Australian Review of Applied Linguistics - Volume 32, Issue 1, 2009

The paper presents preliminary findings of a project which investigated whether learner background, in terms of instruction mode (i.e., school or intensive first-year course at university) and first language (i.e., character based or non-character based), has an impact on the development of writing skills in Japanese as a second language (JSL). Many students in second-year Japanese at university are post-secondary (i.e., they completed Year 12 Japanese at school). They are in class with students who started Japanese at university (i.e., are post-beginners). The intensity of instruction that the two groups have received is very different. A large number of the students learning Japanese at tertiary institutions in Australia are also native speakers of character-based languages (e.g., Chinese). Although there is a substantial volume of studies comparing the effects of instruction mode on L2 development, little is known of how instruction mode and L1 background together may affect L2 development in adult L2 learning settings. The data for the present study include writing samples collected on two occasions from 34 students from a variety of backgrounds. The samples were analysed in terms of length, grammatical complexity and schematic structures, use of kanji (Chinese characters), and vocabulary. The results were compared in terms of study experience and first language. In general, the performance of post-beginner learners from character-based language backgrounds was higher on kanji use and a few other areas, but their superior performance was derived from the interaction of two background factors (L1 and study background). The results show complexity in how different backgrounds affect L2 writing task performance. The study has strong pedagogical implications for teaching a character-based language to students from diverse study backgrounds.

This paper examines multiple-response sequences (MRSs), occurring in adult Korean TESOL classrooms, to show the responses produced by students in the language classroom are not always confined within the boundaries of a single response, but are likely to be seen as mutually orienting to, and collaborating to produce a comprehensible outcome to the sequence. To analyse and consider what types of multiple response (MR) can be identified, and how the different types occur within those MRSs, this study adopts Conversation Analysis principles. By using conversation analytic perspectives, this study identifies four major types of MR (identical, complementary, collaborative and competitive).

This paper is based on an analysis of interviews, conducted at three primary schools in Melbourne, which sought to explore the determinants of code-switching between English and Chinese. Specifically, it examined school education and other specific possible determinants of code switching amongst Chinese-Australian bilingual children. The specific determinants of codeswitching that emerge from this study include: the length of residence in an English speaking community; the exposure to languages in schools and family communication patterns. The nature of school education played a leading role in Chinese language maintenance for the bilingual children.

Studies of the language we use to talk about pain – “pain language” – have hitherto been mainly confined to medical disciplines, and there has been little research in the literature in linguistics and applied linguistics. The appearance of a major new study on pain language, Chryssoula Lascaratou’s The language of pain, presents an opportunity for a review of the book in the context of an overview of this highly complex inter-disciplinary field. The quantitative, word-based MsGill Pain Questionnaire is summarized as a diagnostic instrument from the point of view of language, and compared to Lascaratou’s corpus-based investigation of the use of pain language in Modern Greek conversations between doctors and patients. The focus of this research is on the lexicogrammatical structuring of pain language, and the representation of pain in terms of cognitive metaphors.