Drawing on unique observational data from police training with child volunteers, this study evaluates the linguistic patterns used by officers for transmitting complex, legally-binding information to children during the opt-out procedure (which determines how children's evidence is presented in court). It is shown that while the officers realise…

Exploring opportunities by which learners can internalize new knowledge and consolidate existing knowledge has long been a point of interest in English as a foreign language research. This study investigated how meta-talk opportunities on discourse markers created by four task types including text reconstruction, dictogloss, translation and jigsaw…

The socio-cultural conditions of late modernity induce a "reflexive imperative" amongst young people, which also results in metapragmatic and metalinguistic behaviour, as has been demonstrated by linguistic ethnographers (LE). However, recent LE studies on reflexivity in Western European settings have mainly focused on how groups of…

This paper examines the resulting qualitative transformation of two students' metapragmatic awareness following a semester abroad in southern France--one of whom had access to a concept-based pragmatics instruction programme (expert-mediation), while the other followed a standard semester programme. The larger study from which these cases are…

This paper draws on the KINSA project (The Communicative Situation of Immigrants at Swedish Workplaces), which aimed to identify communicative factors that have a positive impact on the integration of second language speakers in the workplace and in their immediate work team. The focus here is on humour and swearing as strategies for doing…

Diversity is valued and promoted in contemporary public discourse, but on the other hand, there is a strong tendency to homogenize differences in society. The tension between diversity and homogeneity is palpable on U.S. college campuses as the number of international students has been ever-increasing. A more nuanced approach is needed to grapple…

Research has shown that code-switching (CS) between languages in spoken discourse is prevalent in multilingual contexts and is used for many purposes. More recently, it has become the subject of much concern in academic contexts in negatively affecting students' language use and learning. However, while the concern has been increasing, no rigorous…

The present study investigates the role of concurrent and retrospective verbal report in exploring the cognitive processes of six pairs of advanced ESL learners engaged on a written discourse completion task eliciting status-unequal requests in English. Qualitative analysis of the concurrent data indicate that (i) social contextual aspects of the…

This dissertation develops a theoretical and empirical framework for the model of metalinguistic community, a community of positioned social actors engaged primarily in discourse about language and cultural symbols tied to language. Building upon the notions of speech community (Duranti, 1994; Gumperz, 1968; Morgan, 2004), linguistic community…

The influence of English on German has been an ongoing subject of intense popular and academic interest in the German sphere. In order to better understand this language contact situation, this research project investigates anglicisms--instances of English language material in a German language context--in the German hip hop community, where the…

Explores the role of language awareness in the teaching and learning of languages within the framework of educational reform in Spain. Three different types of discourse are compared: the official curriculum, teachers' views obtained in interviews, and teachers' classroom practices. (Author/VWL)