International Journal of Applied Linguistics最新文献

The relationship between L2 reading comprehension and working memory has been studied for years, and previous studies highlight the existence of a correlation between the two. However, to our knowledge, no previous study used Kintsch's Multilevel Comprehension Model to operationalize reading comprehension in the investigation of its relationship with working memory. More specifically, according to Kintsch's model, comprehension consists of three text representation levels—the surface level (the literal wording of the text), the textbase (which includes inferences made by the reader), and the situation model (the integration of explicit and implicit text information with readers’ background knowledge). Therefore, the study reported in this paper examined the contribution of working memory, the short-term retention of information and its manipulation, to different text representation levels during L2 reading comprehension. To do so, fifty-five (N = 55) adult L2 learners of French completed L2 reading comprehension task tapping into three levels of text representation and a numerical complex working memory task. The results showed, on the one hand, a significant contribution of working memory to L2 reading comprehension and, on the other hand, that this relationship was specifically observed with the situation model.

Second language (L2) learners of English must learn to produce English phonemes, words, and sentences. These L2 learners make many errors when learning English; they may change the place or manner of articulation, insert vowels, or delete consonants. Obstruent sounds, such as fricatives, affricates, and stops, can be especially difficult for L2 learners. This study analyzed native English speakers’ perception of the quality of obstruents produced by native Mandarin Chinese and Korean speakers. Target words containing obstruents had been produced in three different tasks: in a carrier phrase, in a paragraph, and in a spontaneous speech sample. Obstruents were produced in word-initial position and word-final position. Raters with differing levels of expertise listened to these words and rated the perceptual quality of the obstruents within the words. This study found that overall, English obstruent productions by native Mandarin and Korean L2 speakers learning English were rated most clear when produced in word-initial position in a carrier phrase or a paragraph. The lowest ratings given were of obstruents in word-final position in spontaneous speech. No significant differences were found for listener expertise level. Combined with future research, results from this study will help educate the field of second language instruction as to how the speech of Korean and Mandarin learners of English is perceived. It also provides additional information on the effect that listener expertise has on the judgment of L2 speech production.

This study explores professionals’ construction of their multifaceted identities as representatives of their corporations in business writing. The self-mention framework is applied to explore the representation of the “business-self” which I propose encompasses the projection of individual, collective, and corporate identities. A corpus of 100 CEO's letter to shareholders was examined for the use of personal pronouns and company referential terms and collocation analysis performed to understand the surrounding discourse contexts. The findings reveal a distinct hierarchy of identities; US business professionals communicate with stakeholders by immersing themselves in the identity of the collective and make a concerted effort to project the corporate identity, whereas representation of the individual self is minimal. The study provides important insights into the identity construction work undertaken by professionals in authentic business texts and the findings can help inform English for Specific Purposes (ESP) practitioners of business communication courses in higher education.

The articles in this special issue contribute to second language (L2) pragmatics by investigating different speech acts and interactions in Chinese as the target language. The studies all examined learners’ pragmatic performance in different contexts and compared their performance with that of native Chinese speakers. The findings of the articles showed what the learners could achieve and what they still had problems in. In this commentary, I first analyze and discuss the aspects in these articles that impress me the most, including research design and focus on L2 pragmatics, theoretical contributions, and methodological considerations. Then, I will address some important implications that the articles provide for future research in L2 pragmatics.

In recent years, content and language integrated learning (CLIL) has become increasingly popular throughout Spain. One suggested benefit of this approach is that it increases students’ exposure to the language and facilitates their acquisition of subject-specific vocabulary (SSV). However, there is a scarcity of research demonstrating this advantage, particularly in terms of lexical availability (LA). This has led to calls to focus on semantic prompts which are linked to the CLIL subject, to better understand the effect of this linguistic exposure. This study investigates the LA of students taking either science or economics through English. Results indicate that CLIL instruction plays an important role in acquiring SSV, revealing that it can help students improve their token production to the extent that they can effectively bridge the gap between them and students with a higher language level and greater token production in other domains.

This paper investigates differences in the characteristic form, frequency and role of directives in two spoken academic genres, conference presentations and university lectures. The study also reports the existence of differences between English native and non-native speakers in the way they use directives at conferences. Data consist of a self-compiled corpus of conference talks and a comparable corpus of lectures from the Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English (MICASE). Results show that, comparatively, directives in lectures are stronger and less mitigated than in conference presentations. Conference speakers in our study make the intrinsic imposition in directives more palatable for the peer audience by using milder directive forms, deploying indirectness and stressing communal membership. Non-native speakers' directives show interesting similarities with those in lectures, a possible sign of overlapping or confusion of two major genres in the “overpopulated” generic world of academics. Findings on conference presentations and lectures are also compared with existing evidence on directives in written research articles: some characteristic roles of directives in writing are irrelevant in speech, while others, e.g. integrating visuals in the presentation and reactivating background and previously constructed content, are central to the spoken genres but irrelevant to writing.

The efficacy of written corrective feedback (WCF) is affected by a variety of variables. To maximize the effect of WCF, it is necessary to find out what variables are more predictive of learning. The present study explored the best predictors of learning among six facets of WCF: explicitness, intensiveness, error type, complexity, languaging, and mode of languaging. Seventy-five first-year university students wrote an essay and received WCF on their errors. Then the essays with WCF were returned to learners, who were assigned to five conditions: languaging about WCF in written form prompted, languaging about WCF in written form unprompted, languaging in oral form prompted, languaging in oral form unprompted, and no languaging. The languaging groups languaged about the WCF they received and the non-languaging group only looked through the corrections on their essays. One day after the languaging activity, all groups took an immediate test, and 4 weeks later, a delayed test. It was found that learning in the immediate test was best predicted by error type, complexity, and languaging, and learning in the delayed test was best predicted by error type and mode of languaging. Based on these findings, the pedagogical implications of the study are discussed.

Covid-19 was the greatest public health crisis of a century, accounting for millions of deaths and initiating an urgent surge of published biomedical research. In this climate of social anxiety, researchers scrambled to publicize their work and achieve a medical breakthrough. The use of journal highlights, a brief bullet pointed list summarising the novel results of a study, is an important tool in this promotional endeavour. In this study we focus on the stance taken by authors in this genre by examining 300 highlights dealing with the virus and comparing them with 300 from articles in the same 16 journals on other issues. Our results show significantly greater use of stance markers in the Covid highlights with hedges, boosters and self-mention particularly marked. Our study offers both a description of stance in highlights and an understanding of the potential impact of the intense, high-stakes competition generated by the pandemic in biomedical publishing. We believe this offers a valuable contribution to the literature on stance, academic discourse and rhetorical persuasion.

Foreign language teachers’ management of their emotional expression has a significant impact on their classroom teaching and professional development. As the demand for online education continues to grow, researchers are increasingly paying attention to the emotional situations of teachers in online teaching. However, there has been minimal research on secondary school English as a foreign language (EFL) teachers, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic when online teaching became the norm. By combining two lines of investigation, namely, emotional labour and emotion regulation, this study aimed to explore the emotional labour of EFL teachers in online teaching during the pandemic. As a qualitative case study, this research recruited 12 secondary school EFL teachers as participants. Drawing from semi-structured interviews and reflective journals, this paper revealed the nuanced dilemma of EFL teachers’ emotional labour, the emotional rules they followed and the emotional regulation strategies they applied in their online teaching. This study also explored the complexity of the online learning environment in relation to EFL teachers’ emotional labour and analysed the characteristics of teachers’ emotional labour in online teaching compared to face-to-face classroom teaching. The findings confirmed that the change in the teaching situation affected teachers’ emotional labour and underlined the importance of self-emotional management. At the end, this paper called for more attention to the emotional demands of online teaching to cultivate an emotionally healthy environment for EFL teachers.