Australian Review of Applied Linguistics - Volume 20, Issue 1, 1997

The number of ranks required for an adequate discourse analysis may vary between genres and can be explained with reference to the social purpose of that genre. Stages of generic structure were attributed to eight language testing interviews on the basis of apparent interviewer purpose, and this attribution was subsequently justified by the distribution of speech function types and mood choices between them. A problem in analysing the major section of the interview was whether to model it as a group of recurring elements at the level of stage, at the level of exchange, or at an intermediate level. The intermediate level of transaction was adopted, allowing for an model which recognises the common purpose and speech function patterns of the stage but also allows an account of how conversational exchanges group to construct both dialogic and monologic texts with or without the characteristics of other recognisable genres. Such an analysis is especially useful in assessing learners’ ability to engage in extended conversational discourse.

In oral proficiency tests there are occurrences of trouble in interaction such as misunderstanding, non hearing or lack of understanding which may cause breakdown in communication. Within the context of the question-answer framework of an oral proficiency test this study investigates the interactive nature of spoken discourse between students and assessors when there is trouble in talk as perceived by the assessors, with a focus on how they accommodate to the students. A sample of twenty oral transcripts and tapes of the 1992 Victorian Certificate of Education (V.C.E.) Italian Common Assessment Task (C.A.T. 2) were randomly selected and examined. By using Conversation Analysis methodology the purpose of the study was to investigate in repair sequences types of assessor accommodation – how the assessors modified their utterances – the kinds of trouble perceived by assessors, what triggered assessor accommodation and whether the accommodations facilitated student response and participation. This study has implications for assessor training since it highlights which strategies are most successful for ensuring student understanding, participation and appropriate responses as well as demonstrating why and in which environments assessors accommodate.

This paper attempts to portray the effects of demographic, social and cultural dislocation experienced by members of the Strelley Aboriginal community on shift in language(s) observed during the period 1976 through to 1993. In particular, the effects of individual rather than traditional group actions will be considered. While concentrating mainly on Nyangumarta, as the politically dominant means of communication for this community, this paper also considers the levelling of other Western Desert languages and dialects within the group. Changes in code mixing and the need for English as the language of formal education are considered together with an outline of the resulting implications.

Overall, learners of Mandarin tend to use overt nouns and pronouns to a greater extent than native speakers (Charters 1996b), but what specifically gives rise to this discrepancy? Differences in the distribution of ellipsis in learner and native speaker texts is investigated: both frequency and discourse contexts of syntactic structures associated with ellipsis are compared. Learners made no errors of ellipsis in structures where ellipsis is grammatically prescribed, nor did they appear to avoid such syntactic structures. In fact, the discrepancy in overall frequencies arises in contexts where ellipsis is optional; it is a consequence not of differing syntactic choices, but of differing pragmatic choices in comparable syntactic contexts. No single syntactic structure emerges as a significant contributor to the different rates of optional ellipsis overall. However, when individual variation is taken into account, it is clear that some learners use ellipsis only in syntactic contexts where it is permissible in English, and most learners use elliptic syntactic structures in a narrower range of discourse contexts than is typical of native speaker use.

This paper concerns the emergence and development of agreement marking in Arabic interlanguage. It investigates the effect of competing structures (pragmatics, semantics and morphosyntax) on the development of Arabic subject-verb agreement morphology. It is hypothesised that Arabic Interlanguage morphology is constrained by the availability of processing strategies (Clahsen, 1986) and competing information structures (Bates and McWhinney, 1981; 1987) especially when dealing with complex agreement patterns. The results show that linguistic complexity (a) influences the types of processing strategies employed and (b) determines the order of acquisition of different agreement patterns. It is also revealed that when the three information structures compete for interpretation of speech, morphosyntax emerges as the least influential eventhough it seems that S-V agreement in Arabic, at least on the surface, is essentially a transfer of morphosyntactic features (person, number and gender) from the subject onto the verb.

Women in politics in Australia have been in the spotlight recently as their numbers have increased over the last decade particularly with the unprecedented number of women elected in the 1996 General election and also with the 1994 promise of the ALP to increase the number of women preselected in winnable seats to 35% by 2002. Recent research on language and gender has shown that women and men use different discourse strategies when they speak and that women tend to be more ‘cooperative’ in their speech while men are more ‘adversarial’ (Tannen 1993). The context of this paper will be the highly public forum of the political media interview. The hypothesis that women avoid answering questions less than men is tested, showing that women do avoid answering questions less than men. The gendered use of different avoidance strategies is also examined but with no significant difference in the way questions are avoided. The use of prefered and disprefered answers, however, showed a gender difference with women using significantly more prefered answers than men. To define different types of answer and avoidance, the notion of topic used by Gardner (1987) and the Gricean Maxims (1975) are used.

This study aims to examine the different attitudes of the native speakers in understanding a written genre of Modern Standard Chinese—sales letters. The examination mainly focuses on the use of formulaic components as they appear in real Chinese sales letters and to compare these with the prescribed advice given in textbooks. To do this, 100 business students and 100 managers were surveyed for their views on appropriate business writing. The divergence of the views of these two groups of native speakers indicates that there is a gap between business teaching and business writing practice. The managers had a good understanding of the communicative purposes of the sales letters, while the students lacked this kind of understanding, which indicates the gap between business teaching and business writing practice.