Discourse and the Non-Native English Speaker

Discourse and the Non-Native English Speaker PDF Author: Michael Cribb
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781624992391
Category : LANGUAGE ARTS & DISCIPLINES
Languages : en
Pages : 379

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Book Description
English is now firmly established as an international language around the globe and as such is no longer the preserve of the native speaker and the inner circle of counties. It is estimated that there are three times as many non-native speakers of English as there are native speakers worldwide and that the majority of speech events conducted in English are solely between non-native speakers of the language. The increased use of the English language on a daily basis by non-native speakers is thus worthy of a study and the purpose of this book. For the non-native speaker, the day-to-day demands of casual conversation can often be met through collaboration and negotiation with their interlocutor. However, there is an ever-increasing need for the non-native to participate in specific speech events such as discussions, meetings, interviews, and presentations, where the construction and delivery of extended turns and monologues is paramount. This is particularly true in professional and academic environments where this type of discourse holds significance and value for the speaker, since it is often through this that their proficiency and professionalism is critiqued and measured. This book is a timely study into the nature of extended discourse and the problems that non-native speakers have in constructing this. The book considers a corpus of spoken data taken from the International English Language Testing System (IELTS) speaking test with an international dimension. It specifically focuses on discourse that is multi-propositional, that is, extended turns and monologues, and analyses this for breaks in coherence and comprehensibility brought about by miscues in semantic and pragmatic features at the discourse level. The main thesis of the book is that the construction of extended discourse carries with it an additional burden for the speaker, namely the need to package information without support from the interlocutor in such a way as to make a coherent interpretation possible. For the mother-tongue speaker, the management of this packaging is of second nature, but for the non-native, the removal of collaborative support from the interlocutor in the form of back-channels and negotiation of meaning leads to miscues at the discourse level which impinge on coherence. As these miscues accumulate and interact with each other, the coherence of the discourse is diminished even further and in extreme cases a complete breakdown in communication can be observed. Two key areas where these miscues materialize are in the semantic consistency and pragmatic relevance of the utterances as each one is added to the common ground. Semantic consistency refers to the need to maintain the internal specificity of utterances and the external consistency across utterances, while pragmatic relevance refers to the need to make contributions which are well-contextualized and relevant to the on-going discourse. The book is both a textual and evaluative approach to studying discourse. It contains copious examples of transcribed non-native discourse with commentaries that indicate where miscues arise and how these lead to a lack of coherence. The book also describes in detail a manipulation experiment which looks at the effect of repairing discourse on the perceived coherence, thus evaluating the psycholinguistic reality of the identified miscues. The book also considers the relationship of fluency to coherence and how disfluent performance can impinge on perceived coherence. The book will be of interest to applied linguistics and English-language teaching practitioners around the world as well as academics involved in the testing of spoken English. Aimed at postgraduate level but accessible to undergraduates, it is a must for anyone concerned with the teaching or studying of a second language such as English and researchers working in the field of discourse analysis.

Discourse Markers in Native and Non-native English Discourse

Discourse Markers in Native and Non-native English Discourse PDF Author: Simone Müller
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9789027253811
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
While discourse markers have been examined in some detail, little is known about their usage by non-native speakers. This book provides valuable insights into the functions of four discourse markers (so, well, you know and like) in native and non-native English discourse, adding to both discourse marker literature and to studies in the pragmatics of learner language. It presents a thorough analysis on the basis of a substantial parallel corpus of spoken language. In this corpus, American students who are native speakers of English and German non-native speakers of English retell and discuss a silent movie. Each of the main chapters of the book is dedicated to one discourse marker, giving a detailed analysis of the functions this discourse marker fulfills in the corpus and a quantitative comparison between the two speaker groups. The book also develops a two-level model of discourse marker functions comprising a textual and an interactional level.

Discourse and the Non-Native English Speaker

Discourse and the Non-Native English Speaker PDF Author: Michael Cribb
Publisher: Cambria Press
ISBN: 1604976578
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 380

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Book Description
Resource added for the Communication 108011 courses.

Discourse markers in non-native English

Discourse markers in non-native English PDF Author: Uwe Mehlbaum
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
ISBN: 3640528891
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 42

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Book Description
Bachelor Thesis from the year 2008 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 2,0, University of Bayreuth (Lehrstuhl für Englische Sprachwissenschaft), language: English, abstract: Discourse Marker is a term which is relatively hard to define. A simplified way is to say that it refers to words or phrases which are usually used to structure sequences of a speech or a written text. Examples of Discourse Markers include expressions like actually, you know, well or OK. Discourse Markers are lexemes which could often simply be left out, without changing the semantic function of a sentence, because they usually don’t contribute to the sentence’s truth-condition or the propositional content. However, they often have other important functions. Apart from being used in order to organise and structure a speech, they often indicate some aspects of attitude (Renkema 2004:169) and the relation between different utterances. Discourse Markers appear very frequently in speeches (usually every few seconds); in written texts they are very frequent as well, though usually not as frequent as in verbal speech. Discourse Markers can also give information about social dimensions, group identity and relations between communicating people (Aijmer 2002:14). Although this definition is by far not entirely comprehensive, it should serve for the moment in order to clarify the subject of this paper. This paper is going to explain the term Discourse Markers in some detail and then analyse the use of Discourse Markers by speakers of non native English, namely members of University Parliamentary Debating competitions (a close definition will follow in chapter 2), who are from the countries Germany, the Netherlands, Czech Republic, Turkey and Malaysia. It will be analysed and explored how often Discourse Markers occur in the speeches of different speakers and what exactly the different Discourse Markers are used for.

Non-native Speech in English Literature

Non-native Speech in English Literature PDF Author: Maria Sutor
Publisher: Herbert Utz Verlag
ISBN: 3831644179
Category : Corpora (Linguistics)
Languages : en
Pages : 326

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Book Description
Foreign accents in fiction are a common stylistic instrument of marking a character as the ‘Other’ and conveying national stereotypes in literature. This study investigates in a qualitative analysis the linguistic characteristics of non-native fictional speech, with a specific focus on the English Renaissance, the Victorian Age and the 20th-century war decades. After examining the concept of national identity and the image of the foreigner in these eras, the study undertakes an in-depth linguistic analysis of a literary corpus of drama and prose. Recurring patterns in non-native fictional speech are uncovered and set into relation with the socio-cultural background of the respective work, which leads to intriguing findings about the changing image of the foreigner and the phenomenon of linguistic stereotying in English literature.

The Emergence of the English Native Speaker

The Emergence of the English Native Speaker PDF Author: Stephanie Hackert
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 1614511055
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 316

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Book Description
The native speaker is one of the central but at the same time most controversial concepts of modern linguistics. With regard to English, it became especially controversial with the rise of the so-called "New Englishes," where reality is much more complex than the neat distinction into native and non-native speakers would make us believe. This volume reconstructs the coming-into-being of the English native speaker in the second half of the nineteenth century in order to probe into the origins of the problems surrounding the concept today. A corpus of texts which includes not only the classics of the nineteenth-century linguistic literature but also numerous lesser-known articles from periodical journals of the time is investigated by means of historical discourse analysis in order to retrace the production and reproduction of this particularly important linguistic ideology.

“There's like the Galleria and like all these like really great shoe stores”: Why non-native speakers do not speak this way and what it means for them

“There's like the Galleria and like all these like really great shoe stores”: Why non-native speakers do not speak this way and what it means for them PDF Author: Kathrin Biegner
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
ISBN: 3640867300
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 11

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Book Description
Seminar paper from the year 2008 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Comparative Literature, grade: 1,3, , language: English, abstract: Learners of a second language are confronted with different challenges. They have to learn new words and grammar rules and how to apply them. To improve their skills they need to be corrected or they must have the possibility to correct themselves by comparing their usage of the foreign language with that of native speakers. However, there are some implicit rules to using a language which are rarely detected by both learners and native speakers. One of these cases is the usage of discourse markers (DM) (Svartvik 1980:171). Swedish linguist Jan Svartvik assumes that such particles’ inadequate applications have more far-reaching consequences during communication than grammatical incorrectness (1980:172). In this essay I will concentrate on the DM like since it is amongst the most frequently used by native speakers of English (Fox Tree 2006:727, 2007:309; Müller 2005:197). As research has shown, non-native speakers use like less often as a DM than native speakers (Fuller 2003:200; Fung and Carter 2007:435; Hikyoung 2004:121; Müller 2005:230). Thus, I will firstly argue that the infrequent use of like as a DM is one feature by which non-native speakers can be recognized as such. Secondly, I will show that this deficit in pragmatic competence effects their communication with native speakers negatively. I claim that the reasons for the lower rate of like relates to its pragmatic functions and the way in which English is taught.

Language and Social Minds

Language and Social Minds PDF Author: Vittorio Tantucci
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108484824
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 207

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Book Description
Proposes a new empirical model to analyse how humans can express social cognition at different levels of complexity.

Non-Native Language Teachers

Non-Native Language Teachers PDF Author: Enric Llurda
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 0387245650
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 311

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Book Description
As non-natives are increasingly found teaching languages, particularly English, both in ESL and EFL contexts, the identification of their specific contributions and their main strengths has become more relevant than ever. This volume provides different approaches to the study of non-native teachers: NNS teachers as seen by students, teachers, graduate supervisors, and by themselves. It contributes seldom-explored perspectives, like classroom discourse analysis, and social-psychological framework to discuss conceptions of NNS teachers.

Language for Teaching Purposes

Language for Teaching Purposes PDF Author: Emma Riordan
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319710052
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 227

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Book Description
This book’s innovative approach proposes Language for Teaching Purposes as a distinct field of enquiry and practice within Language for Specific Purposes. It uses robust theoretical and empirical evidence to demonstrate the specificity of language used by teachers teaching language, and the complex decisions teachers make around language choice and use in language classrooms. These complexities are shown to affect Non-native Speaker Language Teachers in particular so that their language needs must be met in teacher training programmes. Set in the Anglophone foreign language teaching world, this book will appeal to anyone involved in teacher training, language teaching or the investigation of classroom discourse.