How do English as a lingua franca (ELF) speakers achieve multimodal cohesion on the basis of their specific interests and cultural backgrounds? From a dialogic and collaborative view of communication, this study focuses on how verbal and nonverbal modes cohere together during intercultural conversations. ...
Read More
How do English as a lingua franca (ELF) speakers achieve multimodal cohesion on the basis of their specific interests and cultural backgrounds? From a dialogic and collaborative view of communication, this study focuses on how verbal and nonverbal modes cohere together during intercultural conversations. The data include approximately 160-minute transcribed video recordings of ELF interactions with 4 groups of university students who engaged in the following two classroom tasks: responding to a film excerpt and a music video. The results showed that individual participants engaged in the processes of initiation and response to support or challenge one another using a range of communication strategies. The results further indicated that during the discursive activities, the small groups achieved multimodal cohesion by deploying specific embodied resources in four types of participation structure: (1) interlock, (2) unison, (3) plurality and (4) dominance. Future research may broaden our understanding of the embodied interaction that is involved in intercultural conversation.
This paper is concerned with the analysis of the spoken language of teenagers, taken from a newly developed specialised corpus the British and Taiwanese Teenage Intercultural Communication Corpus (BATTICC). More specifically, the study employs a discourse analytical approach to examine vague language ...
Read More
This paper is concerned with the analysis of the spoken language of teenagers, taken from a newly developed specialised corpus the British and Taiwanese Teenage Intercultural Communication Corpus (BATTICC). More specifically, the study employs a discourse analytical approach to examine vague language in an intercultural context among a group of British and Taiwanese adolescents, paying particular attention to the three categories of vague expressions: (a) vague categories, (b) approximations and (c) hedging. Initial quantitative analysis is employed to inform further qualitative analysis to identify the pragmatic functions of each type of vague langue. The different use of vague expressions between Taiwanese and British participants will also be presented in detail. The research findings demonstrate the pedagogical merit of the analyses of naturally-occurring discourse and thus help in the design of English courses for adolescent intercultural interaction.