• Journal Menu
  • About This Journal
  • Aims and Audience
  • Abstracting/Indexing
  • Editorial Board
  • Subscription Information
  • Contact Information
• Authors
  • Author Guidelines
  • Code of Conduct
  • IJLS Editorial Style
  • IJLS Style Sheet
  • Peer Review Process
  • Call for Papers
  • FAQ
• Editors
  • Editorial Board
  • Reviewer Guidelines
  • Code of Conduct
  • Peer Review Process
  • IJLS Editorial Style
• Archives
  • Papers in Press
  • Latest Issue
  • Back Issues
  • Special Issues
• Home

Language users must address public health issues on a daily basis. They have to assess the health risks associated with infectious diseases, judge the safety of foods and immunizations, and gauge their likely exposure to environmental pollutants. All these scenarios are characterized by uncertainty in that they demand a high level of scientific knowledge which is more often than not lacking in the lay person. The reasoning strategies that people use to bridge gaps in their knowledge have typically been studied by psychologists. However, I will argue in this paper that linguists, and particularly those with expertise in pragmatics, have a key contribution to make to an understanding of these strategies. To this end, a group of arguments known as the informal fallacies is discussed. As their name suggests, these arguments have typically been considered by philosophers and logicians as examples of bad or shoddy reasoning. However, under a pragmatic characterization in which features of the context of use of these arguments are emphasized, these so-called fallacies are seen to facilitate reasoning about public health problems. Specifically, these arguments permit subjects to form judgements about these problems in the absence of the type of scientific knowledge that is typically the basis of formal risk assessments.

The issue of what happens when grammatical, lexical, and morphological errors are embedded in indirect reports is very interesting and surely puts the theory of indirect reports to the test and, in particular, Alessandro Capone’s paraphrase/style principle (which predicts, among other things, that if errors are present, they should be attributed to the original speaker of the indirect report). However, here the issue of footing interferes (the speaker should be considered a laminated category, normally consisting of an animator, an author and a principal (in the sense of Goffman 1981)) with Capone’s Principle, given that the speaker of the indirect report (the reporter) can be seen as author of the text and, thus, it is possible that errors will be attributed to him as well. The context usually plays a role in deciding how to resolve such interpretative problems. In some contexts, in fact, , even if the reporter may be tempted to correct errors, he will do so at the expense of theory of mind and will project interpretations that are not projected by the original speaker (in case he did not consider what may prima facie count as an error, an error).

Chinese university students have to take English courses to pass the CET-4 and 6 to benefit their academic and employment careers, but they have been heard to complain that studying English at university is a waste of time. The goal of this study is to explore whether they really feel they do not improve in English, whether only the tests motivate them, and what factors influence their perceived improvement. To answer these questions, a questionnaire was filled out by 418 participants from a prestigious science and technology university. The findings are that most students pass the CET-4, but the CET-6 is much more challenging. Despite spending a great number of hours on English, more than 60% believe they do not improve in English. A subsequent regression analysis showed that the best predictors of perceived improvement are a positive attitude, the amount of time and effort spent on learning English, previous academic test scores and out-of-class English exposure. The best predictors of test-driven motivation are social pressure, the number of times the CET-4 and CET-6 were taken, time and effort and appreciation of formal instruction.

This study attempted at classifying common errors found in the written performance of lower- and upper-intermediate Iranian EFL learners. It engaged a rich corpus of EFL writing samples collected over a course of 20 years (between 1992 and 2011) from lower- and upper-intermediate EFL learners studying at various Iranian universities to provide a precise taxonomy of errors in basic-level EFL writing (i.e., single paragraphs and five paragraph essays). A total of 3157 sophomore EFL learners were included in this study, and from each of them five writing samples were collected. There was a total of 15785 texts in the corpus which contained a total of 5,150,205 words. Corder’s (1981) framework for error analysis was implemented, and it was found that basic-level EFL writing errors could best be classified into three major categories: structural, discursive, and cognitive. Classroom procedures and teaching techniques that can help both teachers and learners to overcome the identified error types are discussed.

The current study aimed at finding the probable differences between the move structure of Iranian writers’ RA introduction subgenre and those of their native counterparts. Sixty (N = 60) Ra introductions taken from four journals, namely IJLLALW, IJALEL, TQ, and AL, written in English by Iranian and native writers were randomly selected. The AntMover software as well as two human coders identified and coded the moves found in the corpus. The CARS model (Swales, 2004) was used as the framework for move and step identification. The resulting move frequencies were compared. For data analysis, a set of Mann-Whitney U tests as well as several descriptive statistics were conducted. For comparison purposes, move and step percentages were also compared. Results indicated that there is a significant difference in the move frequency of RA introductions written by Iranian and native writers in applied linguistics. While both Swales (2004) and the native writers in the corpus treated all of the moves in the RA introduction subgenre as obligatory, Iranian writers treated them as optional. It was concluded that academic writing teachers need to focus on move structures and make their students move-sensitive.

Teaching English pronunciation is being neglected in English lessons in the Netherlands. Most teachers do not have a specific pedagogy for teaching English pronunciation or do not consider it to be important. Students with a desire for more native-like English pronunciation, be it to enhance their intelligibility, confidence or credibility, are faced with a lack of skilled professionals who are able to provide them with the necessary feedback for improvement. Research shows that a student-oriented computer-assisted pronunciation teaching tool can significantly improve students’ pronunciation skills, even without initial teacher input.

In Second Language Acquisition, there is an emerging amount of research which argues that beliefs heavily influence the effectiveness of classroom interactions. However, the extent to which teacher’s and learners’ beliefs impact on speaking practice—i.e., interactions during which learners mostly develop communicative competence in the foreign language classroom—is still not known. Following the claim that any understanding of why teachers and learners behave in the way they do requires an investigation of their underlying beliefs, the present study aims to enhance our knowledge of how the beliefs that teachers and learners have concerning interactions for speaking practice may conflict with pedagogical principles that teachers and learners simultaneously endorse. In exploring perceptual data from teacher interviews and learner focus groups, the findings suggest that teacher and learner beliefs surrounding speaking practice are intricate, and potentially influential in ways that contradict teachers’ and learners’ pedagogical principles regarding communicative approaches. These findings provide an important opportunity to direct our attention towards the effects of beliefs on teaching and learning practices which follow communicative principles, and ways through which teachers and learners can make the most of effective interactional and learning opportunities during speaking practice.