This paper examines the repair skills of three groups of 7 to 11-year old children: 1) children with Pragmatic Language Impairments (the PLIgroup); 2) children with Specific Language Impairments with no pragmatic difficulties (the SLI group); 3) children with normally developing communication skills (the mainstream group). The data comprise one-to-one interactions with a speech and language therapist, where the participants are engaged in a task devised to provide multiple opportunities for the initiation of repair The research also included a six-week period of therapy focusing on pragmatic skills for the children with PLI. Repair skills were compared pre-and post-intervention. Initially, both the mainstream and SLI groups achievedfar greater task success than the group with PLI, whose poor performance was largely attributable to their tendency not to initiate repair After the intervention period however, this group showed marked improvement (both in initiating repair and in task success). This reveals their potential to develop pragmatic skills that they have not spontaneously acquired if they are explicitly taught them.
A small corpus of student e-mail requests to academic staff in a British and an Australian university was collected in order to investigate the cross-cultural nature of Englishes in these requesting events. The notions of ACCOUNT and BUT-JUSTIFICATION, together with the concepts of EQUITY and EQUILIBRIUM are used to explicate the distribution of various features associated with these requests. Results indicate that the British data orient to deferential DEPENDENCE whereas the Australian data exhibit interdependent EGALITARIANISM. Finally, the process of our analysis brings to light the fact that we ought to refine Heider's (1958) theory of OBLIGATION and this, we do. The overall claims of this paper are that the situated nature of student e-mail requests can have a great bearing on the discursive construction of student identities, that this has a bearing on how things get done, and that how things get done in different varieties of English merits further investigation.
Much of the research on affiliation to date has focused on how people do (dis)affiliation. This paper explores the remedial work that follows instances of disaffiliation between interactants who are getting acquainted. Building on an interactional pragmatics analytical approach informed by methods and research in conversation analysis, findings indicate that extended remedial accounts recurrently follow moments of disaffiliation in initial interactions. These remedial accounts enable participants to reposition a prior disaffiliative stance as (ostensibly) affiliative. It appears in initial interactions, then, that remedial accounts play an important role in modulating troubles in affiliating. We propose that the considerable interactional work undertaken by these participants to modulate such troubles reflects a general preference for agreeability in initial interactions, at least amongst (Australian and British) speakers of English.
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