Previous research has indicated that asylum interviewers--contrary to recommendations--use more closed than open questions to elicit information. In the current study, we investigated how information is elicited in asylum interviews by analyzing question-answer pairs in 105 official Finnish asylum interview transcripts. We developed a new coding…

The reported study investigated how newlyweds linguistically encode changes in relationship commitment in retrospective courtship narratives. In particular, we explored their use of emotion words and its correspondence with "temporal agency," that is, the attribution of temporal change to human actors or to abstract events and processes.…

Emotion characterises learners' feedback experiences. While the failure-to-fail literature suggests that emotion may be important, little is known about the role of emotion for educators. Secondary analyses were therefore conducted on data exploring 110 trainers' and trainees' feedback experiences. Group and individual narrative interviews were…

Using a natural language processing tool, this study examined participant discourse in personalized learning schools to better understand what personalized learning looks like in practice. Term frequency-inverse document frequency (tf-idf) was used to identify the significant words and potential emergent themes for 134 interview transcripts. This…

As an interactional encounter between a journalist and one or more newsworthy public figures, an interview program is a special type of discourse that is full of evaluative language. This paper sets out to explore evaluation in interview programs from the perspective of appraisal system. The corpus software used in this study is UAM CorpusTool…

Oral Proficiency Interviews (OPIs) are widely used to measure speaking ability in a second or foreign language. The Michigan English Language Assessment Battery (MELAB) Speaking Test is an OPI used for academic and professional purposes around the world. However, little research on this or other OPIs has quantitatively compared test takers' speech…

This paper proposes a discourse-based approach to the language documentation of local ecological knowledge (LEK). The knowledge, skills, beliefs, cultural worldviews, and ideologies that shape the way a community interacts with its environment can be examined through the discourse in which LEK emerges. 'Discourse-based' refers to two components:…

For Vygotsky, language is a cultural-psychological concept emerged from social interactions and is applied for higher cognitive functions such as thinking, meaning making, and knowledge construction. In this study, a sociocultural perspective was applied to analyze the language produced by 40 sophomore Iranian EFL learners during dialogic…

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…

This paper presents a study of pulmonic ingressive speech, a severely understudied phenomenon within varieties of English. While ingressive speech has been reported for several parts of the British Isles, New England, and eastern Canada, thus far Newfoundland appears to be the only locality where researchers have managed to provide substantial…

The goal of this study was to explore English instructors' application of accommodation strategies under English-Mediated Instruction (EMI) in English as a lingua franca context of higher education in Taiwan. English instructors' verbal discourses with regard to various types of strategies during instruction were documented and examined. The…

The classes, purposes and characteristics associated with the review article in the field of applied linguistics were analyzed. The data were collected from a randomly selected corpus of thirty two review articles from a discipline-related key journal in applied linguistics. The findings revealed that different sub-genres can be identified within…

Morpho-syntactic features of Modern Standard Arabic mix intricately with those of Egyptian Colloquial Arabic in ordinary speech. I study the lexical, phonological and syntactic features of verb phrase morphemes and constituents in different tenses, aspects, moods. A corpus of over 3000 phrases was collected from religious, political/economic and…

The purpose of this article is to examine the use of English discourse markers (EDMs) in medical consultations that were conducted in Spanish. Data are collected from an audio-recorded corpus of Spanish-language consultations that took place in a small community clinic in the United States as well as post-consultation interviews with patients and…

This article considers language learner agency from a poststructuralist perspective, focusing on how agency is discursively constituted as individuals position themselves and are positioned as (potential) agents within ideologically defined spaces. As such, I regard agency as inherently unstable and as a discursively mobilized capacity to act.…