The questionnaire consists of two parts: a table of individual information and a test paper. The former investigates informants' basic information, including the items of name, age, sex, teaching age, title of the technical post, degree, academic career, college or university that they graduated from, working unit, grades for teaching and the others. The latter is the test paper cited from He Ziran and Yan Zhuang (1986), that is, Chinese Students'Pragmatic Failure in English Communication --- Survey of the Pragmatic Difference between Chinese and English. And it contains 48 items, with items of pragmalinguistic and socio-pragmatic competence mixedly arranged. 120 of the questionnaire copies were handed out and 86 are collected, but only 64 are collected. The survey covers over 10 high schools in all the 7 banners of Bameng League, including two autonomous region-class key schools and five other league-class key schools. After the investigation, the present writer carefully corrects, marks, arranges, summarizes and analyzes the questionnaire, and obtains plenty of firsthand data and information. Then some conclusions have been drawn based on the data analysis. The result of the survey shows that linguistic competence is not equal to pragmatic competence, that ESL high school English teachers may use English rather fluently, without many mistakes in vocabulary and grammar,but it does not necessarily mean that they can use the target language appropriately to communicate with native speakers without pragmatic failures, and that the informants' knowledge of pragmatics and their pragmatic competence are rather poor. As a result, improving their knowledge and competence in pragmatics becomes a very necessary and urgent task to develop the quality of ELT in basic educational stages. In order to solve the above problems, the writer makes some suggestions as follows: (1) Pragmatics should be required as an essential course for the English majors in colleges and universities, especially in normal colleges and universities; (2) In-service high school English teachers must study courses of pragmatics and cross-cultural communication; (3) In some poor and remote districts, if educational conditions don't permit, textbooks of pragmatics and cross-cultural communication must be handed out to the high school English teachers who can study by themselves, then tests are regularly held for them and certificates will be given to those who have passed the tests; (4) In some developed districts, if conditions permit, English teachers can be sent abroad to English-speaking countries for further education in order to have a good command of the English language in the authentic contexts; (5) Modern multiple medias, such as VCD or DVD videos, TV or radio programs, the Internet, should be widely and frequently applied to training teachers; (6) More native language teachers and experts from English-speaking countries must be invited to high schools to train teachers of English.展开更多
In this paper, the authors propose a method that incorporates mechanisms for handling ambiguity in speech and the ability of humans to create associations, and for formulating conversations based on rule base knowledg...In this paper, the authors propose a method that incorporates mechanisms for handling ambiguity in speech and the ability of humans to create associations, and for formulating conversations based on rule base knowledge and common knowledge. Go beyond the level that can be achieved, using only conventional natural language processing and vast repositories of sample patterns. In this paper, the authors propose a method for computer conversation sentences generated using newspaper headlines as an example of how the common knowledge and associative ability are applied.展开更多
In this paper, we focus our grammar studies on two early Cantonese literature contexts: Huajian Ji (花菚記, 1714) and Yue Ou (粤謳, 1820). Two aspect markers, the experience aspect marker "gwo 過" and the durat...In this paper, we focus our grammar studies on two early Cantonese literature contexts: Huajian Ji (花菚記, 1714) and Yue Ou (粤謳, 1820). Two aspect markers, the experience aspect marker "gwo 過" and the duration aspect marker "dzy 住", in these two Cantonese books show different characteristics from oral Cantonese today. "Gwo", mostly used as an aspect marker of"experience" and "repeat" in verbal expression, had the usage of"unhappened experience" in the old books as a connection between this two aspects. Every step of "dzy"'s grammarlization process was clearly recorded in the written materials. By comparing with the aspect markers in Mandarin Chinese, the usage of the completion aspect marker "liu 了" found in these two books was also discussed. We argue the importance of literature context in diachronical grammar studies of dialect.展开更多
As foreign language teachers, we always wondered about the silence of our students during the lessons. However, after we started the project "Conversation Table in Portuguese" (CTP), we realized that the students ...As foreign language teachers, we always wondered about the silence of our students during the lessons. However, after we started the project "Conversation Table in Portuguese" (CTP), we realized that the students assumed a more active role during the interactions, probably due to the less hierarchical situation they were in. The CTP provided the students the opportunity to express themselves in a foreign language without the interdiction they felt inside the classroom. Within this new context, the lack of confidence they might have been facing when communicating in a foreign language started to disappear, giving place to a motivation to express what they felt in this "new" language. Therefore, the target language started to become a new locus, a new way that made them not feel scared, but free and curious to say things that they would not say in similar situations when communicating in their mother tongue. In other words, the foreign language can be the place where everything seems to be possible as we do not have the control or interdiction imposed by the social values presented in our society and manifested in our mother tongue. In this study, we analyze some discursive situations taken from a session of CTP in which the students show their new identities in the foreign language. The results show that acquiring another language is much more than acquiring new linguistic aspects of communication, but also giving birth to new identities that make us become new subjects.展开更多
All of us make conversations with others in a certain social context every day, though the mode to start them is various from different persons, occasions and circumstances. This paper is an attempt to analyze the var...All of us make conversations with others in a certain social context every day, though the mode to start them is various from different persons, occasions and circumstances. This paper is an attempt to analyze the variety of modes to open a conversation in different situations from the viewpoint of discourse analysis.展开更多
Conversation analysis (CA) is an integral part of the study of language in communication, in which preference organization is an important topic for pragmatic research. This paper makes a study of preferred and disp...Conversation analysis (CA) is an integral part of the study of language in communication, in which preference organization is an important topic for pragmatic research. This paper makes a study of preferred and dispreferred second turns in naturally occurring interactions to show structurally expected or unexpected responses from the second parts of the adjacent pairs. The study is based on the analysis of examples of people's actual conversations. It is concluded that in actual conversations, the speaker may make a preferred or dispreferred answer in either marked or unmarked form according to the speaker's intention and conversation circumstances.展开更多
文摘This paper treats metaphors and terminology or the discourse of tasawwuf Having in mind that tasawwuf is a discipline developed in the scope of Islamic tradition and that its focus is on the esoteric dimension of the Qur'an (ta wil), which relates to the cognition of the highest rank, an approach to such a discourse needs special effort, both intellectual and spiritual. The language of literature belonging to either theoretical or practical tasawwuf is highly symbolic: theoretical tasawwuf deals with ontology and discusses God, world, and human being, while pragmatic tasawwuftries, just as the ethics, to change human being, that is, to ennoble him. Because of its specific way of presentation and its specific discourse, a communication with that discourse is determined by the knowledge of its symbolism, its terminology and, generally, its professional terminology.
文摘Spoken dialogue systems are an active research field with wide applications. But the differences in the Chinese spoken dialogue system are not as distinct as that of English. In Chinese spoken dialogues, there are many language phenomena. Firstly, most utterances are ill-formed. Secondly, ellipsis, anaphora and negation are also widely used in Chinese spoken dialogue. Determining how to extract semantic information from incomplete sentences and resolve negation, anaphora and ellipsis is crucial. SHTQS (Shanghai Transportation Query System) is an intelligent telephone-based spoken dialogue system providing information about the best route between any two sites in Shanghai. After a brief description of the system, the natural language processing is emphasized. Speech recognition sentences unavoidably contain errors. In language sequence processing procedures, these errors can be easily passed to the later parts and take on a ripple effect. To detect and recover these from errors as early as possible, language-processing strategies are specially considered. For errors resulting from divided words in speech recognition, segmentation and POS Tagging approaches that can rectify these errors are designed. Since most of the inquiry utterances are ill-formed and negation, anaphora and ellipsis are common language phenomena, the language understanding must be adequately adaptive. So, a partial syntactic parsing scheme is adopted and a chart algorithm is used. The parser is based on unification grammar. The semantic frame that extracts from the best arc set of the chart is used to represent the meaning of sentences. The negation, anaphora and ellipsis are also analyzed and corresponding processing approaches are presented. The accuracy of the language processing part is 88.39% and the testing result shows that the language processing strategies are rational and effective.
文摘Critical discourse analysis, with its roots in the critical linguistics of East Anglia, is closely connected with systemic func- tional linguistics. This paper focuses on the relationship between systemic functional linguistics and critical discourse analysis, and illus-trates the future trend and significance of research on critical discourse analysis. Critical discourse analysis is increasingly becoming an a-cademic focus in linguistic field, its combination with other subjects contributes a lot to the social progress.
文摘Language teaching entails the use of varied methods to maximize learning. Most language educators, particularly those teaching foreign languages tend to use lesson review sheets, dialogue practice, drills on grammar, audio tapes or text recordings. Educators also make use of media to enhance learning while a few language instructors use graded-conversations. Thus, this paper explores ways in which graded-conversations impact language learning. This paper shows how using graded-conversations in a Swahili language classroom enhanced language learning and encouraged students to collaborate in and outside the classroom. More specifically, the findings indicate that while graded-conversations motivated students to communicate with each other beyond classroom and use social media to help each other study, assignments shape the type and quality of students' collaboration. Implications for teaching are presented.
文摘This paper presents CACA (computer-assisted corpus analysis) conducted by using a compiled representative corpus. As a descriptive study, it explores the written communicative events produced by engineers in the petroleum industry in Malaysia. Language use is commonly analyzed for competence and performance. Competence is best described as the internalized linguistic knowledge as acquired by the learners while the notion of"performance" is best defined as the external evidence of language competence. Therefore, the core of this paper is reflecting actual language use of the language learners in Malaysia. The data are drawn from a sample corpus compiled from the written communicative events in three companies of the petroleum industry in Malaysia. The methodology applied is fundamental as it tends to investigate the linguistic constitutions in the genre-specific corpus of the professional discourse produced. Computer-based syntactical studies are limited as they require hard work and long hours in order to key-in the data and then there is the complex analytic method of describing the findings. In contrast, this paper will demonstrate an uncomplicated method of analysis and also encourage the use of existing POS (part-of speech) tagging software available online.
文摘Power relation can be revealed in discourse. Teacher power, to a large extent, is manifested through teacher talk. This paper attempts to provide an analysis of classroom language from a critical discourse perspective as to uncover the power hidden in teacher talk and of how language contributes to teacher power.
文摘Types of communicative behaviors consists of verbal communication and non-verbal communication. It is generally believed that the latter refers to concrete language people use to produce an utterance, while the latter mainly refers to body language as well as silence in a conversation. Silence is another way of communication and is part of a conversation. In different culture, silence may have different representative meanings and intentions, because of the various cultural background of each country or nation in the whole world. From the perspective ofpragmatics, silence plays an important role in a particular situation, and it has its own functions in communication.
文摘In recent years, the cultural studies began to take a linguistic turn. This paper employed the three-dimensioned model of Fairclough, a critical discourse analysis (CDA) approach to explore youth subcultures. The cultural discourse of youth in different periods was examined in terms of discursive strategies, discursive practices, and social practices. The analysis shows that the subcultural groups adopt various discursive strategies to resist mainstream ideologies and construct the subcultural ideology and their collective identity. Meanwhile, their discursive practices build effective interaction mode within the subcultural groups. The examples of subcultures reveal that subcultures often emerge in the time of the social and cultural change and reshape the mainstream ideologies and unreasonable social structure.
文摘In recent decades, ecological problems are becoming more and more serious, which are focused worldwide. "Eco-[inguistics" (EL) also called "Ecology of Language" emerges in the situation that scholars try their best to solve the problems in linguistics. As an emerging interdisciplinary area of ecology and linguistics, eco-linguistics aims at analyzing the ecological phenomenon in language, exploring the relation between language and environment, and looking for the variety of internal patterns of language. At present, scholars at home have made a lot of achievements with the tendency from theoretical studies to practical studies. On the theoretical framework of eco-linguistics and the transitivity method of Systemic Functional Linguistics(SFL), by analyzing two texts excerpted from BBC news reports which involve two kinds of animals, this article tries to explore the relation between human and animals and our attitudes toward different animals, analyze the ecological elements and hidden non-ecological features in the discourses, reveal the essential reasons for ecological disruption---inherent human ideology, interpret the influences on nature. We expect that people pay more attention to the issues of environment protection, change anthropocentrism to ecocentrism which builds the harmonious relation between human and nature.
文摘Translational discourse requires at least three participants, therefore it is suggested to consider the universal model of the picture of the world, according to which it is much easier for a translator to combine the pictures of the world of an addressee and an author. An addressee is a mental image existing in the mind of an addresser during the creative process. Having defined its parameters, a translator has an opportunity to deliver the thought of an addresser to an addressee as accurately as possible and to select the means of expression that are clear to an addressee. The type of an addressee correlates with "the relation to the new".
文摘This pilot study explored the linguistic gains of intermediate level Spanish learners who completed community-based learning at a Spanish-speaking seniors center. Leamers had the opportunity, rare in foreign-language instruction, to discuss topics from their textbook in authentic native/non-native dyads. The interactions also allowed the seniors to fulfill an identified community needed by socializing in Spanish. Analyses of a post-service survey revealed that learners assessed the experience positively, because they spoke Spanish creatively. Seniors were described as cooperative and fun interlocutors, suggesting that age difference minimally affected the interactions. Direct observation revealed that learners managed to produce L2 Spanish output in connected speech for an extended period of time. Likewise, the seniors enjoyed a moment of socialization and first language use while sharing their views on the topics of discussion with the young visitors. Seniors' active participation likely encouraged learners to cope with sudden switches of topics that required negotiating for meaning and pushing the still limited interlanguages. A new service leaming study proposes to investigate the use of native/non-native dyads in Spanish in fulfilling a dual function: socialization and first language maintenance for the seniors at the center and language learning for the students.
文摘The core of dialogue teaching is dialogue. The dialogue here refers to the way in which the teachers and students based on mutual respect, trust and equal position carry on the two-way communication and mutual learning through conversation and listening. One of the marked differences between dialogue teaching and traditional teaching is that dialogue teaching highlights the essence of the teaching process of communication and cooperation. At the same time dialogue teaching is based on students' psychological demand, which makes the teaching full of strong emotion. Using the dialogue teaching as the background, this paper mainly provides the guiding principles and practical advice for the teachers' classroom language strategies so as to achieve more effective teaching effect.
文摘As a major criterion for textuality and a prominent term in discourse analysis, discourse cohesion is used on the one hand, to identify the linguistic features that cause the sentences to "cohere", and on the other hand, is to make the sentences in the discourse display some kind of mutual dependence. The paper has intensively analyzed the radio interview between Edward Heath and an interviewer from the perspective of discourse cohesion. After an in-depth analysis, the paper concludes that the interview is quite structurally cohesive by adopting several grammatical cohesive devices or ties, such as the verbal form, the time relator, the conjunction, the reference, the substitution, and the ellipsis, especially the reference and conjunction
文摘According to the principals of the Course Standard of English for Ordinary Senior Schools, published by China Education Ministry in 2001, the general goal of English curriculum on the basic education stage is to foster the students' cross-cultural awareness, which is to develop their cross-cultural communicative competence. To achieve this goal, most of all, teachers of English at high school must have a good command of cross-cultural pragmatic competence. By looking through papers in various periodicals and the Internet, the writer finds that most of the studies have coped with pragmatic failures of ESL students but few of ESL teachers'. Therefore, this thesis studies the present situation --- how much do schoolteachers of English know about pragmatics? What about their cross-cultural communicative competence? Can they communicate with the native speakers fluently and appropriately? What are the most serious problems among them in pragmatics? What can be done to solve the problems? With all the questions, this research has collected considerable firsthand data and information. Only after the basic situations are known overall, can actions be taken to solve the problems existing in everyday ESL teaching. So this research is necessary and urgent for the present basic English pedagogy. However, since the present writer's ability and research conditions are limited, it is not possible to make a wider investigation in many places. Therefore, the district --- Bameng League, Inner Mongolia, China, is selected as the basic range of the survey, the situation of which is believed to be able to represent the basic educational ones in the poor and remote districts in the north and the west of China where education is more backward. The questionnaire consists of two parts: a table of individual information and a test paper. The former investigates informants' basic information, including the items of name, age, sex, teaching age, title of the technical post, degree, academic career, college or university that they graduated from, working unit, grades for teaching and the others. The latter is the test paper cited from He Ziran and Yan Zhuang (1986), that is, Chinese Students'Pragmatic Failure in English Communication --- Survey of the Pragmatic Difference between Chinese and English. And it contains 48 items, with items of pragmalinguistic and socio-pragmatic competence mixedly arranged. 120 of the questionnaire copies were handed out and 86 are collected, but only 64 are collected. The survey covers over 10 high schools in all the 7 banners of Bameng League, including two autonomous region-class key schools and five other league-class key schools. After the investigation, the present writer carefully corrects, marks, arranges, summarizes and analyzes the questionnaire, and obtains plenty of firsthand data and information. Then some conclusions have been drawn based on the data analysis. The result of the survey shows that linguistic competence is not equal to pragmatic competence, that ESL high school English teachers may use English rather fluently, without many mistakes in vocabulary and grammar,but it does not necessarily mean that they can use the target language appropriately to communicate with native speakers without pragmatic failures, and that the informants' knowledge of pragmatics and their pragmatic competence are rather poor. As a result, improving their knowledge and competence in pragmatics becomes a very necessary and urgent task to develop the quality of ELT in basic educational stages. In order to solve the above problems, the writer makes some suggestions as follows: (1) Pragmatics should be required as an essential course for the English majors in colleges and universities, especially in normal colleges and universities; (2) In-service high school English teachers must study courses of pragmatics and cross-cultural communication; (3) In some poor and remote districts, if educational conditions don't permit, textbooks of pragmatics and cross-cultural communication must be handed out to the high school English teachers who can study by themselves, then tests are regularly held for them and certificates will be given to those who have passed the tests; (4) In some developed districts, if conditions permit, English teachers can be sent abroad to English-speaking countries for further education in order to have a good command of the English language in the authentic contexts; (5) Modern multiple medias, such as VCD or DVD videos, TV or radio programs, the Internet, should be widely and frequently applied to training teachers; (6) More native language teachers and experts from English-speaking countries must be invited to high schools to train teachers of English.
文摘In this paper, the authors propose a method that incorporates mechanisms for handling ambiguity in speech and the ability of humans to create associations, and for formulating conversations based on rule base knowledge and common knowledge. Go beyond the level that can be achieved, using only conventional natural language processing and vast repositories of sample patterns. In this paper, the authors propose a method for computer conversation sentences generated using newspaper headlines as an example of how the common knowledge and associative ability are applied.
基金This research is financially supported by the Youth Program of National Social Science Foundation of China (Grant No 10CYY008).
文摘In this paper, we focus our grammar studies on two early Cantonese literature contexts: Huajian Ji (花菚記, 1714) and Yue Ou (粤謳, 1820). Two aspect markers, the experience aspect marker "gwo 過" and the duration aspect marker "dzy 住", in these two Cantonese books show different characteristics from oral Cantonese today. "Gwo", mostly used as an aspect marker of"experience" and "repeat" in verbal expression, had the usage of"unhappened experience" in the old books as a connection between this two aspects. Every step of "dzy"'s grammarlization process was clearly recorded in the written materials. By comparing with the aspect markers in Mandarin Chinese, the usage of the completion aspect marker "liu 了" found in these two books was also discussed. We argue the importance of literature context in diachronical grammar studies of dialect.
文摘As foreign language teachers, we always wondered about the silence of our students during the lessons. However, after we started the project "Conversation Table in Portuguese" (CTP), we realized that the students assumed a more active role during the interactions, probably due to the less hierarchical situation they were in. The CTP provided the students the opportunity to express themselves in a foreign language without the interdiction they felt inside the classroom. Within this new context, the lack of confidence they might have been facing when communicating in a foreign language started to disappear, giving place to a motivation to express what they felt in this "new" language. Therefore, the target language started to become a new locus, a new way that made them not feel scared, but free and curious to say things that they would not say in similar situations when communicating in their mother tongue. In other words, the foreign language can be the place where everything seems to be possible as we do not have the control or interdiction imposed by the social values presented in our society and manifested in our mother tongue. In this study, we analyze some discursive situations taken from a session of CTP in which the students show their new identities in the foreign language. The results show that acquiring another language is much more than acquiring new linguistic aspects of communication, but also giving birth to new identities that make us become new subjects.
文摘All of us make conversations with others in a certain social context every day, though the mode to start them is various from different persons, occasions and circumstances. This paper is an attempt to analyze the variety of modes to open a conversation in different situations from the viewpoint of discourse analysis.
文摘Conversation analysis (CA) is an integral part of the study of language in communication, in which preference organization is an important topic for pragmatic research. This paper makes a study of preferred and dispreferred second turns in naturally occurring interactions to show structurally expected or unexpected responses from the second parts of the adjacent pairs. The study is based on the analysis of examples of people's actual conversations. It is concluded that in actual conversations, the speaker may make a preferred or dispreferred answer in either marked or unmarked form according to the speaker's intention and conversation circumstances.