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Mastery of the art of crafting online reviews and responses is essential as a valuable additional tool for enhancing learners' English proficiency in specialised contexts. This study aims to: 1) Examine the formality levels in crafting reviews and responses; 2) Explore face-threatening acts utilised in reviews and politeness strategies employed in responses; and 3) Uncover moves and steps in composing reviews and responses. Data was collected from the Top 25 Hotels in the World in 2022 according to Tripadvisor.com. Six distinct corpora were formed, comprising positive, negative, and mixed reviews, along with corresponding responses, resulting in 87,973 tokens. Findings show reviewers leaned towards casual language (85.87%), while respondents used a consultative style (82.67%) in their responses. The shift from casual to consultative occurred most frequently (70.67%). For politeness, admiration (73.07%) and expressions of complaints/reprimands (64.53%) were common in reviews. In responses, strategies like offering, promising, or giving gifts (72.00%) and apologising and begging for forgiveness (50.40%) were prevalent. Reviews used three moves and ten steps, while responses employed six moves and 16 steps. These insights can be integrated into ESP classrooms to enhance review and response writing skills effectively.

The translation of Russian literature into Chinese requires careful consideration due to the linguistic nuances and cultural subtleties involved. The works of Chekhov present challenges for translators aiming to maintain the original narrative's richness and cultural resonance in the Chinese context. The main objective of this study is to analyse the translation strategies used to make Chekhov's literary masterpiece accessible to Chinese readers. This study examines translators' decisions regarding functional equivalence, cultural adaptation, and the treatment of special expressions. It provides valuable insights into the wider discussion on literary translation. This research aims to fill a gap in the existing literature by examining a specific work in the Russian literary canon. By doing so, it contributes to our understanding of cross-cultural literary transmission. This study utilises a close reading methodology and participant analysis with a sample of five translators to investigate the translation process by analysing key passages. The study employs a qualitative analysis approach to examine linguistic and cultural aspects, providing a comprehensive perspective on the translation challenges and opportunities when translating Chekhov's works into Chinese. The findings highlight the translators' ability to maintain fidelity to the source text while adapting to Chinese linguistic and cultural nuances. The study identifies strategies used to handle special expressions and emphasises the choices made in linguistic and cultural adaptation. This study provides new contributions to the field of translation studies by examining the translation dynamics of Chekhov's work in the context of Russian Chinese literary exchange. The study is significant as it can provide insights into translation practices and enhance our understanding of the interplay between cultural and linguistic elements in literary translation.

Contrary to prevailing research on willingness to communicate (WTC) which treats spoken second language (L2) as the predominant indicator of WTC, this study examines a young English as a second language (ESL) learner's WTC expressed through multimodal means and her utilization of multimodal and multilingual resources for mediating WTC in translingual environments. Data were collected from videotaped ESL lessons and an interview. Adopting a multimodal conversation analysis (CA) approach, this cross-disciplinary study analyzes the ESL novice's WTC expressions in two communicative settings: small-group interactions in ESL class and a multilingual triad conversation in an interview. Findings reveal that (1) gestural WTC display can signify more than one's intention to enter discourse, (2) contrary to previous WTC studies, first language (L1) use can indicate L2 WTC, and (3) the learner used diverse semiotic resources to mediate WTC and sustain discursive engagement. Implications are discussed with respect to the findings. This study extends the understanding of WTC beyond spoken L2 expressions, emphasizing embodied display and L1 use in the learner's communicative repertoire. Additionally, it sheds light on the learner's strategic use of multimodal resources to sustain engagement in translingual environments, contributing to the broader field of language education and multimodal analysis.

Local tour guides' English speaking competence determines inbound international tourists' travel experiences. This study investigated student tour guides' English learning by adopting role-play tasks. The communicative tasks were designed to explore how real interactions prepared English as Foreign Language (EFL) learners to become cultural ambassadors who introduce Taiwanese features to the world. Twenty-nine students were recruited from an "English for Tourism Purposes" course to interact with international students who acted as tourists. The student tour guides took turns introducing a topic unique to Taiwan. Data included recorded conversational interactions between the international and local students, comments on tour-guiding performances, and reflective notes. Adopting conversation and thematic analysis, the researcher analyzed the objective learning outcomes by observing how students performed in the tour-guiding tasks and examined the subjective viewpoints from the participants' reflective notes. The results revealed distinctive spoken features for communicative competence and the benefits of gaining a deeper intercultural understanding of how to communicate Taiwanese culture in English and developing various communication skills for interacting with foreigners. Pedagogical implications are discussed in terms of the design of English for Tourism teaching.

This paper investigates the author's classroom practice of implementing an interpretive perspective on intercultural language teaching and learning in two online intercultural workshops on the topic of face masks designed and delivered during the COVID-19 pandemic. It reflexively examines two critical incidents in classroom practice in terms of what these incidents reveal about the challenges faced by pre-service teachers in operationalizing an interpretive stance towards intercultural language teaching and learning in practice. Based on the epistemology of reflective practice, this self-study seeks to produce knowledge-of-practice by framing the author's practical knowledge as language teacher in relation to theories of intercultural language teaching. Classroom discourse analysis of teaching and learning sequencies provides an emic lens on the enactment of an interpretive perspective on intercultural language teaching at the micro level in terms of two basic aspects of pedagogical practice: 1) Embedding interpretation in learning design and 2) Mediating learners' interpretations in classroom interaction. The findings reveal that this author's attempts to personalise intercultural language learning and elicit meaningful reflections from students were constrained by the limited semiotic richness of the material presented and the difficulty of going beyond a superficial interactional format to provide effective scaffolding and successfully realize a dialogic stance towards knowledge building. The paper considers the implications of these challenges for pre-service teacher education and offers suggestions for supporting teachers hoping to teach interculturally.

By investigating the first thirty minutes of ten initial student group meetings (cf. Rampazzo & Aranha, 2019), this study explores the interactional resources that participants display during online talk-ininteraction. Multimodal Conversation Analysis is applied to the data consisting of "Gesprächsanalytisches Transkriptionssystem 2" (GAT2) transcriptions of recorded Zoom video conferences. Virtual Exchange (VE), also referred to as Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL), is a method of intercultural online learning in which groups of learners collaborate with partners from another culture or geographical area in an authentic and immersive setting. Despite the collaborative and immersive nature of virtual exchanges, microanalytic studies regarding interaction in this field are still underrepresented (Dooly, 2017). This is also and particularly true for the concept of interactional competence (IC) (Kramsch, 1986) which has hardly been considered in VE research so far. IC is a competence model that comprises interlocutors' interactional resources such as turn-taking, repair, sequence-organization, multimodal resources and other. This paper depicts the interactional strategies that EFL students adopt in online video team meetings. Further, it argues that some L2 IC features, such as turn-taking and multilingual resources, come with particular dynamics and characteristics in a VE context and provides examples for these practices.

Analysis of conversations between international university students in the Corpus of English as a Lingua Franca Interaction (CELFI, McDonough & Trofimovich, 2019) has demonstrated that holds, which are temporary cessations of dynamic movement, are a robust visual cue of nonunderstanding that can be reliably interpreted by external observers as signals of listener comprehension difficulties (e.g. McDonough et al., 2019, 2022, 2023). Using CELFI materials, this study used an experimental design to explore whether business communication students (N = 64) benefit from instructional activities designed to raise their awareness of holds as a signal of nonunderstanding. The students carried out perception tests in Week 1 and Week 5 that presented video excerpts from CELFI showing the depicted listeners' hold onsets and releases, and the students rated those listeners' comprehension. In the interim, 31 students completed weekly awareness-raising activities via Moodle (2 hours per week) for four weeks. A mixed ANOVA showed that students who participated in the awareness-raising activities showed significant improvement in their ability to discriminate between hold onsets and releases. Implications for the use of awareness-raising activities to promote recognition of nonverbal behavior are discussed.

Purpose: This study aims to examine how teacher candidates (TCs) in Türkiye and the USA navigate their intercultural communication skills in a telecollaboration project. Design/methodology/approach: Forty-eight TCs participated (26 in Türkiye and 22 in the USA) in the study. TCs discussed critical issues in multicultural education on an online learning platform for six weeks. Their discussions were analyzed using content and discourse analysis. Findings: The findings indicated that TCs approached the telecollaborative space as a translingual contact zone and positioned themselves and their interlocutors in the discourse by using the personal pronouns; I, we, you and they. When they positioned themselves using we (people in Türkiye/USA), they spoke on behalf of everyone included in the scope of we. Their interlocutors responded to these positionings either by accepting this positioning and responding with a parallel positioning or by engaging in translingual negotiation strategies to revise the scope of we and sharing some differences/nuances in beliefs and practices in their community. Research limitations/implications: When TCs talk about their culture and community in a singular manner using we, they frame them as the same across every member in that community. When they ask questions to each other using you, the framing of the questions prime the respondents to sometimes relay their own specific experiences as the norm or consider experiences from different points of view through translingual negotiation strategies. A singular approach to culture(s) may affect the marginalized communities the most because they are lost in this representation, and their experiences and voices are not integrated in the narratives or integrated with stereotypical representation. Practical implications: Teachers and teacher educators should first pay attention to their language choices, especially use of pronouns, which may communicate inclusion or exclusion in intercultural conversations. Next, they should prepare their students to adopt and practice language choices that communicate respect for cultural diversity and are inclusive of marginalized populations. Social implications: Speakers' pronoun use includes identity construction in discourse by drawing borders around and between communities and cultures with generalization and particularity, and by patrolling those borders to decide who is included and excluded. As a response, interlocutors use pronouns either to acknowledge those borders and respond with corresponding ones from their own context or negotiate alternative representations or further investigate for particularity or complexity. In short, pronouns could lead the direction of intercultural conversations toward criticality and complexity or otherwise, and might be reasons where there are breakdowns in communication or to fix those breakdowns. Originality/value: This study shows that translingual negotiation strategies have explanatory power to examine how speakers from different language backgrounds negotiate second and third order positionings in the telecollaborative space.

Power relations and change have become two of the most important foci of intercultural communication education and research. This paper contributes to these two elements by problematising and operating an analytical framework from outside the "West," the Chinese notion of Zhongyong (the "Golden Mean"). Based on a dialogical analysis of focus groups collected during an art course, the paper shows that Zhongyong can expand and complexify our understanding of interculturality, looking into how e.g. the students balance otherness with otherness (or not), as well as make use of reflectivity and criticality (or not) to implement potential change when cooperating.

This study explores multilingual international students' narratives of mobility and socialisation through online discursive spaces of interview conversations. Drawing upon an ecological approach to transnational narratives, the researcher analyzed international students' multiscalar interactions and transformations in sociospatial practices. The analyses provide ethnographic accounts of the participants' translingual discourses, transcultural trajectories, and translocal community lives that involve transnational connections across temporal and spatial borders. The findings also suggest that interview conversations with peers promote international students' dynamic narrations of their life experiences of multilingual mobility in continuously evolving ecological communities.

This article presents a model of intercultural learning that may be used in the planning and implementation of citizenship education in foreign/second/world language teaching. The Cycle model of intercultural learning aims at the development of global citizenship and comprises four phases: noticing, comparing, reflecting and interaction. Among the central concepts are critical cultural awareness, perspective awareness, local and global contextualisation, and decentering. The article further shows how language learning and intercultural learning may be integrated by combining the Cycle model of intercultural learning with task-based language learning and language learning via chunks and keywords. The argument is illustrated by results from an action research project carried out in Denmark in the school year 2021/2022. Thematically, the project draws inspiration from The UN Global Goal 11: Sustainable cities and communities, and addresses students of English, German, and French in grade 8 (15-year-olds). In this article, the focus is on one of the English classes, but the article concludes with reflections on the relevance of all languages.

This paper links Systemic Functional-based multimodal discourse analysis and English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teacher education through the workshop "Multimodal Literacy in the EFL classroom" (MLEFL). Drawing upon 'multimodal analysis for critical thinking' (MACT) pedagogy (O'Halloran et al., 2017) and the Systemic Approach to teaching critical viewing (Lim and Tan, 2017, Lim, 2018), MLEFL aims at involving student teachers (STs) in a transformative process through which STs with no previous instruction on multimodality are introduced to multimodal literacy. After being engaged in making meaning through various semiotic resources and conducting multimodal analysis with the use of a pedagogic metalanguage, STs complete a task of representing their new experiences via the process of creating a lesson plan aimed at promoting primary school students' multimodal literacy. The paper presents MLEFL as a design for learning (Kress and Selander, 2012). It serves two purposes: to present the content and syllabus of the MLEFL workshop and to reflect upon its implementation and effectiveness. The paper reports on the qualitative findings from a small-scale research conducted with twenty pre-service EFL teachers who participated in the fourweek workshop in a virtual environment. It investigates STs' perceptions shared in workshop evaluation forms and participation in the forum as well as their assignments for signs of learning. The analysis of the findings revealed differences in STs' capacities (Kress, 2010: 175) which support the effectiveness of the workshop. Most STs created lesson plans which promote critical viewing, used the pedagogic metalanguage efficiently and explained the design of their activities with well-informed rationale.

This investigation uses conversation analysis (CA) to document, in very close detail, how participants-in-interaction manage and organize repair practices in moments when linguistic repair becomes conditionally relevant in conversational or 'chatting' phases of online dyadic L2-learning interactions between a tutor and tutee. Specifically, this study focuses on the phenomena of precluding linguistic repair when it becomes relevant (by making it conditional on quick uptake and completion, and by deploying turn-taking devices to hold the turn when other-correction becomes or seems relevant) and abandoning it when it is in progress. Analysis framed these phenomena not as individual strategies, but as collaborative accomplishments realized through the interactional competence (IC) of the participants, and showed that participants oriented to both pedagogical and social concerns in moments of linguistic repair. Therefore, such moments were key sites for co-construction and configuration of the interactional space as primarily social or pedagogical, or as a complex and conditional interweaving of the two.

The prevalent use of ELF in global communication necessitates a rethinking of what theoretical frameworks and methodological approaches are appropriate to explain the changing and complex nature of intercultural interactions, particularly, those whereby English is recognised as a passport. This review accounts for ELF interactions in terms of Interactional Sociolinguistics (IS). In doing so, it discusses the characteristics and functions of IS taking into consideration the complexity of ELF contexts, most notably intercultural encounters that are prone to misunderstandings and communication breakdowns. Further, based on an analysis of previous studies on ELF, the paper characterises ELF interaction and its key components, and ELF interactional ecology using Interactional Sociolinguistics as a theoretical framework.

This study examines service encounters in Saudi Arabia from a pragmatic perspective. Its aim is to investigate the possible impact of perceived cultural distance between customers and service providers on pragmatic choices. It specifically examines how Saudi customers construct their service encounters when talking to service providers of the same (versus different) cultural/ethnic background in terms of discourse structure; strategies of request and internal modifications, and stylistic strategies. Three cafés with service providers of three different ethnic/cultural backgrounds are chosen. One has Saudi service providers, the second café has Arab (non-Saudi) service providers, and the third café has non-Arab service providers. Forty socially minimal service encounter interactions that take place in each café are observed and manually recorded. The study uses the framework of 'rapport management' by Spencer-Oatey (2002) as its approach for data analysis. The findings indicate that there are differences among the three sets of data in terms of discourse structure, the realization of the speech act of request, and the stylistic aspect of interactions. According to the special nature of service encounters, customers' pragmatic choices are explained in terms of expressing certain degrees of social distance rather than politeness. More specifically, the closer cultural distance between customers and service providers, the more pragmatic strategies functioning to achieve more closeness and solidarity are employed.

Politeness strategies are of significant importance to maintain the face of the addressee. Senders of formal congratulatory letters seek to create a positive image in the minds of their addresses by performing particular illocutionary acts and face-saving acts (FSAs) in the form of written texts. To the best knowledge of the researcher, this topic received little attention from linguistic researchers, especially on the pragma-stylistic level. The importance of this study arises from the fact that congratulatory formal letters are an effective tool in the successful performance of foreign relations and thus deserve investigation. The current study investigates the pragma-stylistic aspects of illocutionary acts and FSA Politeness Strategies in some selected English and Arabic formal congratulatory letters written by English and Arabic officials. Findings reveal that assertive constitutes the highest frequency in English data, while expressive occurs more in Arabic. Besides, the FSA politeness strategy (Use appropriate forms of address) includes most of the total frequency in both English and Arabic data, which still it appeared more in English. Additionally, (Exaggerate interest, sympathy with H) comes next in Arabic, while (Be optimistic) appeared more in English. In addition, results show that exaggeration (Hyperbole) is the prevalent stylistic device used in Arabic. Arabic officials usually exaggerate the glorification of people in authoritative positions, while English high officials tend to be more moderate. The findings will be helpful in cross-cultural comparative studies and other related fields.

Conceptualization of foreign language teaching as a cross-cultural interaction means engaging learners in various cultural mediations. Language use becomes a form of interpretative architecture of a target language. Understanding language use from a discursive perspective develops meta-pragmatic awareness and interpretative capacities of learners. The study answers the question of how to design the architecture of context analysis. This research aims to determine the effective ways of interpretative engagement of learners with aspects of pragmatics in the Ukrainian university setting. The study investigates how the process of interaction shapes the engagement of learners in practices of noticing, reflection, and comparison of cross-cultural situations. The data came from a case study on cross-cultural language learning within the second semester, 2021. The study analyzes the audio-recording of the classes, researcher notes, and post-course interviews of 24 participants. This research used a method of the content analysis. The study of the results, based on six categories (narrative analysis, discourse analysis, semiotic analysis, interpretative analyses, conversation analysis, and critical analysis), showed that the learners started to consider the nature of their cross-cultural mediation. The research proved that through such an interpretative engagement, students become engaged into working with languages and cultures. The study presents some recommendations for language teachers to create a meaning-making process from multiple perspectives.

With the goal of contributing to ongoing efforts to decolonize ELT, this article addresses the potential of microanalytic research into classroom interaction in disrupting hegemonic forces of coloniality. Microanalytic research provides a step-by-step, minute examination of interactional discourse, and it has the capacity to reveal gaps between official policies/participants' beliefs and actual communication practices. To set the scene, we begin the article with a sketch of our experience in Japan and a review of previous studies reporting on teachers' struggles and responses in confronting coloniality in the ELT classroom. We then turn to microanalytic research to show how this strand of work may complement ongoing efforts towards decolonizing ELT by foregrounding participants' resourcefulness and agency in rewriting existing norms and structures. In closing, we consider future directions for decolonizing ELT classroom interaction research and pedagogy, emphasizing the affordances of microanalytic insights for pedagogical reflection and practice.

In this study, we examined the use of compliments, self-praise, and self-denigration, as exchanged among nonnative English users. This was part of participation in an online cross-cultural exchange project (Ibunka 2019), which involved learners from six countries (Algeria, Brazil, Indonesia, Japan, Taiwan, and the Netherlands). The aim of the study was two-fold: first, to contribute to the burgeoning research on the three speech acts in online settings; second, to unravel how the project participants -- as nonnative users -- managed to build and sustain rapport/comity via these social acts, despite their assumed linguistic deficiency. The study's data were extracted from a corpus of 2055 posts and comments ([approximately equal to] 368654 words) and analysed in terms of: distribution (1105, 301, and 361 tokens were identified, respectively), topics (core vs. peripheral), sequential organisation (vertical vs. horizontal), and rapport/comity building potential. The findings were extensively discussed in light of the existing literature, especially relative to social networking sites. Some of these findings are of a particular interest to English language teachers, namely: using linguistic proficiency and incompetence as topics for the three speech acts and the latter deployment as metacomments and message openers/closers as well as for the management of relational work.

As part of the effort to elevate the oral English proficiency of Thai EFL learners, this paper explores university students' target-deviant English use in conversation, which should be systematically tackled in conversation teaching. Data examined included 41 two-three-minute video-recorded role-play dialogues from two English conversation classes. The data was transcribed and analyzed following the Conversation Analysis (CA) framework. The students' conversational English problems were detected in four key areas. First, those involving segmental organization included final-sound omission and incorrect pronunciation of vowel sounds (with the highest frequency); and [l] or [r] deletion in consonant clusters. Second, problems with super-segmental organization contained stress (third-highest frequency), and too many pauses within turn construction units (TCUs). Next, ungrammatical TCUs (second-highest frequency) were found in syntactic organization. Finally, problems with sequence organization included abrupt conversation closing; irrelevant adjacency pairs; topic shifts without signposts; inappropriate expressions to identify oneself on the phone; and inappropriate responses to an announcement of bad news. It is recommended that in conversation class, students be made more aware of correct English pronunciation and provided more opportunities to practice making goal-oriented, casual conversation with explicit feedback regarding natural conversation mechanisms involved in realizing particular interactional goals.

This article introduces an approach to creative media literacy for world issues (WIs) such as COVID-19. In so doing, the article integrates four positions on discourse and media as terrible facets of globalization in the context of critical discourse analysis (CDA). The objectivist position deals with WIs as neutral discourse shared among humanity and distributed through English as an international language and educational media. The ideologist position treats creative media literacy as relations of power between global and local identities in the form of competing discourses associated with WIs. The rhetorical position reveals the hidden strategies used in global media discourse and English as a global language. The social constructionist position provides three levels of analysis for creative media literacy among university students: textual analysis, discourse analysis, and critical discourse analysis. The article concludes with guidelines on how lecturers can implement this approach with English as a foreign language (EFL) students.

To assist second language learners in becoming effective, aware, and reflective participants in higher education, support can be provided by integrating structured awareness raising approaches in the language curriculum. Drawing on self-regulation principles, such a structured awareness raising curriculum is most notably sustained by reflective one-to-one dialogue, also known as advising in language learning (ALL). While previous studies have shown that students who received this kind of support in face-to-face settings were able to successfully develop effective learning strategies, little research has demonstrated to what extent students can develop these strategies, supported by ALL, when learning online. This study shows how four groups of second language majors (n = 252) demonstrate knowledge and control of learning and learning strategies when discussing their planning and progress with peers online. This study draws on Google Classroom data (posts and comments: n = 957) collected over two semesters. Using digital conversation analysis and social network analysis, students were found to demonstrate (1) awareness of approaches to learning, (2) awareness of facilities, roles, and resources, and (3) awareness of self when collaborating with peers. This study shows how ALL can support students in effectively applying different learning strategies when engaged in computer-supported collaborative work.

In this article, we use grounded practical theory to develop a practical theory for using "difficult data" in Language and Social Interaction university classes. "Difficult data" are transcribed, audio/video-recorded data that contain language and ideologies that could be offensive, bigoted, or otherwise disturbing. We provide contextual literature for understanding the pedagogical tensions around using these data from communication pedagogy research as well as social theory for handling the language within the data. We base our analysis on various types of data from academia: an international/intercultural pedagogical speech event, student surveys, field notes, interview, and recordings of classroom instruction using difficult data. We provide a practical theory focused on techniques for managing the central problem that instructors want students to analyze the social consequences of interaction without replicating the problematic impacts of discourse that make difficult data difficult. Our theory reveals four techniques including framing the data as difficult, surveying students before the class, using already-published research data, and metacommunicating about these dilemmas. These techniques do not promise inviolability, but instructors can foster deliberative reflection/co-orientation about classroom interaction that considers whether the use of difficult data can help students develop analysis-informed praxis.

Aptitude is a hypernym used in training and practice-based contexts to refer to a person's natural or acquired ability to do something. It tends to be an attribute that is 'forward-looking', i.e. referring to a person's probability of achieving success in the future. This paper adopts a retrospective perspective in looking at the 'success achievement' of (would-be) interpreters and employs the term knowledge, skills and abilities (KSAs). The research questions that this paper addresses relate to frequency of KSAs referred to across four 'stakeholder areas' relevant to interpreter performance: studies from pedagogues on training and (pre-qualification) testing; testing/credentialing authorities; industry-based organisations; and trainee and practising interpreters themselves. Comparison across the four stakeholder areas shows that the training and testing, and credentialing stakeholder areas most frequently identify linguistic and transfer-based KSAs, with moderate attention afforded to intercultural skills, discourse analysis skills, social interactional skills and knowledge bases across different thematic areas, and demonstration of knowledge of ethics. The industry-based stakeholder area records high levels of frequency for KSAs to do with research, terminology, business, self-assessment and ICT skills, alongside linguistic, and interactional KSAs. Overall, however, the broadest spread of frequently identified KSAs is recorded amongst the trainee and practitioner stakeholder group.

The use of interactional metadiscourse markers in opinion paragraphs written by A2-level English learners was investigated in this research. Although metadiscourse is commonly studied in discourse analysis, pragmatics, and language teaching, there has been limited attention given to the writing of beginner-level language learners. Metadiscourse is typically associated with advanced English learners' writing behavior. However, this study recognizes that English learners at lower proficiency levels can also employ interactional metadiscourse markers, such as hedges, boosters, attitude markers, self-mentions, and engagement markers. The study scrutinized the opinion paragraphs of 20 university students at A2-level during the period of emergency remote teaching caused by the pandemic. The analysis of metadiscourse was carried out using Hyland's model for academic texts. The paragraphs of 10 students who attended online writing classes and 10 who did not were compared. The results showed that students who attended online classes attempted to use the metadiscourse markers they had learned in their writing lessons. On the other hand, students who did not attend online classes tended to use fewer interactional metadiscourse markers. The study proposes that students' writing and communication with their readers can be considerably impacted by teachers' attitudes, lesson materials, and sample paragraphs. Therefore, metadiscourse analysis can assist teachers and material developers in selecting appropriate materials for writing instruction.

The starting point for this research is an eTandem initiative between learners of Mandarin Chinese and German. The participants mainly learnt the dominant variety of their target languages (German Standard German, Mainland Chinese Standard Mandarin), however, their tandem partners are speakers of a non-dominant variety (Austrian Standard German, Taiwanese Standard Mandarin). Due to this pairing, some speakers felt prompted to position themselves in relation to the discussed varieties. The empirical study analyses the discursive construction of language variation of one eTandem dyad that elaborated on this topic at length. For this purpose, we adopted a critical discourse analysis approach and focused on three aspects (nomination, predication, perspectivisation). The results reveal that language variation in the Chinese context, especially the concept of Fangyán, was difficult to grasp and explain, while the discussion on German was more clear-cut. Standard language was conceptualised as a tool for inclusion, whereas non-standard varieties were conceived as excluding but also as a means to create community belonging. Based on our results we conclude that diversity in varieties in tandem learning has the potential to offer valuable opportunities not only to learn about target language variation, but also to increase language awareness regarding one's expert language.

This article introduces an empirical study of "Connected Learning" in a Japanese EFL classroom context, instantiated through the Bridging Activities pedagogical framework. Students considered their interests, made groups, and joined Reddit communities. Self-selected texts were then analyzed with rigorous teacher mediation. Students participated by creating Reddit posts and several presentations detailing their text analysis and participation. Qualitative and quantitative data were collected from these presentations and questionnaires. Findings revealed that students in this context focused predominantly on gaming and anime communities, and participated multimodally using text, images, videos, and polls. Regarding language learning, attention was paid to cultural similarities and differences, vocabulary, acronyms, and slang. Student perceptions were positive, with 96% of students considering the topics covered appropriate to their future language needs. Additionally, the opportunity to engage in intercultural communication with target language users was considered novel, meaningful, and empowering. Pedagogical implications of using public websites in FL instruction and future research ideas are discussed.

Study abroad homestays are generally assumed to provide visitors with opportunities to learn language 'in the wild' by participating in the host family's everyday life. Ultimately such participation is accomplished via individual episodes of interaction as the visitor is socialized into the family's mundane routines and rituals. Building on research into second language interaction in the lifeworlds of learners beyond the classroom, this study considers (1) how interactants in one homestay context draw on a range of ecologically available resources to co-accomplish participation and membership, and (2) how such participation affords the guest with an expanding repertoire of resources, including linguistic elements and new participatory practices. The study uses multimodal conversation analysis (CA) to discuss two extended extracts from naturally occurring interaction collected between a novice L2 English speaker and his homestay family. The analysis suggests that language learning is more complex than the mere provision of linguistic input: new lexical items and practices emerge within the interactants' respective lifeworlds in relation to locally situated contingencies, and can be occasioned and explained via recourse to a range of material and embodied affordances beyond just language. Input, therefore, is sequentially and ecologically located in the broader business of an ongoing collective sociality and primarily serves the two key interactional imperatives of progressivity and intersubjectivity.

Anticipatory completions can be a potential place in which the second speaker expresses disagreement with the first speaker. 'Doing disagreement' is a significant feature of group work interaction, and resolving such disagreements can pose an interactional challenge for students in classroom contexts (Sharma 2012). Examining disagreement episodes can help teachers and students to understand the practices that participants employ to maintain their stances, contest their interlocutors' standpoints, and close disagreements. This study sets out to discover the interactional patterns advanced EFL participants use in disagreement episodes in post-completion sequences that do and do not bring disagreements to a close. We draw on Conversation Analysis to describe 50 hours of interactions, a total of 20 video-recorded English discussion task sessions collected over 10 weeks from 15 Farsi-speaking advanced EFL students assigned to work in groups of three. The results show that acts to close the disagreement sequence include: relinquishing a position by accepting the position maintained by another, or acknowledging the repair performed by another party. Disagreements are not resolved when the partners fail to accept the possibility of two or more positions or when the less knowledgeable speaker is oriented to disagreement. We conclude with implications for pedagogic practice.

In this study, we draw data from a tripartite telecollaborative project that involved 112 teacher candidates (TCs) from university-based teacher education programmes in France, Turkey, and the USA. Theoretically, we rely on Pantic's (2015. A model for study of teacher agency for social justice. "Teachers and Teaching" 21, no. 6: 759-778) model of teacher agency for social justice and use discourse analytic methods (Gee. 2018. "Introducing Discourse Analysis"; from Grammar to Society. Routledge) to examine how TCs negotiated their agency for social justice in small group discussions around the topics of social justice (e.g. conditions of refugees and immigrants, gender inequities, and LGBTQ+ rights) in their educational contexts. We found that when TCs used agentive positionings in their discussions, their discourse involved first person pronouns coupled with will + infinitive structure (e.g. I will teach …) followed by specific plans of action, as opposed to when agentive positioning was lacking with the use of generic pronouns and hypothetical structures (e.g. teachers/everyone would/could …). We also found that TCs used the discursive space of telecollaboration to negotiate their agencies and had variable success as they navigated tensions in their beliefs and positioned themselves as future social justice teachers in relation to the discussion topics. Their positionings demonstrated their level of engagement and their individual/collective efficacy. Our findings suggest that future research should continue to investigate the micro-level discourse involved in telecollaborative spaces.

Numerous studies have attested to the consensus-orientation and cooperative nature of English as a lingua franca (ELF) interactions. However, limited attention has been given to moments of disagreements in ELF communication, with most of the little existing work focusing on disagreements in ELF academic or informal contexts. Consequently, little is known about how ELF users display disagreement in real-life business contexts. For this reason, this study examined disagreement expressions in five ELF business meetings drawn from the VOICE corpus to understand the nature of disagreement in ELF interactions. Following the identification of disagreement instances, the study used Stalpers's (1995) framework to investigate whether the disagreement was accompanied by a mitigation strategy that reduces its impact. It was found that the examined ELF business speakers express their disagreement in both mitigated and unmitigated forms with a marked preference for using mitigated expressions, indicating that the appropriate linguistic choice for expressing disagreements in a between-company business meeting is a mitigated disagreement form. Another main finding is the frequent use of disagreement utterances, suggesting that ELF speakers do not merely seek consensus, but they also raise objections and state their different opinions. One implication of these findings is that ELF encounters might not be as consensus-seeking and mutually supportive as suggested in previous works. Taken together, the findings of the present study extended the existing body of work on ELF disagreement and, in general, added further to our understanding of ELF interaction.

Teletandem (Telles, 2009) is a model of telecollaboration in which pairs of foreign language students from different countries meet regularly and virtually to learn each other's languages. Within this context, participants are expected to help their partners learn by providing feedback. The multimodal nature of this type of environment, however, may offer different learning opportunities (Guichon & Cohen, 2016) and have an impact on feedback provision. This research aims at investigating peer corrective feedback in Teletandem in relation to the different modes. Using a case study approach, we describe how three Brazilians offered feedback to learners of Portuguese as a foreign language. Data used came from 20 Teletandem oral sessions that took place over a period of three years and were stored in MulTeC (Aranha & Lopes, 2019). Data analysis revealed that CF provision is characterized by reformulations, with a blurred distinction between recasts and explicit corrections due to a combination of multimodal strategies. Results also indicate that error correction may be more (or less) emphasized depending on how interlocutors combine multimodal resources. Pedagogical implications are discussed.

This ethnographic case study explores intercultural and ethnographic engagement by undergraduate Hong Kong students enrolled in an Intercultural Communication course at a public research university. Ethnographic projects originated from virtual exchanges with undergraduates in a professional writing course at a private research institution on the East Coast in the US. Using a discourse approach as taught in the course, Hong Kong teams explored, analyzed, and reflected on intercultural communication topics as experienced in social networking sites. Hong Kong teams elicited from their US partners information on their personal, institutional, and professional contexts. Online interactions took place on Facebook over 10 weeks, and Hong Kong teams were encouraged to analyze their online interactions for an ethnographic project, a course requirement. The author investigates Hong Kong students' prior experiences and expectations, and if and how Hong Kong students engaged with counterparts in the US on Facebook to collect information on their topic, and if Hong Kong teams analyzed their Hong Kong-US exchanges. Data triangulation includes a pre- and post-project survey, Facebook interactions, and ethnographic projects. Findings indicate that the majority of Hong Kong teams used their online exchanges for analysis in relation to course themes (e.g., politeness, face systems, corporate ideologies) as well as commented on the cultural exchange as a learning outcome.

In a recent paper, Simpson and Dervin (2019a) offer a radical critique of the Council of Europe's "Reference Framework of Competences for Democratic Culture" (RFCDC). However, Simpson and Dervin's paper contains numerous factual errors, interpretative errors and category errors in its description of the RFCDC. We identify 12 such errors which invalidate the conclusions drawn by them. We correct all of these errors, and suggest that, rather than using Simpson and Dervin's paper as a source of information about the RFCDC, readers should read the RFCDC itself, before drawing their own conclusions about the RFCDC and the adequacy of the arguments offered by Simpson and Dervin.

This paper examines email requests sent by Indonesian students to Japanese university professors using English as their lingua franca. It particularly analyzes how students modify their email requests using internal and external modifications as a way to soften the force of the imposed requests. Data were gathered from a total of 56 authentic emails and analyzed using a framework contrived by Economidou-Kogetsidis (2011), a modified Cross-Cultural of Speech Act Realization Patterns (CCSARP) coding scheme initially developed by Blum-Kulka, House & Kasper (1989). The result showed that while Indonesian students barely use the internal modifications to soften the imposition of their written requests, they tend to rely more on the use of external modifications using supporting moves. This strategy can indirectly modify the illocutionary force of the request as the students ensure that they provide their professors with enough background information and justify the reason behind their request through grounder moves. This present study also shows a shift in students' communication style where brevity is highly preferable.

Marginalization in decision-making discourse results in disempowerment of the marginalized and detracts from the efficacy of participatory decision making. In ESL contexts, it is usually associated with English proficiency. But this view ignores the influence of preferences for different participation styles, an understanding of which is essential for the development of effective pedagogical remedies to the problem of marginalization. The present study addresses this gap by investigating discourse participation and marginalization from a participation styles perspective. Findings reveal that marginalization resulted from a failure to adopt turn-taking strategies associated with dominant participation styles. Implications for pedagogy are discussed.

Over the past three decades, the internationalization of higher education has evolved from a marginal position to a central focus for higher education institutions worldwide (Knight & de Wit, 2018). International students, as important actors in internationalization, contribute to academic, cultural, economic, and technological developments, and global competency and reputation of the destination countries and universities. Although internationalization and international student engagement have been addressed in universities' diversity, equity, and inclusion goals, few researchers have examined U.S. universities' organizational attitudes and underlying assumptions toward their international students. Through a combination of neo-racism and critical discourse analysis frameworks, we purposefully selected 10 public and private national universities with a broad geographic distribution and analyzed their website discourses of support in academic, social, and cultural adjustments provided for international students and discuss the promotion of intercultural awareness for both domestic and international students. Findings show that despite a relatively high level of intercultural awareness in supporting international students presented in some universities, more provide limited support and present deficit thinking and even overt discriminative discourses on international students. We argue the need for two-directional communications and understandings over one-directional demands and expectations from universities to students in the globalized era. Findings also reveal the necessity for universities to promote intercultural awareness, implement more inclusive university policies, and improve their support for international students.

It is widely believed that tourist trade has been the fastest developing trade in the world. In China, with the development of economy and the improvement of people's living standard, travelling has been an indispensable part of living. Therefore, tourism text becomes one of the most effective publicity tool to attractive tourists. A tour guide presentation is a kind of tourism texts. And as a new text type, it arouses many scholars' attention. Many scholars pay much attention to analyze the tour guide presentation based on translation, such as principles and strategies of translation. Few scholars try to analyze it from an angel of linguistics. Both spoken language and written language are tools of human communication. And they all bear different function. According to Halliday's Systemic Functional Grammar, he holds an idea that language has three metafunctions. They are ideational, interpersonal and textual function. This paper tries to analyze a tour guide presentation based on Halliday's Systemic Functional Grammar. And this paper points an asymmetrical power structure between a tour guide and tourists. And this paper also presents some suggestions about how to write a good tour guide presentation for effectively delivering information and attracting tourists.

Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC) is acknowledged to represent a social space where people interact with others who may not necessarily know them. They can also recreate their own identities in the course of their interaction. This study investigates ways in which the identities of speakers can be revealed by their use of language in multiple-participant conversations. In particular, the study aims to elicit the strategies that speakers employ the most by analysing the way they talk at a micro-analytic level, and the ways in which they organise and sequence their turns at talking. The results show that the processes of turn-taking and topic development are subject to distraction and breakdown in computer-mediated environments. There are many instances of pauses caused by frequent overlaps between participants. The accents of participants are considered the main feature which can constitute one's identity in voice-based chat-rooms. Other factors such as communication and technical skills, systems and server speeds could also have an effect on such communication. Additionally, the participants seem to employ certain strategies to overcome interactional limitations of CMC systems, such as the use of pauses, quiet and loud intonation, and stress of particular syllables of some words. These strategies can contribute to determining the speaker's identity.

Current communication is increasingly computer-mediated, dynamic, dialogic, and global, so students should master new information, communication technologies, and digital genres, as well as acknowledge the global role of the English language. Thus, this paper aims to offer a teaching proposal, to be ideally implemented in the secondary education English as a foreign language classroom, on how to develop students' communicative and digital competences based on a digital genre like the travel blog. First, a corpus of travel blogs was compiled, and the blogs' communicative purposes and prominent linguistic and discursive features were identified. Next, different lesson plans were designed on the principles of communicative language teaching and task-based learning, together with the corpus-based results. Overall, students are expected to follow a process-writing approach that enables them to interact digitally in travel blogs.

Based on the Communicative Action Theory, intersubjectivity theory and the interpersonal classification of metadiscourse, this study makes a comparison between the source texts and the English-translated texts of Chinese company profiles with a self-built parallel corpus, along the dimensions of lexical variation, lexical density, grammatical explicitation and metadiscourse use. The purpose of this study is to evaluate English-translated company profiles by examining the lexical features and intersubjectivity. The research findings are as follows. First, English company profiles show a lower degree of lexical variation and density and a higher degree of grammatical explicitation, and use more metadiscourse resources. Second, metadiscourse resources construct the intersubjectivity of company profiles by fulfilling the Universal Validity Claims required by communicative actions. Third, English-translated company profiles are much easier to understand, with a clearer logic and a higher degree of intersubjectivity.

While research on Western multimedia platforms, such as YouTube, is prolific and interdisciplinary, Asian portals remain unknown. We explore this field by analyzing the juvenile and intercultural uses of a popular visualization system in Japan and China, known as "danmaku" or "danmu". This technology inserts dynamic and contextualized comments on a photogram, with several typographical possibilities. Based on a corpus of 1,590 comments on "The Ministry of Time", collected from a fandom platform with millions of users, we analyzed the topics that arouse the most interest among Chinese fans. We combine content analysis, which incorporates coding and counting techniques of the categories with the most interventions (n>16), with multimodal discourse analysis (TV series, Asian platform and user comments). Results show that the viewers are most interested in the film genre (time travel), the characters, the plot, certain sociocultural contents, and the Spanish language. Their discussions address issues of interculturality, some topics that are taboo in China and the fandom culture in Asia. Our study illustrates the potential of participation, communication, and learning in Asian social media, and constitutes an interesting and innovative contribution to the field of media and digital literacy, with various suggestions to promote intercultural competence with the use of popular culture.

The study of teaching translation has always been influenced by the theory of foreign language teaching, regardless of the theoretical or practical approaches the researchers used. In the classroom, students are frequently bored with translating grammar because they are seldom taught how grammar works. In view of this teaching gap, this study offers new translating skills for students to enhance their understanding and readability of the translated texts. Dr. Randy Pausch's "The Last Lecture," available in both video and text, was used as the study material because of the special language features of speech and written texts. Using Dr. Pausch's spoken and written material, the study adopted Hall's (1976) intercultural communication patterns together with discourse analyses by Halliday and Hasan (1976), so that students can learn how to analyze coherence and cohesion in their translations with different communication patterns. The subjects for this study were 80 English-major students, and the tools are four texts from Dr. Pausch's speech and published books. Data from student learning journals and their pre-test and post-test results were collected for statistical examination. Rather than simply translating words and following grammatical rules, the study provides new ideas for teaching translating, enhancing the quality of student translations by melding the latter with their personal experiences of the words they read and hear.

This paper explores the interactions of a groupwork team composed of both local and exchange students, with heterogeneous competence in English, in an English-medium CLIL context at a technical university in Catalonia. Plurilingual and multimodal conversation analysis is used to trace how the students jointly complete an academic task. The research conducted specifically analyses how students categorise themselves and each other in terms of their expertise, and the procedures and resources the students deploy to accomplish the task. The data show that participants' heterogeneous linguistic repertoires are not an obstacle for successfully completing the task, for constructing subject knowledge, or for establishing a climate of mutual understanding and cooperation. The analysis refers to the tension emerging in the data between the interactional principles of progressivity --actions oriented towards task completion--and intersubjectivity--actions oriented towards resolving communicative difficulties. It also focuses on how co-participants mobilise diverse resources from their communicative repertoires, including plurilingual resources, gesture and material artefacts, in managing the task. The main argument put forward is that in instructional environments in which students are expected to build subject matter knowledge using languages that they are simultaneously learning (e.g. CLIL), considering their whole communicative repertoires as valuable resources for their learning is a promising approach.

From a discourse analytic approach, this study examines suggestion-response episodes in office hour interactions. The theoretical framework of relational work broadly informs the study. A total of thirty-eight office hour interactions constitute the primary data source, and the participants are 3 international instructors and their 34 Turkish students at two universities in the northwest of Turkey. The analysis demonstrates that the co-constructed suggestion-response episodes yield a large amount of instructor-initiated suggestions. Modality (modals and semi-modals) is crucial in instructor-initiated suggestions functioning especially to fulfill their institutional role as support provider in such office hour interactions. A closer analysis of the episodes also reveals that the international instructors fulfill a variety of functions (e.g., providing alternative ways as a solution; emphasizing expectations or requirements for assignments tasks and projects; expressing outcomes of a future action; suggesting a future action, etc.) while making suggestions with modals and semi-modals. Adopting a discourse analytic perspective, this study might pave the way for prospective research endeavors specifically in intercultural communication.

This paper examines explicitness in English as lingua franca (ELF) spoken interactions. Using a conversation analysis procedure, about 11h of audio-recorded naturally occuring ELF interactions of 79 incoming Erasmus students were analyzed for this purpose. The corpus was compiled by means of 54 speech events, 29 interviews and 25 focus group meetings and the participants represented 24 mother tongues. Research into ELF reveals that ELF speakers tend to use various "explicitness strategies" (Mauranen, 2007) in order to enhance intelligibility. The findings of this study show that there are indeed variations from standard ENL forms with respect to the degree of explicitness in spoken interactions. There is a tendency among ELF speakers to make the meaning more explicit for the listeners. Repetitions of same expressions in subsequent sentences, use of over-explicit forms, use of an extra subject following a relative clause and use of emphatic reference are the emerging patterns observed in this study.

The history of English language education is punctuated with teaching and learning theories and approaches advocated by different communities of practice. One of such recent trend is the support for the integration of intercultural communicative competence (ICC) in the English language classroom. To date, minimal studies have examined this extension of the English language classroom. Hence, to determine the teaching practice of ICC this study looked at the identity-in-practice and -in-discourse, as well as sources of pedagogical knowledge of four English teachers teaching at private institutions in Bangkok. This study employed a discourse analysis approach to first identify the participants' emergent trajectories and funds of knowledge, and subsequently compared the findings with the fundamental principles of intercultural education, or the community of practice that support ICC. The findings indicated that while some participants' trajectories paralleled the tenets of ICC, there were also divergent ones. This reflected the contextualization of intercultural education, as well as the teachers' (lack of) knowledge regarding ICC. More than this, the findings also indicated the viability of a community of practice, especially for intercultural education, in a disparate educational sector.

This paper uses conversation analysis (CA) to examine telephone conversation openings in an unwritten and understudied language, Rushani, spoken primarily in remote, mountainous areas of Tajikistan and Afghanistan. In a sample of three telephone conversations, examples are sought of the four opening sequences of telephone calls originally identified by Schegloff (1986): summons-answer; identification-recognition; greetings; and initial inquiries. At first glance, telephone conversation openings in Rushani appear to skip over the greeting stage and move directly into an extended exchange of initial inquiries. However, upon closer analysis, it is argued that a Rushani word that translates as "How are you" is in fact used by conversation participants as a greeting. The paper concludes with an argument that the study supports a "universalist" position of CA as applied to calls conducted in languages other than English (Luke & Pavlidou, 2002). Despite their apparent form as initial inquiries, greetings in telephone conversations in Rushani serve precisely the same function and resolve the same "interactional issues" as greetings in other languages (Schegloff, 1986).