Australian Review of Applied Linguistics - Volume 21, Issue 2, 1998

This study is an attempt to investigate language attitudes of the older and younger generations of Vietnamese bilingual adults in Melbourne, in relation to their ethnicity in the Australian context and in the light of the historical background of the Vietnamese immigrants in Australia. A survey of 165 Vietnamese bilingual adults and students in Melbourne was carried out to investigate their language use in private and public domains, their appraisal of English and Vietnamese, their attitudes towards Vietnamese language maintenance, acculturation, and the question of their ethnic identity in Australian society. The results of the findings reveal that there is a significant difference between adults and students in various aspects of their language attitudes. Overall their choice of language use in private and public domains varies with situations and interlocutors. Although both groups show positive attitudes towards the appraisal of Vietnamese, the maintenance of Vietnamese language and culture and the retaining of their ethnic identity, what is significant is that students demonstrate stronger positive attitudes than adults. With regard to factors that influence the maintenance of Vietnamese, while adults think that government language policy is the most important factor, students express their confidence in the ability of the Vietnamese themselves to maintain their language.

A “concept-oriented” analysis of past time reference in the English of two French learners provides insight into the communicative strategies employed by advanced language learners. Although these learners have a limited command of past tense morphology, they nevertheless manage to establish past time reference in conversational discourse, utilising alternatives to morphological marking such as the use of adverbial phrases, implicit framing established by prior discourse, or “nil” framing, relying on assumed shared knowledge or the interlocutor’s interpretive skills. The two varieties of “learner English” differ significantly: one features a substantially higher number of morphologically marked verbs, with increasing explicitness in temporal framing; the other makes much greater use of implicit framing, with a substantial and unexpected increase in reliance on discourse-based frames. Neither learner shows evidence of linear or stage-wise development which would correspond to “rule-governed” acquisition of new knowledge.

This paper sets out to explore how to teach Chinese business writing with a combined approach based on schema theory and genre analysis. Very little research has been done in the area of teaching business Chinese except for the ‘recipe’ style textbook advice which fails to reflect a complete picture of business practice in mainland China. In order to fill this gap, this paper proposes a combined approach and exemplifies its application in teaching the writing of sales letters. The emphasis is placed on the teaching of communicative purposes of this genre. In addition, the learning of business Chinese is viewed as a dynamic process of establishing knowledge structures. The teacher can help the students in this process by providing them with authentic materials and by integrating the views of the enterprise managers.

The literature on autonomous learning indicates that role is a critical dimension in implementing learner autonomy. This paper examines the roles adopted by learners and teachers in language learning settings where the objective of promoting learner autonomy has been adopted. It does this first by exploring the ways in which different writers committed to autonomy have characterised learner and teacher roles. It then focuses specifically on language learning and considers how three variables – culture, learning mode and individual differences – might influence the roles which individuals actually adopt. The paper concludes by considering how new or modified roles might most effectively be presented.

This paper examines the ways in which callers structure the message phase of their contributions in which they express a point of view and how expressing a POV in a talkback radio is realized through the interaction of caller and host, and in some cases between the caller, the host and an invited guest. Expressing one’s point of view in a talkback radio segment is an extended turn found in a particular type of institutional talk and has it’s own identifiable structures and features. This particular extended turn contains within it a number of moves, of which only the POV itself is obligatory. Other moves within the extended turn have various functions, some of which are designed to integrate the particular contribution into a sequence of talk while others are designed as convincing strategies in support of the expressed POV.

Research into the linguistic descriptions of women have revealed that females tend to be defined in terms of their relationships to men, their appearance and/or sexual attributes, and that women and their activities tend to be trivialised (Pauwels 1987; Thorne et al. 1983). Additional, more recent research into gender representation has revealed dehumanising descriptions of women as food and as animals, such as birds and horses (Hines 1994; Stirling 1987). Such metaphors reflect individually or socially constructed conceptual associations between real-world phenomena that may serve to trivialise or enhance members of a given group. This paper reports on an investigation into lexical representations of men and women in the Hong Kong variety of English. Analysis includes all nominal and verbal descriptors of men and women and the acts performed by them. These descriptors were distributed into semantic classes on the basis of the qualities they reveal about their human referents. Results show that men are conceptualized as pro-active and assertive beings, to some extent born to succeed; while women are under-developed, emotional and in need of protection. The gender metaphors of women are compatible with concepts of both early stages of human development and subhuman entities, such as animals.

The study reported in this paper examined turn-taking and sequence organisation in a sample of twenty-one interactions derived from the 1992 Victorian Certificate of Education Italian oral Common Assessment Task. The most common adjacency pair was found to be the question and answer, the assessor having the right to ask questions and the student to answer. Student initiated questions occurred in five environments and only when conditions were created for them to do so. The assessor’s role was to open and close sequences and sections and to initiate topics principally through the question. Two types of sequences were identified, question/answer and expanded sequences. It was found that there were two groups of assessors. Those who predominantly set up question/answer sequences, and those who set up post sequences.