“…Despite their strong role in providing cues to emotion, and intent, understanding the reliability of expressive signals could be challenging for ESL learners, and therefore understanding how to define these may be crucial for effective teaching approaches. However, the area is not very well explored, and focus has generally been on the use of these elements of language, or in expressive writing, rather than identifying whether context plays a part in interpretation (Smith, 2013;Mercury, 1995;Horan, 2013).In this context, as Liyanage et al, (2015) suggest, explicit instruction in expressives, particularly those that are focused on swearing or taboo language would be beneficial to ESL students wishing to achieve a native like speech in English. However, in order to be able to do this, greater understanding of the role of expressives and descriptives as emotive terms is required.…”