International Journal of Applied Linguistics最新文献

Many studies emphasize the importance of interpersonal communication in shaping individuals' climate beliefs and actions, but none seem to focus on individuals in the general public as “climate action motivators,” i.e., persons providing reasons to engage in climate action. Our goal is to move linguistic research on climate communication forward through an innovative study focusing on identifying words and arguments that people assume will motivate their fellows to climate action. We analyze responses to an open-ended survey question asking Norwegian survey participants how they would motivate others to adopt a climate-friendly lifestyle. The survey data provided 4,070 freely formulated answers. Through a combination of qualitative and quantitative analysis, we found two main themes that characterize individuals as climate action motivators: (1) urging people to think about the future and future generations and (2) discouraging everyday acts of consumption. However, we also observed that the language and themes suggested by people as climate motivators are multifaceted, which highlights the inherent dilemmas in climate communication.

Despite the recognized importance of investigating L2 students’ academic literacy development and socialization, there is a lack of empirical research on the role of social networks in L2 students’ thesis writing endeavors. To address this gap, this study employs the individual networks of practice (INoP) framework to examine how three master's students at a university in the Chinese Greater Bay area leveraged their social networks in the thesis composition process and the factors that influenced their effective use of these networks. Data were collected from multiple sources, including semi-structured interviews, participants’ thesis drafts and feedback, email exchanges, and online chats. The findings illustrated three different INoP maps, highlighting participants’ exercise of agency in leveraging their social networks for thesis composition. Beyond the pivotal influence of supervisors, the research uncovered a diverse array of INoP constituents (i.e., peers, friends, and family) instrumental in offering academic guidance and emotional support for thesis endeavors. Furthermore, various factors were found to either facilitate or hinder students’ ability to utilize their INoP connections, including power dynamics, access to resources, and time constraints. This study contributes to a contextualized understanding of how L2 student writers leverage social networks to enhance their academic writing and facilitate their socialization into the academic community.

Despite a large body of literature on data-driven learning (DDL) in second language (L2) writing, relatively few empirical studies explore the types of strategies employed by learners during DDL-supported revision processes. Anchored in sociocultural theory, this study investigated the strategies used by seven novice L2 undergraduate writers in corpus-supported revision over a 14-week semester. The focal group used an Expert Argumentative Text Corpus across four multi-draft writing cycles in a blended learning design. The study analyzed and triangulated data from group discussions, self-reports, individual interviews, and written texts with traceable changes. Findings showed that learners employed varied metacognitive, collaborative, and affective strategies and actively engaged with the corpus and other resources to make surface changes (i.e., spelling, grammar) and meaningful (i.e., coherence, elaboration) revisions. The evolving strategies revealed learners’ deeper engagement with DDL through peer collaboration, which transformed initial peer pressure into peer support.

Drawing on 444 English narrative continuation essays composed by 111 Chinese high school English learners at four time points during an academic year, in this study we delved into the changing patterns of five measures of fiction trigrams and six usage-based indices of fiction verb-argument constructions (VACs) and examined their impacts on essay scores. The results showed that both the sophistication of verb lemmas and the usage of simple and common VACs increased over time. Additionally, higher-rated narrative continuation essays contained more common and strongly associated trigrams containing sophisticated words, as well as more sophisticated VACs containing less frequent verb lemmas. Overall, the findings support the usage-based theory of language development, enrich current limited understanding of the longitudinal effects of writing narrative integrated essays on the development of English phraseology and VACs among high school EFL learners, and unravel their relationships to holistic scores in narrative writings.

Despite garnering increasing scholarly attention in educational research, metacognitive training remains an underexplored topic in interpreting studies. This study aimed to investigate the impact of standards-based self-assessment on student interpreters’ metacognitive strategy use and interpreting performance. Their perceptions of the metacognitive self-assessment practice were also explored. A total of 43 Chinese undergraduate interpreting students participated in the study. Of these, 22 were assigned to the experimental group, which received metacognitive intervention [i.e., self-assessment based on the China's Standards of English Language Ability (CSE) metacognitive interpreting descriptors], while the control group (n = 21) did not receive such intervention. A pretest-posttest design was adopted, and both quantitative and qualitative data from the metacognitive questionnaire, interpreting test, and written reports were analyzed. The results showed that the metacognitive intervention exerted a positive effect on students’ metacognitive strategy use and interpreting performance. Furthermore, students generally expressed positive perceptions of the intervention, although they also suggested that further adjustments to the self-assessment tool were needed. The study concluded that the standards-based self-assessment was an effective pedagogical technique for metacognitive interpreter training.