Intonation plays an important role in understanding the intended meaning of speech since neglecting the study of intonation in the discourse leads to a misunderstanding of some pragmatic meaning. This study attempts to answer these two questions: what is the pragmatic function of the information tone types that are employed in Obama's speech…

Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC) is acknowledged to represent a social space where people interact with others who may not necessarily know them. They can also recreate their own identities in the course of their interaction. This study investigates ways in which the identities of speakers can be revealed by their use of language in…

With Conversation Analysis (CA) insights, this paper examines the textbooks used to teach oral English communication to Thai EFL learners in secondary schools. In an attempt to raise the awareness of features of naturally-occurring conversation and help increase the learners' exposure to these features, two textbook series, hereafter A and B, were…

This study investigated whether L2 English learners' prosodic properties in speech acts change as they are immersed in the English-speaking academic community over time, and if so, what individual and contextual factors (proficiency, orientation to language study, and target language contact) potentially affect these changes. Forty-seven Japanese…

Language education policies contain discourses that have language ideologies embedded within them. This study explores the language ideologies in official language education policy documents of Pakistan from 2000 to 2020. Using Corpus Assisted Critical Discourse Analysis techniques, a 1.28 million-word-corpus was generated from 32 policy documents…

This study presents a sociolinguistic analysis of a Korean-English bilingual child's code-switching practices from the perspective of language socialization. The ethnographic description and discourse analysis of a migrant Korean family's interaction in the US home shows how the social meanings of languages and language ideologies present within…

This study explored college students' use of a popular smartphone social networking application, WeChat, in a tandem language learning project. The research questions included (1) How do Chinese-English dyads utilize the WeChat app for weekly language learning?, and (2) What are the perceptions of the Chinese-English dyads on the use of the WeChat…

This study analyzes the narrative-based interview data of three Indian women to examine the manner in which they utilize stylization to construct identity-rich, ideological stances related to discriminatory discourses of Hindi and English medium education in the linguistically rich, albeit complex, present-day context of India. Stylization is…

This dissertation is a variationist sociolinguistic analysis of the variable word order and prosody of copular constructions ("Nicolas es feliz" versus "'Feliz' es Nicolas," "Es Nicolas 'feliz,'" "Es 'feliz' Nicolas," "Nicolas is 'happy'") in the Spanish of first- and second-generation…

The criteria by which raters judge pragmatic appropriateness of language learners' speech acts are underexamined, especially when raters evaluate extended discourse. To shed more light on this process, the present study investigated what factors are salient to raters when scoring pragmatic appropriateness of extended request sequences, and which…

In Spanish, it is most commonly claimed that constituents in narrow presentational focus appear rightmost, where they also get main stress (1a), while stress in situ (1b) is infelicitous. (1) [Context: Who bought a car?]. a. Compró un carro mi [mamá][subscript F]. bought a car my mom. b. Mi [mamá ][subscript F] compró un carro. However, some…

In this article I examine the collocational behaviour of groups of semantically related verbs (e.g., "head, run, manage") and nouns (e.g., "issue, factor, aspect") from the domain of business English. The results of this corpus-based study show that much of the collocational behaviour exhibited by these lexical items can be explained by examining…

Detailed research concerning the issue fluency, specifically relating to pauses, mean length runs, and fluency rates in Japanese EFL learners, is limited. Furthermore, the issue of tracking fluency gains has often been ignored, misunderstood or minimized in EFL educational research. The present study, which is based on six monologues conducted…

From a conversation analytic perspective, this dissertation investigates how talk-in-turns in conversation are constructed and organized in a way that minimizes gaps and overlaps between speakers. Based on an informed assumption that turns are built out of turn units that allow the projection of their possible end points, I first characterize…

This paper attempts to reveal some strategies performed by a teacher which indicate that s/he is exercising power in managing and conducting language teaching and learning process. Such power may be manifested in terms of the frequency of directives or of the holding of control over the interaction process. Despite the fact that exercising power…