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In the current conditions of globalization and the use of English as a lingua franca (ELF), the notions of pragmatic competence and appropriateness as well as pragmatic failure become of paramount importance to the language learners and instructors. The current article discusses these questions through an approximate replication of Jaworski's (1994) study of pragmatic failure in responses to English greetings by Polish English as a Foreign Language (EFL) students. The need for the replication arises from the lack of studies addressing pragmatic failure of EFL learners and the need to approach pragmatic behaviour of EFL learners in the conditions of ELF. The replication duplicates the methods of data collection and analysis of the original study but alters the native language (L1) of the participants and expands the study through the analysis of responses and the ratings. The data consists of Russian EFL learners' responses to the "How are you?" greeting question in the examination context. The results showed that Russian EFL learners achieve pragmatical success: the majority of the responses was rated as appropriate by the English native speakers. It is concluded that the original study's concern with teaching pragmatics should be applied and investigated in greater details focusing on ELF. Additionally, the notions of pragmatic competence and pragmatic failure need to be reevaluated and applied in the context of ELF.

The present study aimed to examine the effect of proficiency on the pragmatic comprehension of speech acts, implicatures, and routines, as well as the way learners of different proficiency levels employ strategies when comprehending a pragmatic task. Thirty-three high-proficiency and forty-one low-proficiency Chinese learners of English completed a multiple-choice discourse completion task (MDCT). Of the participants, six were selected from the two proficiency groups to perform verbal retrospections to probe their strategy use in the MDCT task. The quantitative results showed that the high-proficiency group performed significantly better than the low-proficiency group on speech acts, implicatures, and routines. In addition, the analyses of verbal reports identified eight major strategies the learners used while performing the task, including sociopragmatics, hearer's response, relevance, keyword/key phrase, life experience/world knowledge, amount of information, intuition, and multiple strategies. The high-proficiency group showed a significant use of multiple strategies, life experience/world knowledge, amount of information and relevance. The low-proficiency group, on the other hand, indicated a significant use of intuition. Close examination further revealed that the high-proficiency group showed more flexibility in strategy use, thus leading to more accurate performance. Conversely, the low-proficiency group did not vary their strategy use, which normally led to incorrect responses on the task. Finally, the study closes by providing pedagogical implications for language teachers as to how strategy instruction can be implemented in L2 pragmatics classrooms.

Education worldwide was affected by the coronavirus pandemic when many countries, including Estonia, had to switch to distance learning. It was an unexpected change in education and required a response from relevant stakeholders. This study aims to understand the activities of different stakeholders as revealed in the messages of the Facebook group 'Homeschooling with technology' from 6 March to 26 April 2020. A mixed method study design was used, including quantitative and qualitative content analysis of 872 messages posted by members of the Facebook group, which were divided into eight role groups. Teachers, educational technologists, principals and parents represented local stakeholders while external stakeholders included members from government institutions, supporters, teacher educators and members with other roles. The analysis covered activeness of each role group, emotional expressions, speech acts and topics represented in messages. The results indicate that educational technologists played a key role in handling the coronavirus pandemic situation in education. However, local stakeholders also received support from external stakeholders. The results help capture the roles, experiences and views of different stakeholders during the educational change caused by the coronavirus pandemic in order to learn from this and to be prepared for such situations in the future.

Cognitive is an essential developmental aspect for children. The cognitive barrier is one of the learning barriers experienced by children with autism. From educational perspective, teacher language input can appropriately develop cognitive abilities of autistic students. This study aims to describe (1) teacher's language input for recognizing the cognitive abilities of autistic students in classroom interactions and (2) cognitive abilities of autistic students based on teacher language input in classroom interactions. The approach of the study was conducted qualitatively with case study, while source of data was oral texts from the teacher language input toward autistic students in classroom. The results shows that the cognitive abilities of autistic students can be recognized through teacher's language input in classroom learning by engaging interrogative speech acts, such as representative, directive, expressive, and commissive. The cognitive level is used to see the variants of the teacher's language input. Meanwhile, the acquisition of students' cognitive abilities based on teacher language's input is developed through memorizing, understanding, applying, and analyzing skills with criteria student A and B in the medium category, and G in low category.

Much research has been done in the realization of apology and request speech act but very few have explored this in the context of Arabic language. We perform a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) process in this paper to gather and analyze studies to identify the diverse apology and request strategies preferred by Arabic learners of English and the influence of culture and social distance on them. The strategies employed and the speech acts along with the native and foreign dialects and pragmatism involved are researched. Following a predefined review procedure, we identified 15 literature papers within the years 2016-2020 presenting research on apology and request strategies preferred by Arabic learners of English. The studies are gathered from various resources and illuminate the apology and request strategies in different contexts. We analyzed the papers to understand the preferred strategy method chosen and the logic behind it. Moreover, this study presents a related discussion and conclusions.

This cross-sectional study examined the effects of English language proficiency on Jordanian EFL students' production and comprehension of apology strategies. The participants were 270 Jordanian EFL learners and 90 native speakers of English. Data were collected using Written Discourse Completion Test (WDCT) and Multiplechoice Discourse Completion Test (MDCT). Descriptive statistics and the Spearman rank-order correlation coefficient (rho) test were used to analyse the data. Results showed that Jordanian EFL learners' production and comprehension of apology strategies are influenced by their levels of English language proficiency. A small to large negative correlation relationship was reported between Jordanian EFL learners' language proficiency and the production of explicit apology strategies and non-apology strategies. On the other hand, the study revealed a small to medium positive correlation relationship between Jordanian EFL learners' language proficiency and the production of less-explicit apology. The study also showed a significant correlation relationship between proficiency and the comprehension of apology strategies. Thus, teachers of English at Jordanian schools may need to consider focusing on classroom activities that can help EFL learners enhance their pragmatic knowledge of apology strategies.

Cyberbullying has become a serious global issue. Previous studies focusing on the prevalence and the consequences of cyberbullying have paid little attention to its linguistic features, especially in celebrity cases. This current study fills this gap by investigating the language that constitutes cyberbully toward celebrities from different cultures. Data were collected from the Instagram accounts of two celebrities representing Asian and Western culture, one is Korean, and another one is British. This study employed the notion of cyberbullying (Patchin & Hinduja, 2006; Smith et al., 2008) to label bully comments and categorized them into cyberbullying's type (Willard, 2006). Moreover, speech acts theory was employed to identify the intention of those comments distinguishing cyberbullying from other aggression. To compare the similarities and differences between the two cultures, direct and indirect speech acts were used. An analysis reveals that Korean celebrity received harassment, whereas British celebrity experienced harassment and denigration according to cyberbullying's types. In addition, four classifications of speech act were found: representatives, directives, expressives, and commissives. The findings show different forms of language are used. Indirect speech acts are commonly found in the case of Korean, whereas direct speech acts are frequently used in the case of British.

Although the use of technology for pragmatics instruction has attracted significant attention from scholars, the number of studies regarding the impact of self-access materials to this end is limited. Nearpod is a useful cloud-based application to support self-paced learning. This paper aims to probe the effect of learning through Nearpod on EFL learners' request performance. Researchers designed seven self-access courses to teach requests. The data was collected from 11 EFL learners through Online Oral Discourse Completion Tasks before and after the treatment. The post-test results revealed that the participants significantly improved their request performance after the treatment. The learners' responses in the pre-test and the post-test were also qualitatively analyzed for an in-depth investigation of the changes in their requesting behavior. The findings revealed that the learners stopped modality generalization and started using a variety of modal verbs according to the context of situation after the treatment. Additionally, it was indicated that self-paced pragmatics instruction helped learners overcome the pragmatic failures regarding the main verb use in request head acts. Furthermore, the differences regarding the learners' use of internal and external modifiers were also documented. After the treatment, they performed various internal modifiers that were either absent or uncommon in the pre-test data. Alerters and grounders were found to be the most frequent external modifiers in both the pre-test and the posttest data set. In summary, the results indicated that self-paced learning helped learners improve strategies for performing appropriate requests.

Language knowledge is not limited to linguistic competence; cultural norms of a society affect the way people communicate. In fact, culture, tradition, and values are realized and manifested through language and the use of units known as speech acts. The current study sought to explore the strategies used by 200 native Iranian speakers of Persian, 50 American native speakers of English, and 48 Iranian English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners in producing the speech act of congratulations through the social network of Instagram. Participants were asked to comment in response to the post and congratulate the celebrity for their birthday. The content analysis of the congratulations corpus led to the emergence of eight categories of congratulation strategies for Iranian native speakers of Persian (the most frequent one: "statement of congratulations," n = 80, 58.39%), nine categories for the American native speakers of English (the most frequent one: "use of address terms," n = 44, 30.34%), and seven categories for the Iranian EFL learners (the most frequent one: "statement of congratulations," n = 28, 47.45%). Moreover, the results of Chi-square indicated that the three groups were different with regard to certain categories of congratulation strategies. The results can have important implications for EFL teachers and learners as well as textbook developers.

The present study examines the influence of social distance and power factors on the use of internal and external mitigating devices and strategies in the production of requests by Korean learners of Russian. The data was collected by using a Discourse Completion Task (DCT) containing twelve situations that varied in the facts of power and social distance. The results of the study indicated that the learners showed preference for the use of interrogative, modal verb "moch" ('can') and politeness marker "pozhalujsta" ('please') among internal mitigating devices, and grounder and apology among external mitigating strategies. On the other hand, the learners demonstrated an underuse of such devices/strategies as negation, conditional/interrogative particles and imposition minimizer, which are frequently employed by native Russian speakers. It was concluded that the social distance and power factors influenced the choice of mitigating devices/strategies in the requests produced by Korean learners of Russian. In general, the learners employed more internal and external mitigating devices/strategies in the situations with greater social distance and greater social power.

This study explored the relationship between metapragmatic knowledge and transfer of learning from one speech act to another. Using a digital application, 105 Chinese learners of English received implicit instruction on how to formulate a high-imposition request to someone in a higher social status and larger social distance. Immediately after the instruction, they reported what they thought they learned or noticed during the instruction, which served as an indication of their metapragmatic knowledge. After this, they completed immediate and delayed post-tests that assessed their knowledge of the instructed speech act (request-making) as well as their knowledge of the uninstructed speech act, advice-giving (transfer item). Results showed that the participants made significant gains in their productive knowledge of both speech acts after the instruction. The participants' metapragmatic knowledge significantly correlated with their test performance for both speech acts. These findings indicate that transfer of learning from one speech act to another can occur after instruction. The findings also support that metapragmatic knowledge established during instruction is related to the transfer.

This paper investigates the phenomenon of greeting in English, which can be surprisingly challenging for speakers of other languages, such as Chinese. By 'greeting' we mean the seemingly 'simple' act of choosing conventionalized expressions at the opening of an encounter. Following pilot interviews with Chinese learners of English who reported puzzlement concerning greeting in English, we pursue a two-fold approach to explore conventions of greeting in English and Chinese. First, we use corpora to investigate pragmatic differences and similarities between conventionalized uses of English and Chinese comparable Greet expressions, examining them separately and then conducting a contrastive analysis. This step helps us capture the contextual spread of Greet expressions in English and Chinese. Second, we elicit production data from speakers of English and Chinese to investigate their behaviour in the broader opening phase of an interaction across various contexts. The results of the study help us understand in a differentiated way the puzzlement that certain groups of learners of English feel when it comes to greeting.

This study compared holistic and analytic marking methods for their effects on parameter estimation (of examinees, raters, and items) and rater cognition in assessing speech act production in L2 Chinese. Seventy American learners of Chinese completed an oral Discourse Completion Test assessing requests and refusals. Four first-language (L1) Chinese raters evaluated the examinees' oral productions using two four-point rating scales. The holistic scale simultaneously included the following five dimensions: communicative function, prosody, fluency, appropriateness, and grammaticality; the analytic scale included sub-scales to examine each of the five dimensions. The raters scored the dataset twice with the two marking methods, respectively, and with counterbalanced order. They also verbalized their scoring rationale after performing each rating. Results revealed that both marking methods led to high reliability and produced scores with high correlation; however, analytic marking possessed better assessment quality in terms of higher reliability and measurement precision, higher percentages of Rasch model fit for examinees and items, and more balanced reference to rating criteria among raters during the scoring process.

The quantifier "some" often elicits a scalar implicature during comprehension: "Some of today's letters have checks inside" is often interpreted to mean that not all of today's letters have checks inside. In previous work, Goodman and Stuhlmüller (G&S) proposed a model that predicts that this implicature should depend on the speaker's knowledgeability: If the speaker has only examined some of the available letters (e.g., two of three letters), people are less likely to infer that "some" implies "not all" than if the speaker has examined all of the available letters. G&S also provided behavioral evidence in support of their model. In this paper, we first show that a simple extension of G&S's model (1) predicts G&S's knowledgeability effects, and in addition, (2) predicts that the knowledgeability effect will be reduced when the speaker's usage indicates numeral alternatives are available. We tested the new model's predictions in four preregistered experiments. All experiments supported the first model prediction, replicating G&S's finding of a main effect of the speaker's knowledge. Further, Experiments 2 and 4 supported the second model prediction showing that the words that a speaker tends to use affect the strength of scalar implicature that comprehenders make. In particular, when the speaker has partial knowledge (e.g., has only examined two of three letters), comprehenders think that "some" is more likely to mean "not all" when the speaker also tends to produce number words in similar sentences (e.g., "2 of today's rooms have working smoke detectors."). These results have important ramifications for theories of meaning: the context beyond the sentence (e.g., the speaker's tendency to use particular words) affects the set of alternatives that comprehenders consider when inferring meaning.

Speech acts are a way to conceptualize speech as an action. Speech act of flaming is an utterance that expresses insults; swearing; and hateful; intense language in hostile online interaction. Flaming is an expressive speech act and often leads to the trading of insults between members within a certain conversation. Social media is one of the platforms that has been used to express, comment and voice out emotions. In this study, the speech act of flaming in a Twitter status will be analysed based on the Malaysian context. The data of this study is a compilation of Twitter statuses consisting of 2.5 million words and is labelled as Malaysian Twitter Status Context corpus (MTSC). The tweets were analysed based on 14 subcategories of flaming (Bansal, Nittin, Siddhartha, Kapil, Anuj, Sheenu, Kanika, Kunal, Kunal, Manav, 2012 and Revathy & Norizah, 2017). This study adopted the qualitative approach through contextual analysis. Findings of this study showed that flaming in Malaysian context can be direct or intentional; and indirect based on the intentions (illocutionary force) to offend other tweeters. Findings of this study show that language usage among youngsters specifically the tweeters are not in line with the values and ethics that have been practiced in our culture and society.

This study aims at exploring the linguistic habits of Iraqi Arab speakers and the situations wherein Iraqis invoke religion and the lexicon of Allah in their daily online communication. Throughout this work, it was sought to answer the question whether the religious belief of Iraqis is reflected in online chats Iraqi by involving situation-bound rituals in their CMC and the functions these expressions fulfil in this communication. Although computer-mediated communication lacks nonverbal behaviour and prosodic features support the speakers' polite intention, many researchers assert that there are many resources whereby individuals can resort to in demonstrating their solidarity. The Methods is based on examining synchronic messages exchanged on WhatsApp and Viber in four groups with the participation of 99 participants in total whose age ranged from 15 to 70 years old, with different educational qualifications and religious orientations. Social distance between the participants varied from intimate to neutral, and large. Likewise, social rank ranged from equal footing to low-high relationships and high-low relationships. The setting involved different occasions such as congratulations, greetings, farewell, thanking, offering condolences as well as receiving bad news. The findings of this research have shown that Iraqi Arabic speakers incline to enhance the politeness of their message by involving religious vocabularies that take mostly the form of supplication. Besides, the religious lexicon stands as a form of etiquette that promotes the speakers' and the addressee's faces. FIt is hoped that this work would lead to further studies related to religious expressions across computer mediated communication.

This study is intended to examine the deceptive strategies utilized in the well-renown Agatha Christie's (1926/2002) detective fiction "The Murder of Roger Ackroyd" to fill a gap in the literature by conducting a pragma-stylistic analysis of the novel. To do so, the researchers have set two objectives which are phrased as follows: firstly, examining the pragma-stylistic choices that are used to surface the deceptive strategies on the character-character level in the pre-dénouement stage and secondly, investigating the pragma-stylistic choices that are used to surface the deceptive strategies on the narrator-reader level in the pre-dénouement stage. The stylistic idiosyncrasies of Christie's Dr. Sheppard are carried out through an eclectic pragma-stylistic approach to expose his deceptive strategies for the fulfillment of his selfish ends. Therefore, the study at issue follows an eclectic conceptual framework which comprises Merzah and Abbas's deceptive principle (2020) and Chen's (2001) self-politeness, along with the stylistic effects achieved via the manipulation of such linguistic tools, to explore the two levels of discourse, namely, character-character level and narrator-reader level proposed by Black (2006). The qualitative analysis of the novel has exhibited that Dr. Sheppard is an expert deceiver who principally relies on indirect strategies, as he is cognizant of the power of what is insinuated but left unsaid.

This study investigated online polylogues and the speech acts encoded in online discussion forums (ODFs) that occur as part of computer-mediated communication. These ODFs took the form of text-only online polylogues involving multiple participants who engaged in multiple conversations. The data were sourced from a sample of messages drawn from a corpus of 400 messages posted to the three ODFs: Becomingwebhead, EVObasic_internet, and Tesolflashmx. Four of the findings of the study are worth mentioning. First, the three ODFs displayed five types of polylogal thread messages. Second, the polylogal frequencies and the sequential structure displayed by the thread topics varied according to the number of participants who posted messages, the topic discussed, and the intensity of the discussion. Third, the participation framework and the conversation structure followed both (semi)regular and irregular patterns of adjacency pairs. Fourth, some of the speech acts performed by participants in their polylogal discussions included greeting, welcoming, informing, advising, thanking, congratulating, and promising.

Election campaigns are constantly regarded as a persuasive campaign to convince the nation to vote for the leader of a country. Being said such, this study investigates the discourse of twitter of two political premiers in Asia: Former Prime Minister of Malaysia, Najib Tun Razak (henceforth, Najib) and Prime Minister Narendra Modi (henceforth, Modi), in the aspects of discursive strategies and speech acts during election campaigns. The discourse of Najib and Modi are selected due to their active participation on Twitter throughout election campaigns. The data were collected over 3 months throughout the national elections of both the countries, which were from February to April 2013 in Malaysia and January to March 2014 in India. This qualitative study employs Wodak's discursive strategies to analyze the lexical choices utilized in the election tweets and Searle's speech act taxonomy to analyze the speech acts used. The presence of two major speech acts was highlighted during the elections: commissives and directives. These two speech acts collaborated under the hood of discursive strategies of predication and perspectivation that empowered Najib and Modi to establish a strong contact with citizens while creating a sense of integrity and oneness. This study is significant as it creates political and language awareness to citizens by denoting how political figures establish power through mutual consent with citizens using Twitter. Furthermore, this study enlightens citizens on how the 140-character tool can influence the political decision-making of a community.

There is a lack of awareness of the use of compliments and compliment responses in the Saudi Arabian context. This research investigates, from a sociolinguistic perspective, the speech acts of compliments and compliment responses as realized by eighty Saudi students who study English as a Foreign Language (EFL). It aims to identify the semantic and structural formulas used by the participants to express compliments and to respond to compliments. The study also examines the roles of the topic of conversation and the participants' first language in the realisation of compliments. Furthermore, the study investigates gender differences with regard to the use of compliments and compliment responses. A discourse completion test (DCT) consisting of twelve situations was used to collect data from the participants. The analysis of the responses found that the dominant form of compliments used was unbound semantic formulas that were not influenced by the social relationship between the participants. Topics that are socially delicate result in the use of more implicit compliments than explicit compliments. The religious norms require politeness in the interactions between people, and this is reflected in the prevalence of implicit compliments. There is a wide range of compliments used with no fixed pattern of usage. Compliments tend to be given using adjectives rather than verbs. Gender did not appear to affect the nature of usage of compliments and responses. The research suggests that the cultural influences of the English language and western culture may be influencing how young Saudis use compliments.

Effective professional learning is acknowledged as a key lever to improve teacher practice. However, many studies report significant variation in the effectiveness of the types of programs on offer. Recently, there has been a move from the traditional single event, passive approach to more collaborative and ongoing forms of professional learning. Interestingly, researchers have paid little attention to understanding the experience of professional learning from the teachers' viewpoint. This research sought to develop this understanding by following the attitudes and behaviours of a group of secondary teachers as they participated in an ongoing professional learning program. This professional learning program tracked teachers as they participated in workshops and then applied the learning to their classrooms. Our results suggest five interacting characteristics that contributed to improvements in teaching practice. These findings underpin the development of a process model of professional learning, that we call the Iterative Model of Professional Learning (IMPL).

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.

As language acquisition research supports the value of the interactive scaffolded environment and awareness-raising communicative tasks for the development of pragmatic knowledge, the present study attempted to investigate the effect of Collaborative Translation Task (CTT) on learning and retention of request speech act strategies. The main objective of the study was to determine whether collaborative translation tasks, either from or to the target language, presented in a supportive expert-novice environment, might lead to more efficient learning and retention of pragmatic knowledge. For this purpose, an experimental study was designed with four experimental groups and one control group, receiving different types of treatment including CTTs, and structured input with and without explicit instruction. Three equivalent forms of discourse completion tasks (DCT) were given to 150 low-intermediate participants as a pre-test, a post-test and a two-month follow-up delayed post-test. The results of the study indicated that CTTs appeared to have enabled noticing and deeper processing of both pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic knowledge and resulted in improved learning and retention of pragmatic knowledge. The results also provide positive evidence for House's (2008) hypothesis that translation has the potential to raise pragmatic and cross-cultural awareness.

Using the single-group pre-posttest design, this exploratory study examined whether L2 learners of English can learn a speech act by experiencing perlocutionary effects of the act as feedback (observing their interlocutor's reactions to their choice of speech act expressions). Sixty undergraduate English learners at a university in China played a digital game, developed at the researcher's institution, involving 10 hypothetical request-making interactions that took place on a university campus. For each interaction, participants read a brief scenario description and watched a video that depicts that scenario. After watching the video, they were presented with four options of request-making expressions and asked to select the most desirable expression directed to the speaker in each video. Each option was linked to specific reactions depicted by speakers in the videos (perlocutionary effects). After choosing a response, participants were shown a reaction video designed to give feedback on the appropriateness of their selected response. Recognition and production tests were used for pre, post, and delayed posttests to assess participants' knowledge of targeted request-making forms. Results revealed a significant gain from the pre to immediate post-test in both modalities, but the gain was not retained at the delayed post-test. The effect of game-based instruction appeared larger in the production (Cohen's d = 0.83) than in the recognition test (d = 0.45). Participants' game performance significantly correlated with their test scores.

Research on pragmatic awareness of language learners has mainly focused on the target language. As argued by some scholars, a multilingual perspective should also be adopted in the analysis of pragmatic awareness. In fact, existing findings point to the peculiar characteristics of multilingual pragmatic comprehension and awareness. Bearing these aspects in mind, this paper focuses on the pragmatic awareness of multilingual learners while they are performing a collaborative writing task in three different languages, namely those of Catalan, Spanish, and English. The corpus consists of recordings from 30 university students' oral interactions while working in pairs to write three email request messages. In an attempt to provide a holistic and ecological account of learners' performance, pragmatic-related episodes were identified by considering Brown and Levinson's politeness features (1987) and Leech's (1983) approach to pragmatic competence. Results are in line with previous studies tackling multilingual learners of English and they provide us with interesting insights about the mechanisms that multilingual students activate when planning and performing pragmatic production tasks during collaborative work.

The main purpose of the present study is to propose a framework for implementing group dynamic assessment (DA) using students' smartphones for improving and assessing EFL learners' ability to produce well-formed and appropriate requests. This study focuses on five learner reciprocity moves during DA interactions to get deeper insights into the learners' development. During three treatment sessions, the participants of the DA style instruction were asked to make requests in response to a number of scenarios during mobile-mediated group interactions via WhatsApp. The DA group participants were prompted to revise and self-correct their incorrect requests by a sequence of incrementally-ordered hints from most implicit to most explicit based on the sociocultural framework. The analysis of learners' reciprocity moves during the three DA sessions revealed that learners became progressively more responsive to mediation for formulating correct requests and achieved a more agentive role to interact with the mediator. Analyzing learners' scores obtained from three testing occasions also revealed that mobile-mediated DA was significantly effective to promote the learners' knowledge of request strategies.

In this article, focus is on students' oral production in two classrooms in Swedish for immigrants (SFI). The study focuses on practices with interaction patterns where students are involved in negotiation of meaning. Theoretical basis is the importance of interpersonal interaction for language development, with a focus on students' use of varied speaker roles and speech actions. Data were obtained through observations, field notes, and audio and video recordings. The examples presented here demonstrate that students were involved in the negotiation of meaning and had space to try different speaker roles and speech actions, such as (among others) initiating, agreeing, dissenting, arguing, interrupting, and taking the floor. These examples only constituted a restricted part of class time, and most of the teaching was of a type where little oral or written interaction took place. Overall, we think that SFI education could be improved by developing teaching that stimulates and allows for negotiations of meaning and language production and also allows for use of different types of digital media, both for oral and written interaction.

Adopting the methods of multimodal conversation analysis, this study demonstrates that adult second language (L2) users with emergent literacy formulate requests as 'complex multimodal Gestalts' consisting prototypically of deictic or depictive gestures combined with gaze, situationally relevant material, and vocal or linguistic resources. The data obtained for this study are from classroom interactions and out-of-class service encounters that were conducted as part of pedagogical tasks in the context of integration training for adult L2 students with emergent literacy. The analysis shows how co-constructed request sequences typically involve multimodal negotiation in which the co-participants support L2 users to formulate requests that are understandable and that contribute to the progressivity of the interaction. The findings contribute to an understanding of practical requests as multimodal, context-sensitive, collaborative actions and underline the importance of this perspective especially from the view of L2 users with emergent literacy.

We compared speech acts and complexity of maternal speech to firstborn dizygotic twin and singleton infants. Nine twins and nine singletons were video-recorded at home in spontaneous face-to-face interactions with their mothers, from the 2nd to the 6th month. Continuous micro-analysis revealed that (a) open-ended questions, direct requests, disapprovals and complex utterances predominated in mothers' speech of singletons compared to twins; and (b) mothers of singletons and mothers of twins showed age-related variations in questions and in certain forms of complexity, respectively. In the framework of the theory of innate intersubjectivity, these results show that mothers of twins and mothers of singletons share the ability to adjust sensitively to their young infants' expressive behaviours.

The onset of COVID-19 has prompted world language professionals to reconceptualize best practices in second language (L2) teaching and research during a time of limited interaction due to social distancing across the globe (Morris, 2022). Not surprisingly, study abroad programs that once fostered communicative and intercultural development were put on pause, also halting opportunities for the transformative learning that can occur in immersion contexts (Leaver et al., 2021). Because study abroad can provide L2 learners with authentic L2 input and opportunities for meaningful interaction in diverse social contexts in ways that traditional classrooms simply cannot replicate, it provides fertile ground for L2 pragmatic development, particularly when supported with explicit instruction (Morris, 2017). This paper provides evidence from two studies of pragmatics that justifies the importance of getting back abroad to maximize L2 pragmatic development. The first study of 16 advanced L2 Spanish learners at home revealed limited pragmatic knowledge among all participants, including those who had studied abroad, thus pointing out the shortcomings of uninstructed pragmatic development. The second study of beginning L2 Spanish learners abroad confirmed the development of pragmatic competence among all students, particularly those who received a task-based instructional treatment. These studies signal that it is not only important to get back to Rome, per se, but also essential to support students in discovering what the Romans do, along with how, when, and why they do it, thus supporting their communicative effectiveness both in and out of the classroom as we move through and beyond the pandemic.

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to investigate how general, implicit instructions with auditory-perceptual emphasis; specific, explicit instructions with biomechanical focus; or both affect learning of oral-nasal balance control in speech. Method: Thirty healthy, vocally untrained participants were assigned to one of three instructional groups (i.e., implicit, explicit, and integrated) and learned to produce oral versus nasalized vowel-, syllable-, and phrase-level targets during once-weekly sessions over 4 weeks. Learning gains and performance variability were analyzed using nasometry. Results: We observed a significant main effect of instruction type on learning gains at phrase level (p = 0.016). Specifically, the integrated group (M = 59.8%) significantly outperformed the explicit group (M = 37.9%) and numerically outperformed the implicit group (M = 45.1%). For nasalized phrase targets, results revealed a significant main effect of instruction type on performance variability (p = 0.042), but pairwise comparisons between instruction groups were not significant. Conclusions: The integration of implicit processes via auditory-perceptual modeling and explicit processes via relevant biomechanical directives resulted in larger motor learning gains, especially at higher levels of task complexity (i.e., phrase) compared to providing implicit or explicit instruction alone. The higher performance variability (i.e., less stable productions) that was sometimes induced by explicit instruction did not negatively impact learning when integrated with implicit instruction. Clinical implications for speech/voice therapy models are discussed.

This study explores discourse markers (DMs) as they occur with compliment responses (CRs) in classroom interactions among Iranian learners of English as a foreign language (EFL). Using the tenets of conversation analysis, this paper draws on data from teacher-student interactions in several private language institutes in Iran. After audiorecording and transcription of the compliment-response exchanges, 148 DMs were identified within the responses. These sequences were analyzed to find out how DMs are combined with four distinct CR types; accept, mitigate, reject, and request interpretation. DMs were also identified and categorizedbased on their frequency of occurance and semantic features to allow comparison with previous findings. The results of this study revealed that Iranian EFL learners resorted to a limited number of DMs in responses to teacher-generated compliments, with "linking" DMs being the most favorable type. Moreover, some DMs were accompanied by a specific CR type which helped the formation of an intended illocutionary force by the complimentee. It was also observed that a DM or a combination of these markers can stand alone as a legitimate and functional response to compliments, which further reveals that DMs can contribute to both semantic and pragmatic meaning. These findings clearly suggest that explicit teaching of DMs in English language classes should be taken into consideration, as these linguistic elements can provide learners with important tools to convey their intended meaning more smoothly and effectively.

The lack of participation of girls in programming robotics is well documented in the international literature on the subject. The Inspired Towards Science, Engineering and Technology (I-SET) is a community engagement project that promotes science engagement in predominantly disadvantaged communities. In this paper, we present the findings of an action research project. The primary objective of this research project is to monitor and improve this community of practice. This research paper aims to explore whether girls encounter barriers to full participation in robotics competition teams. While educational parity has been reached in STEMI-related subjects at the school level, young women are far less likely to select STEMI fields at the tertiary level compared to young men. The I-SET community of practice is well-situated to promote STEMI fields to girls from an early age. Barriers to their full participation in the I-SET community of practice included male dominance in the everyday activities and speech acts of the teams; a lack of technohabitus; and alienation. Broader constructions of gender identity in schools and the communities that they serve presented a major challenge to coaches keen to actively include girls. These challenges were further compounded by gendered divisions of labour that left little time for girls (particularly those from poorer backgrounds) to practice.

This article presents the "modus operandi" of a game, the so-called Game of Shapes, which can be used as an active learning tool to teach Constructivism to introductory International Relations courses. While sharing our own experience of the development and application of the game in a laboratory with International Relations students, this paper aims to provide a teaching template that can assist in the problematization of the statist and individualistic ontology of rationalist theories. Hence it is an interactive dynamic that helps to introduce and open up the discussion of the contingency of the social world, which is the base to understand any of the several and intricate tenets of Constructivism and any other critical approaches. Most of the students' feedbacks were very positive regarding their comprehension of the content presented. They provided important feedback on how the activity was valuable in order to grasp complex concepts, important to constructivist theories in International Relations.

The aim of this study is to investigate how L2 learners develop their ways of expressing compliments in L2 as a result of a virtual exchange. Although compliments play an important role in the discourse of second language (L2) classrooms studies exploring production of this speech act among L2 learners are limited. This study explores how 18 participants realised the speech act of complimenting in English before and after their virtual exchange. L2 learners of English from Poland met in groups for six weeks, via video conferencing, with Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) teacher candidates from a university in the USA. During online sessions, the eighteen L2 learners' primary focus was on discussion in English. Quantitative content analyses were completed on the students' production and were further analysed qualitatively using NVivo 12 into researcher-created categories. The data provided evidence of change from pre- to post-testing in the ways the compliments were formulated by the L2 learners and of transition from strong L1-culture transfer, to some more appropriate use of the formulaic sequences in L2.

Numerous language-learning variables play a crucial role in students' pragmatic competence development. However, amongst many of these variables, factors like age, gender, and proficiency level have not been extensively researched. Specifically, domains like Motivation and its role in pragmatic development are understudied. This study aims to explore EFL learners' pragmatic Motivation in a study abroad context. A quantitative research design was adopted for this study. Data were collected from 160 university students through a general pragmatic motivation questionnaire and a speech acts-specific motivation questionnaire focusing on request, refusal, and apology speech acts. After collecting and analyzing the data, this study revealed interesting findings on students' pragmatic motivation, which was used to make pedagogical conclusions.

The primary purpose of this study was to examine the effects of a brief training plus e-mail-specific performance feedback (ESPF) on increasing preschool teacher's use of behavior-specific praise (BSP) statements. Quantity of BSP was measured using a frequency count, while voice intonation of BSP statements was measured using a voice recording system. A multiple probe design across four preschool teachers who taught in inclusive preschool classrooms was used to evaluate the effectiveness of ESPF on BSP delivery. As an outcome measure, researchers examined whether changes to the teacher's BSP affected children's task engagement during class activities. Results indicated a functional relation between ESPF and an increase in the quantity of BSP statements. Voice intonation of BSP statements increased for three participants following ESPF; however, a clear functional relation was not present in the data. Results also indicated that increased quantity and intonation of BSP statements resulted in a tendency for increased mean task engagement across all children; this finding may warrant further investigation. Limitations and future research directions are discussed.

Purpose: This study examined speech breathing during two connected speech tasks in children with cerebral palsy (CP) and typically developing (TD) peers. Understanding how the respiratory system supports speech production during various speech tasks can help researchers construct appropriate models of speech production and clinicians remediate speech disorders effectively. Method: Four children with CP and four age- and sex-matched TD peers completed two speech tasks, reading and extemporaneous speech. Respiratory kinematic and acoustic data were collected. Dependent variables included utterance length, speech rate, sound pressure level, and lung volume variables. Results: Based on descriptive results, children with CP and speech motor involvement demonstrated reduced utterance length and speech rate, equivalent intensity levels, and changes in lung volume variables indicative of respiratory physiological impairment as compared to their TD peers. However, children with CP and no speech motor involvement exhibited speech production and speech breathing variables in the more typical range. In relation to task effects, the majority of children (CP and TD) produced shorter utterances, slower speech rates, equivalent intensity levels, higher lung volume initiation, termination, excursion, higher percent vital capacity per syllable, and longer inspiratory duration during extemporaneous speech as compared to reading. Conclusions: Two major themes emerged from the data: (a) Children with CP, particularly those with concomitant speech motor involvement, demonstrate different speech production and speech breathing patterns than their TD peers. (b) Speech task impacts speech production and speech breathing variables in both children with CP and their TD peers, but the extemporaneous speech task did not seem to exaggerate group differences.

Educational research regularly claims, with lots of evidence, that humans learn from experience. However, experience is composed of outer and inner sensations. Thus, if humans learn from experience, we would expect that educational research would be replete with work on sensation. Yet sensation in the wild, outside laboratory studies, plays no real role in educational research on teaching and learning. This paper is based on current research, in several different disciplines, that sensation and feeling activate, guide, and assess cognition and that much of human thinking and problem-solving is based on associations formed from experience that are triggered quickly and unconsciously. We explore the nature of living things, learning and thinking without consciousness, the distinctive nature of the human brain and body, and the role of the physical and social body in cognition. The paper discusses some of the implications of a sensation-based view of human thinking and acting for how we study learning, language, and social identity.

Purpose: Differences between child-directed speech (CDS) by women and men are generally explained by either biological-evolutionary or gender-social theories. It is difficult to tease these two explanations apart for different-sex-parent families because women are usually also the main caregivers. Thus, this study aims to examine the influence of parental sex on CDS by investigating men and women who are in same-sex-parent families. Method: Twenty same-sex-parent families participated in the study--10 families in which the parents were two men and 10 families in which the parents were two women. The families were matched for toddler age (range: 9-24 months) and sex. CDS was recorded using the Language Environment Analysis (LENA) device for 16 hr during a day. Each parent was also audio-recorded during a 30-min play session with his or her child. Results: No difference was found between men and women across all the LENA measures, namely, adult word count, conversational turns count, and child vocalization count. The analysis of speech samples during parent-child play showed no difference between men and women in mean length of utterance and number of nouns, verbs, and adjectives. Pragmatic speech acts of initiations, responses to infants' actions, or vocalizations were similar in both sexes. Women used more "teaching" utterances than men, and men who were main caregivers used more "teaching" utterances than men who were secondary caregivers. Across both sexes, secondary caregivers used more "requests for actions" compared to main caregivers. Conclusions: The present findings support a functional-social approach and not a biological approach for explaining the use of CDS by men and women. These findings have clinical implications on the involvement of men in early intervention programs.

In response to calls for improving the quality of DCTs as data-gathering instruments, this study investigates the effectiveness of technology-enhanced discourse completion tasks (TE-DCTs) as a method for eliciting nonverbal speaker data. We used a mobile application to administer four TE-DCTs to native speakers (L1) and intermediate and advanced second-language (L2) speakers of Spanish. Each TE-DCT contained two scenarios with the goal of capturing nonverbal devices used in the speech act of attention-getting (i.e., devices used to draw the interlocutor's attention). The written description of each DCT scenario was supplemented with a short video clip to provide participants with nonverbal factors such as distance to interlocutor, bodily stance, and orientation of interlocutors. To capture nonverbal cues as part of the participant responses, the participant video recorded their oral responses to each scenario. The mobile application used was successful in capturing a variety of attention-getting elements, including nonverbal devices, in the majority of both L1 and L2 participant responses for all DCT scenarios. Drawing on this data, we argue for the use of mobile applications as an ecologically valid way to measure one type of pragmatic ability. In addition, we advocate their integration into L2 pedagogical practice.

Recently, there are limited specific researches on the pragmatic strategies of teachers' criticism from the angle of the Politeness Principle, among which most of them argue that teachers should adopt appropriate politeness strategies when criticizing students. However, only a few researchers point out that Leech's Politeness Principle is "other" oriented and neglects "self," which is too absolute, ideal, and unsuitable in teacher and student relations. In this paper, the author illustrates the true nature of politeness in teacher-student relations is that teachers should pay attention to self, show politeness to the students, and consider the third party (parents). Finally, the writer illustrates some politeness strategies, including criticizing with a sense of humour, criticizing in vague language, adopting empathy and showing politeness to a third party to show appropriate politeness to the students to make the criticism effective. The purpose is to make some middle school teachers recognize how to criticize appropriately.

"To what gender and status one talks" governs more the speaker, in deciding their culturally and socially accepted strategy in conversation, than "who talks"; as the airport runway dictates the pilot's landing strategy. This paper, employing conversational analysis, tries to explore how the gender and social status of the audience dictate the speaker's speech acts and moves in Muslim formal conversation in three functional topical units composed of 107 acts of directive, assertive, commisive, expressive, rogative, and 103 moves of initiations, responses, and follow ups. The finding shows that, to all female students, a male initiates and controls the conversation for materializing his social power by having more directive acts and initiation moves. To the high female, Low male uses assertive and response. While the female, regardless the social status and gender of the audience, uses assertive acts and response moves to support the interaction and social togetherness. The findings imply that the object to whom one talks is more crucial in describing the conversation strategy.

This teacher inquiry project describes how one first grade teacher learned to use coached language supports to improve children's self-control and cooperation. "Courtesy scripts" were created in the process. The development of courtesy scripts and their application in early elementary classrooms is presented. Courtesy scripts are specific phrases explicitly taught (I do, we do, you do), reinforced, and used in conversations by both the speaker and listener. Children learned how to make requests while also honoring the needs of others. Use of these pragmatic language supports helped to create a peaceful classroom community. A practical method for teaching courteous language patterns to young children is described by presenting scripts that can be easily adopted or modified by teachers. Scripts for peer requests and for sharing are provided as examples. The courtesy scripts method may be of interest to scholars studying the relationship between language usage and prosocial behavior in early childhood settings. Teacher educators may also be interested in the method when providing professional development related to social, emotional and character development or when teaching classroom management.