International education constitutes a key industry in Australia and international students represent a third of university students at Australian universities. This paper examines the media representation of international students in terms of their English language proficiency. The study applies Critical Discourse Analysis to the multimodal data…

Focusing specifically on the negotiation of commonality, this study explores rapport building (Spencer-Oatey, 2000) in online intercultural text chat, where Australian students of Italian interact with L1 Italian speakers. Although the initial purpose of the examined chat exchanges is to facilitate L2 acquisition, analysis of transcripts indicates…

Based on Darvin and Norton's (2015) reconceptualization of identity theory highlighting the recursive relationship between identity, capital, and ideology, this study posits that refugee and asylum seeker adolescents and adults in transit on Nauru are ascribed a 'displacement identity' through externally imposed normative ideologies. In addressing…

Within the theoretical and methodological framework of Conversation Analysis, the present study explores the nature of the native speaker (NS) and nonnative speaker (NNS) identities in repair practices of English conversation. It has identified and analyzed in detail repair sequences in the data and has also conducted quantitative analyses in…

This study seeks to examine variations in patterns of interactivity as they are displayed in the ongoing discourse construction of high and low self-efficacy learners of Spanish in the context of computer-mediated-communication. The paper specifically focuses on the analysis of synchronous text chats of six university students of Spanish at…

Within the Australian education system, Aboriginal students' use of non-standard English features is often viewed simplistically as evidence of non-attainment of literacy and oral-English milestones. One reason for this is the widespread use of assessment tools which fail to differentiate between native-English speakers and students who are…

Critical directions in applied linguistics can be understood in various ways. The term "critical" as it has been used in "critical applied linguistics," "critical discourse analysis," "critical literacy" and so forth, is now embedded as part of applied linguistic work, adding an overt focus on questions of power and inequality to discourse…

In today's second language classrooms, students are often asked to work in pairs or small groups. Such collaboration can take place face-to-face, but now more often via computer mediated communication. This paper reports on a study which investigated the effect of the medium of communication on the nature of pair interaction. The study involved…

This paper reports on a study of peer interaction in ten foreign language (FL) classes, six secondary and four primary, over a period of four months. The focus of this paper is the nature of peer interaction, including the purposes of second language use, and language choice. The data, comprising observation, audio and video recordings of five…

This article reports on a case study of negotiation that occurred in peer group oral interactions under assessment conditions. Discourse analysis was used to illustrate how participants negotiated and co-constructed the assessment format itself as well as meaning exchange sequences. Analyses of the data point to the advantage of using peer group…

Investigates the processes involved in the learning of Arabic subject-verb agreement by Australians. It is hypothesized that the amount and direction of information encoding motivated by certain semantic categories as well as the availability of discourse cues would influence the learners' performance in subject-verb agreement tasks. (27…

An examination of approaches to analyzing speech reporting, found that the various approaches fall into two broad categories: traditional, emphasizing the syntactic dimension; and discourse pragmatic, emphasizing the interaction of syntactic, pragmatic, and stylistic factors. A model is proposed and applied to learner varieties of English and…

Examines what should be the oral component of a foreign language course. Structural, interactive, generic, and contextual constraints are discussed in terms of their implications for teaching. (32 references) (Author/CK)

Case notes from an Australian law course illustrate linguistic demands that this academic genre places on non-English-speaking background students. These demands need to be explicit to clarify the association between lexicogrammatical realizations and generic meanings in the discourse. Case notes and a reading assignment are appended. (Contains 26…

Studied the effect of content knowledge on learners' participation in interactions between nonnative speakers. Measures of participation included amount of talk, conversational fillers, back channels, topic moves, clarification questions, and confirmation and comprehension checks. Findings support the relationship between knowledge and…