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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.

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.

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.

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Vulnerabilities and ‘gatekeeping’ asymmetries often emerge throughout interactions taking place in institutional settings. This is especially true in cross-cultural interactions occurring in migration contexts, which are often characterized by an asymmetrical power distribution between the participants involved, namely Western experts vs. non-Western migrants, challenging a successful meaning negotiation. Starting from the assumption that mediation processes are central in migration contexts, where speakers from different sociolinguistic backgrounds interact in multilingual environments where there is an increasing use of lingua francas such as ELF, the paper will explore those pragmalinguistic processes and behaviours challenging successful meaning negotiation or leading to communication failure in such intercultural and multilingual contexts. A discourse analysis of spoken interactions involving asylum-seekers, language mediators and professionals unveiled participants’ use of strategies of hybridization, negotiation, and reformulation, activated in such cross-cultural mediation encounters, where meaning is negotiated at different levels – linguistic, paralinguistic and extralinguistic – variously and creatively exploited by multilingual speakers. The ultimate aim of the exploration of spoken specialized discourse, related to medical and legal integration, to mediated migration narratives, as well as to cross-cultural representations of traumatic experiences, is to promote intercultural awareness, cultural diversity and plurilingualism, and to raise concern towards current ethical issues connected to identity and displacement in the new multilingual and multicultural European societies.

The hymn "Salam Farmandeh" was a phenomenon that was reproduced in at least 35 copies in different languages and dialects less than a year after its first launch in Iran. From the perspective of an intercultural communication that can be seen as a cultural phenomenon, this anthem was also reproduced in the language of the Republic of Azerbaijan. The aim of this research is to investigate the comparative discourse analysis of Persian and Turkish versions with an intercultural communication approach. The data analysis is based on two methods of semiotics and discourse. The theoretical framework of the research is based on the theories of diffusion and, identity negotiation. The findings show that this hymn, in general, is understood and reproduced outside the borders of Iran, especially for Shia minorities in the Caucasus, as a manifestation of a cultural resistance against the globalized western culture. The discourse governing the Turkish version is formed around three basic aspects: "Introducing Imam Zaman (AS) to the youth", "Actively waiting for his reappearance “and "Building the future of Azerbaijan, according to its religious identity". In comparing the Turkish version with the Persian one, the two basic meanings of "introducing Imam Zaman to teenagers" and "actively waiting for the appearance of Imam Zaman" were repeated, around which the discourse of the Persian version was also formed.

Empathy, broadly defined as the ability to experience another's emotions and perceptions, is one of the major attitudes and actions underpinning an individual's participation in dialogue across diversity. The goal of this methodological paper is to operationalize empathy as a discursive construct, manifested in children and adolescent dialogic interactions. A coding scheme is developed based on three distinct steps. First, a review of the operational definitions of empathy is carried out, to capture how its related values, skills, and dispositions have been detected thus far. Second, the definitional elements resulting from this overview are represented in the dialogical notion of other-orientedness, which can be manifested, actually and potentially, in discourse. Moves are distinguished in 8 categories based on their disposition to be potentially other-oriented (dialogicity), which becomes actually manifested depending on their relevance to the discourse they are used in. Dialogicity and relevance are captured by the coding scheme proposed in this paper, which is validated and used to illustrate how it can reveal dialogical empathy and the development of common ground in interactions. • Providing a validated coding scheme for capturing the manifestations of dialogical empathy in dialogues. • Operationalizing empathy for the purposes of discourse analysis. • Showing the relationship between dialogical empathy and other-oriented moves. • Reviewing the operational definitions of empathy in psychology, discourse studies, and rhetoric. • Providing a tool for analyzing conflicts of "common" grounds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]