جستجوی مقالات مرتبط با کلیدواژه « Requests » در نشریات گروه « ادبیات و زبان ها »

This study aims to contribute to the research literature on politeness in language teachers’ requestive behaviour. More specifically, it adopts a multilingual approach to explore teachers’ politeness strategies in the English for Young Learners (EYL) classroom, an underresearched instructional setting where regulative discourse tends to predominate. Participants are two pre-school teachers and two intact groups of 4/5-year-old children. 1,942 procedural and disciplinary directives in six video-recorded lessons are processed from a discourse-pragmatic perspective centred on directness, modifiers, and person deixis. The emerging syntactic and sequential design of regulative discourse seems to respond to factors like activity type and differing understandings of classroom power relations or deontic stances (Stevanovic, 2011). Results can serve as an awareness-raising exercise useful to draw attention to the need of strengthening practitioners’ pragmatic sensitivity in teacher training.

Speech acts shape the core of pragmatic competence and their mastery is a prerequisite for successful dis- course encounters in an L2. Cross-cultural comparisons, as claimed by Johnstone (2018), are very effec- tive for knowing and acquiring the speech acts. Accordingly, the purpose of this study was to compare a limited number of communicative routines in English and Persian within the framework of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) developed by Wierzbicka (1991) and to examine if the words uttered by speakers at the surface level (exterior) would match their thoughts (interior) especially in such routines as compliment, request, and invitation patterns. The participants comprised 21 MA students studying Eng- lish language teaching. The data was obtained by a validated researcher-made questionnaire containing both structured and unstructured items and 10 scenarios on the basis of which the study participants pro- vided comments, appropriate expressions, and responses. For the English routines, the data was obtained from three English plays. The aforementioned communicative routines in Persian were described in terms of their NSM while the metalinguistic components for the English routines were adopted from Wierz- bicka (1991). The results indicated that the NSM provided rich insights into subliminal cross-cultural dif- ferences. Since this study makes use of simple cultural scripts (similar to circumlocution) to describe communicative routines in both English and Persian, learners can easily understand differences within the hidden cross-cultural bound interactions. Implications of the study suggest that both EFL teachers and learners can gain more profound insights about the cross-cultural sociopragmatic differences between English and Persian.

Pragmatic competence is one of the most important components of successful communication; also, it is the most difficult aspect of SLA. This study aimed to explore the effects of concurrent group dynamic assessment (G-DA) on Iranian EFL learners’ learning of requests and refusals, following a mixed method design. In the experimental part of the study, 2 intact classes were homogenized by a pretest, with 24 written discourse completion tasks (WDCTs), carried out by the participants as the treatment. Concurrent G-DA group received calibrated feedback, whereas the nondynamic assessment (N-DA) group was explicitly provided with pertinent assistance without considering their zone of proximal development (ZPD). Additionally, for the sake of a qualitative study, all the dialogues between the teacher and pairs of students under investigation were audiorecorded while they were receiving the treatment. Finally, a WDCT posttest was administered to both groups. Results of the analysis of the data, using t test, showed that the G-DA group performed significantly better than the N-DA group. Also, the qualitative microgenetic analysis of the dialogues between the learners and their teacher indicated the effectiveness of concurrent G-DA in learning requests and refusals, thus corroborating the efficiency of dynamic assessment (DA) in pragmatic instruction. Implications and applications are discussed in this study.

Despite an upsurge of interest in teaching pragmatics in recent years, the assessment of L2 pragmatic competence appears to have attracted little attention. Assessment in this area seems to center on either formal or interactional assessment (see Ross & Kasper, 2013). Using qualitative analysis, this preliminary study explores the benefits and limitations of the teacher-based and interactional assessment of young learners’ pragmatic development facilitated through dialogic intervention into pragmatics using the visual presentation of narratives. The teacher-based assessment instruments included: a) formality judgment tasks (FJTs); b) discourse completion tasks (DCTs); c) student-generated visual DCTs (SVDCTs); d) pre-designed assessment rubrics; and e) the teacher’s written reflections. The outcome of these instruments was compared with the analysis of f) audio- and video-recorded classroom interactions. The data from five Japanese learners aged 7-12 studying in Hong Kong are reported. The analysis of the data demonstrated that multiple teacher-based assessments used at different points during the instruction revealed enhanced pragmatic awareness and production of the target requests on the learners’ part. However, the teacher-based assessment instruments sometimes resulted in an incomplete or inconsistent data set and occasionally yielded overly generous or inaccurate assessments. In contrast, the interactional assessment, though it tends to be impractical in everyday teaching contexts, revealed the teacher’s ongoing mediation and the dynamic process of joint knowledge construction, including teacher or peer scaffolding, the learners’ response to the mediation, collaborative meaning-making, stages of other-regulation, and emerging signs of self-regulation. Some of the teacher-based assessments offered an opportunity to explore a broader repertoire of pragmatic knowledge in the learners that may not surface in interactive oral discourse. Teacher-based and interactional assessment can thus be viewed as complementary in terms of credibility and practicality as they inform each other regarding the learning outcome and the process of knowledge co-construction. (299words)

This paper reports the findings of a study designed to investigate English e-requests of Iranian EFL postgraduate students (i.e., nonnative speakers of English) made to their professors during their education at Islamic Azad University, Najaf Abad Branch, Isfahan, Iran, to find out types of politeness features employed in the students’ e-mails and the extent to which these features might influence the degree of politeness of the students’ e-mails to the faculty. To that end, both quantitative and qualitative approaches were employed to investigate 60 English e-mails composed by the participants. The findings revealed that the Iranian students’ English e-mails were not overly adorned with politeness features. The results also indicated that such direct and unmodified e-mails failed to create e-polite messages to the faculty and, therefore, were capable of causing pragmatic failure.