In discourse processing, speakers collaborate toward a shared mental model by establishing and recruiting prominence relations between different discourse referents. In this article we investigate to what extent the possibility to infer a referent's existence from preceding context (as indicated by the referent's information status as inferred or…

News is a kind of writing style, which is so valuable that many linguists choose it to study. This thesis aims to conduct a systemic analysis of modality type, value and orientation under the framework of Halliday's Systemic-functional Grammar in order to explore the interpersonal meanings of modality in English news discourse. The research data…

This paper describes an intervention for improving the quality of peer assessment conferences in calculus. Although a body of work highlights the learning benefits of peer assessment, few papers have described the nature of student conversations during peer conferences/assessment in detail. This paper provides deeper insight into what those…

This study investigates interpersonal processes underlying dialog by comparing two approaches, "interactive alignment" and "interpersonal synergy", and assesses how they predict collective performance in a joint task. While the interactive alignment approach highlights imitative patterns between interlocutors, the synergy…

This paper analyzes dialogues between insurance sales agents and their clients in transformational rural China from the perspective of interactive frames, footings and discourse identities. Through the analysis of three types of talk, namely, friendship talk, institutional talk and task-oriented talk, the ambiguous and conflicting identities that…

This study examined the development of interactional competence (Hall, 1993; He & Young, 1998) by beginning learners of Spanish as indexed by their use of alignment moves. Discourse analysis techniques and quantitative data analysis were used to explore how 52 learners expressed alignment and changes in participation patterns in two sets of…

This study investigated whether parent perceptions of their own and their child's levels of talkativeness were related to objective measures recorded via the Language Environment Analysis (LENA) System. Parents of 258 children aged 7 to 60 months completed a questionnaire on which they rated how much they and their child talked. Six months…

By taking Hyland and Tse's (2004) interactional metadiscourse model, this study attempts to compare the incidence of the interactional metadiscourse markers in letters to shareholders of American and Chinese companies in the financial industry and their rhetorical functions. This study makes American corpus of 41 letters and Chinese corpus of 37…

This study aims at examining the frequency of interpersonal metadiscourse markers in academic written discourse and investigating the way Turkish writers use interpersonal metadiscourse, namely in MA dissertations from one major academic field; English language teaching (ELT). A corpus based research is applied by examining a total of 20…

This work is an analysis of small talk in the workplace. The study is intended to fill two main research gaps in the relatively young field of small talk in the workplace studies: On one hand, the lack of quantitative data that would account for the dimensions and the proportions of the elements of small talk interactions; on the other hand, the…

Professional development is an important part of creating a culture of continuous school improvement to maximize student learning. Rarely do we measure the impact of professional development on teacher learning, implementation and student outcomes. This study describes a professional development strategy for elementary teachers to promote…

This study adopts the revised interpersonal model of metadiscourse to discover whether and to what extent Chinese authors employ a varying amount of Interactional Metadiscourse (IM) in the past decade in English abstracts of economics Research Articles (RAs). The data was drawn from a prestigious economics journal in China to compose a corpus of…

Adopting a quantitative approach, this paper highlights findings of an exploratory study on Hokaglish, initially describing it as a trilingual code-switching phenomenon involving Hokkien, Tagalog, and English in a Filipino-Chinese enclave in Binondo, Manila, the Philippines. Departing from the (socio)linguistic landscape of the archipelagic…

Background: Even though research has increasingly focused on the qualitative features of natural conversations, which have improved the communication therapy for hearing-impaired individuals (HI) and familiar partners (FP), very little is known about the interactions that occur outside clinical settings. Aims: This study investigated qualitatively…

As part of an intervention project to encourage exploratory talk with young children in mathematics, it was found that, although the children did not engage fully in reasoning, the intervention had supported some children in developing more cohesive discourse. The cohesion was evidenced through the children's use of deictic words, in particular…