日语教学与其文化背景

从语言与文化的关系这一角度 ,阐述了学习外语的同时 ,必须要了解其文化背景的重要性 ,并从日语的两大特点 (敬语、男女用语 )揭示文化对语言的影响。

Reliability and Content Validity of a Comprehensive Discourse Completion Test of Interlanguage Pragmatics for Academic Situations

The present study aimed at investigating the reliability and content validity of a comprehensive test of Interlanguage Pragmatics （ILP） developed for the academic situations in the Iranian context. To do so, a meta-analysis of 50 articles which had reported on the tests of ILP was done and the criteria required for the selection of the speech acts of academic situations were developed. Then a Multiple-Choice Discourse Completion Test （MDCT） of interlanguage pragmatics was developed and validated through native checked situations and items based on meta-pragmatics procedures. Participants of the study were 50 M.A. students majoring in TEFL （Teaching English as a Foreign Language） studying at Iranian universities as well as 50 native speakers of English. The findings revealed that the test developed enjoyed high internal consistency and content validity. The present findings could contribute to the fields of second language testing and assessment in general and testing interlanguage pragmatics in particular.

Explicitness and implicitness of utterances

Three pragmatic theories in terms of two properties of utterance-explicitness and implicitness are surveyed, with a general commentary and a proposal of further development in the study of explicitness and implicitness of utterance in view of its sound features.

MT-Oriented English PoS Tagging and Its Application to Noun Phrase Chunking

A hybrid approach to English Part-of-Speech(PoS) tagging with its target application being English-Chinese machine translation in business domain is presented,demonstrating how a present tagger can be adapted to learn from a small amount of data and handle unknown words for the purpose of machine translation.A small size of 998 k English annotated corpus in business domain is built semi-automatically based on a new tagset;the maximum entropy model is adopted,and rule-based approach is used in post-processing.The tagger is further applied in Noun Phrase(NP) chunking.Experiments show that our tagger achieves an accuracy of 98.14%,which is a quite satisfactory result.In the application to NP chunking,the tagger gives rise to 2.21% increase in F-score,compared with the results using Stanford tagger.

Evaluation of College English Test

There has been much heated discussion on College English Test for non-English majors Band 4 and Band 6 because it has exerted great influence on English teaching in Chinese universities. This essay is intended to explore the reliability, validity,practicality and washback of this large-scale test by focusing on CET Band 4. The author of this report discusses the merits as well as some existing problems of this test and offers some suggestions at the end of the essay.

The Applicability in Selection of American sitcoms as Materials for Teaching English listening and speaking

English Sitcoms are widely welcomed by teachers and students, but it has been debatable whether they are suitable for teaching material in English teaching. Though in these sitcoms spoken English with full-filled humor is the main feature, there is still a long distance between real and Actors＇ lines. Through English spoken feature, we take American popular long sitcom ＂Friends＂ and ＂Big Bang＂ as the example, combined the analysis of real spoken language in the sitcom in order to dig out the suitability when we need to select appropriate teaching material.

PRAGMATIC ADAPTABILITY OF TEACHER'S CODESWITCHING

Codeswitching is one of teacher's strategies used in foreign language classrooms in order to approach or realize some teaching or communicative purposes.Based on Verschueren's Linguistic Adaptation theory,this article is a detailed analysis of the pragmatic adaptability that teacher's codeswitching can fulfill.We classify the objects to which teacher's codeswitching adapts into the linguistic reality,the teacher's roles and the teacher's speech intention.

English as a Lingua Franca: A New Approach for English Language Teaching in China?

Research on English as a lingua franca(ELF)has triggered a debate on whether English teaching should consistently conform to native-speaker Standard English or it should value the pedagogical implications of ELF.This article provides an overview of current research on teaching English as a lingua franca.It starts with research on the rationale to introduce ELF-informed teaching and comparisons between ELF-informed teaching and native-English-based teaching.Concrete proposals of how to incorporate ELF-informed teaching into English language teaching(ELT)classrooms are presented.Then controversies in the debate are summarized.They are:A lack of ELF-informed textbooks;a lack of ELF-informed assessment;and a lack of qualified teachers.It then reviews recent publications dealing with these controversies.This is followed by a discussion about the research on ELF-informed teaching in the Chinese context.This article argues that research on the practicality of ELF-informed teaching should start with prospective English users,such as students in China’s Business English Program.It concludes with some suggestions for future research and practice on ELF-informed teaching in China.

"Nativeness" and Intelligibility:Impacts of Intercultural Experience Through English as a Lingua Franca on Chinese Speakers' Language Attitudes

This paper investigates the impacts of intercultural experience through English as a lingua franca （ELF） on language attitudes, with the focus on Chinese speakers＇ narratives of ELF experience in relation to their views of Englishes. The data retrieved through 769 questionnaires and 35 interviews with Chinese users of English revealed the impacts in four aspects. First, the lack of ELF experience helps to maintain the assumption that conformity to native English is necessary for interactants to understand each other. Second, ELF experience triggers the question about the exclusive connection between nativeness and intelligibility. Third, it raises challenges to the exclusive relevance of native English for successful intercultural communication. Fourth, it helps to develop an awareness of intercultural communication strategies as important for communicative effectiveness in the context of the diversity of English. Attitudes revealed in the four aspects all point to a concern with the issue what is intelligible English. This paper thus discusses intelligibility in relation to （non-） nativeness and the role of intercultural experience in making sense of the issue of intelligibility, which leads to the exploration of pedagogical implications of this study.

The Effects of Explicit Metapragmatic Instruction on Chinese English Language Learners' Acquisition of Compliment Responses

The present study investigated the effects of explicit metapragmatic instruction on foreign language learners＇ performance of compliment responses （CRs）. Eighty-two non-English major students participated in this study. They were randomly assigned to two groups, an experimental group that received explicit metapragmatic instruction on compliment responses and a control group that did not. A pretest-posttest research design was adopted. The data were collected through a written discourse completion task （WDCT） with six scenarios concerning the topics of appearance, performance, and personality. The results revealed that learners who received explicit instruction dramatically decreased their use of Accept strategy and increased Combination （CB） strategy at the macro level; more specifically, a decrease in Appreciation and an increase in Accept ＋ Accept at the micro level. The learners of the control group made little progress in their performance. The study sheds light on pragmatics learning in an EFL setting and provides implications for pragmatics pedagogy.

Intelligibility and Segmental Phoneme Repair Strategies in English-as-a-Lingua-Franca Interactions among Chinese and Japanese Speakers of English

This is a qualitative study of the types of segmental repair that maintain mutual intelligibility in English-as-a-Lingua-Franca interactions among Chinese and Japanese speakers of English （Jenkins, 2000; Matsumoto 2011; O＇Neal 2015a, 2015b, 2015c, 2015d, 2016, in press）. Repair refers to a set of practices through which conversation participants stop the ongoing action to attend to actual or potential problems 1：o the maintenance of mutual intelligibility （Schegloff, 2007; N^meth, 2012）. Although anything can potentially be a problem to the maintenance of mutual intelligibility, this study focuses only on instances of the repair of segmental phonemes so that the pronunciation remains mutually intelligible. Using conversation analytic methodology to examine a corpus of repair sequences concerning pronunciation among Chinese and Japanese students at a Japanese university, this study claims that three segmental repair strategies are used in the interactions to maintain mutually intelligible pronunciation： segmental phoneme modification, segmental phoneme insertion, and segmental phoneme deletion.