Previous psycholinguistic research has shown that Second Language (L2) speakers could learn from engaging in prediction. Few works have directly examined the relationship between prediction and L2 syntactic learning. Further, relatively limited attention has been paid to the effects of two linguistic factors in this area: structure type and L2 proficiency. Using a mixed experimental design, 147 L2 Arabic speakers with varying L2 proficiency levels completed two syntactic priming experiments, each targeting a different structure: (a) the dative and (b) Temporal Phrases (TP). The experimental conditions required participants to predict what the upcoming sentence’s structure would be. The experimental conditions differed in the degree of engagement in prediction error. Results suggested that Arabic L2 speakers at different proficiency levels showed enhanced priming and short-term learning for two syntactic structures (PO, fronted TP) when (a) instructed to guess only (constrained condition) as well as when (b) instructed to guess and compute the prediction error (unconstrained condition), relative to the controls. These results imply a guessing benefit for priming and short-term learning. Participants also experienced different priming effects by structure type, but there was no significant effect for proficiency. The theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed.
Numerous studies have attested to the consensus-orientation and cooperative nature of English as a lingua franca (ELF) interactions. However, limited attention has been given to moments of disagreements in ELF communication, with most of the little existing work focusing on disagreements in ELF academic or informal contexts. Consequently, little is known about how ELF users display disagreement in real-life business contexts. For this reason, this study examined disagreement expressions in five ELF business meetings drawn from the VOICE corpus to understand the nature of disagreement in ELF interactions. Following the identification of disagreement instances, the study used Stalpers’s (1995) framework to investigate whether the disagreement was accompanied by a mitigation strategy that reduces its impact. It was found that the examined ELF business speakers express their disagreement in both mitigated and unmitigated forms with a marked preference for using mitigated expressions, indicating that the appropriate linguistic choice for expressing disagreements in a between-company business meeting is a mitigated disagreement form. Another main finding is the frequent use of disagreement utterances, suggesting that ELF speakers do not merely seek consensus, but they also raise objections and state their different opinions. One implication of these findings is that ELF encounters might not be as consensus-seeking and mutually supportive as suggested in previous works. Taken together, the findings of the present study extended the existing body of work on ELF disagreement and, in general, added further to our understanding of ELF interaction.
Current English Language Teaching (ELT) textbooks have largely adopted the communicative approach by using authentic materials to foster EFL students’ communicative competence. However, the communicative status of Saudi high school English textbooks has been underexplored. One way to assess the authenticity of Saudi EFL textbooks is by considering their use of a frequent linguistic item known as lexical bundles. Thus, the present study investigated whether the lexical bundles in communicative Saudi high school textbooks are representative of conversational English. This comparative corpus study used a lexical bundle approach to compare the ten most frequent lexical bundles in the textbooks to those in an English reference corpus. Results show that three and four-word lexical bundles are less frequent in the textbooks compared to the reference corpus and that there is considerable variation in the structural and functional patterns of the bundles in the two corpora. Pedagogical implications are discussed in light of the findings.
The study of the Research Article (RA) genre has been dominated by genre analysis and corpus linguistics focusing on rhetorical moves and, or lexicogrammar, with little attention to the level of the message and the realization of different types of Theme and progression patterns. To the best of our knowledge, there is a lack of comparative studies investigating similarities/differences in the use of theme in electrical engineering RA Introductions written by native English-speaking (NES) scholars and non-native English-speaking (NNES) Saudi scholars. We address this gap using Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) approach to analyze the texture of electrical engineering RA Introduction sections written by NES scholars and NNES Saudi scholars from a message perspective. The research questions aimed to quantitatively and qualitatively investigate (1) Theme types, (2) thematic markedness, and (3) thematic progression patterns in the two data sets. After reviewing comparative research on message structure, we analyzed 117 RA Introductions written by experienced NES/NNES authors. The results accord with research comparing thematic organization in native English scholars' writings and those from cultural background other than Arabic. The findings showed that NESs' and Saudi NNESs' introductions overlap at a clause level, but they start to diverge beyond the clause. This study provides a good starting point for understanding NNES Saudi scholars' use of underexplored linguistic items. The results of the current study offer insights for academic writing instruction and material developers.
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