Australian Review of Applied Linguistics - Volume 13, Issue 1, 1990

This paper explores the practice of meaning elaboration in language teaching. From observations of eight English language tutors at work, it is observed that there are six dimensions which may be exploited in the process. The explanation may link an item to others within the linguistic system by means of sense relations, it may specify the semantic attributes or components that are considered salient, it may indicate the referents of the item, it may contextualize the item, or specify the preconditions for its occurrence, or it may invoke metalanguage. Discourse devices may be employed to indicate which of these aspects are being employed. The paper examines in detail the processes of contextualization and the specification of preconditions.

This paper presents data from a longitudinal study of Vietnamese refugee families acquiring Australian-English. Specifically, the paper is concerned with Vietnamese acquiring proficiency with vowels. It documents the progress made by four members of a Vietnamese family across their first year in the country, reporting on two areas of production known to be difficult for Vietnamese: the long-short vowel distinctions, and diphthongs before a final consonant. It also reports on the subjects’ discrimination of the monophthongal vowels of Australian-English. It is shown that, for this family, the long-short distinctions are particularly problematic in terms of both production and discrimination. The report is presented as a family case study. Psycho-social factors influencing the development of the four family members are discussed. It is stressed that we as teachers and researchers need to be aware of these factors, particularly those relating to the family – the most important social unit in Vietnamese culture.

The author argues that the differences in the ways of speaking prevailing in different societies and different communities are profound and systematic, and reflect the different cultural values. In the past, the extent of the differences between different language communities in their ways of speaking was often underestimated. In particular, the search for universals in language use inspired by language philosophers such as Paul Grice (1975, 1981) and John Searle (1969, 1979) often led to the identification of the mainstream American English with the “normal human ways of speaking”. The last decade has witnessed a growing reaction against this kind of misguided universalism,resulting in the birth of a new discipline: cross-cultural pragmatics. The progress of this new discipline, however, has been hampered by the lack of a suitable metalanguage. Researchers in this field tend to rely heavily on vague and undefined terms such as “directness”, “indirectness”, “harmony”, “solidarity”, which are used differently by different authors, or by the same authors but on different occasions. This leads to confusion, and to a lack of consensus and clarity even on the most basic points. The author argues that to compare cultures in a truly illuminating way we need a culture-independent perspective, and that one can reach such a perspective by relying on a natural semantic metalanguage, based on universal semantic primitives. These claims are illustrated in the paper with numerous examples.

This articles reports on the fieldwork methodology that was adopted to collect naturally occurring conversations within an Italo-Australian family. In particular, it focusses on the gradual development of the researcher’s position from an outsider to the family network to an insider of a special kind, as reflected through gradual changes in the topics and discourse structure of the conversations, the participants’ constellation and the languages used. The articles evaluates some major adjustments that had to be made to the ethnographic methods adopted as initial fieldwork models. It concludes that any method needs modifications in order to suit the specific speech community under scrutiny as well as the linguistic focus of the research.

This paper examines the debate between process and genre approaches to language teaching and learning in a particular cross-cultural and English as a Second Language setting. It argues a position based on the analysis of both the respective theoretical assumptions as well as the evidence from classroom practice.

The study examined the effects of fixed criteria, training and moderation on reliability of ratings assigned to written scripts. Using an item response analysis, consistency of inter and intra rater reliability of scoring patterns were examined under changing conditions. Ratings were assigned twice under workshop conditions and once under unsupervised isolated conditions. The workshops were used to identify criteria used by raters and then to obtain an agreed set of criteria using a consensus moderation approach. Results indicate that raters are influenced by their backgrounds, the moderation procedure and by the criteria depending on the circumstances under which the ratings were assigned. However a lack of fit of the ratings to a single dimension model over time, suggests that the raters may change their criteria under different conditions. Although similar ratings may be assigned different criteria are employed by the same rater over time. The results seriously question the use of classical measurement approaches in the assessment of rater reliability.