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Evaluation and point of view in the oral production of Italian learners of English Virginia Pulcini (University of Turin, Italy). Spoken Learner Corpus Colloquium 24-25 January 2008 Université catholique de Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium. Overview of research.
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Evaluation and point of view in the oral production of Italian learners of EnglishVirginia Pulcini (University of Turin, Italy) Spoken Learner Corpus Colloquium24-25 January 2008Université catholique de Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium
Overview of research • Pulcini, V. (2004) “A corpus of ‘informal academic interviews’: the Italian Component of the LINDSEI project” • situational setting, subjects, structure of the interview • characteristics of this genre: goal-oriented, semi-structured, asymmetric, institutional and cross-linguistic.
Pulcini,V. and C. Furiassi (2004) “Spoken interaction and discourse markers in a corpus of learner English” • teachers use twice as many discourse markers than students • Teachers: backchannels (mhm, uhu, I see, oh), please, now, right (comprehension and agreement), textual markers of option and contrast (or, but) • Students: response forms (yeah, no), fillers and hedges (I mean, I think), phatic devices (you know), markers of addition and continuity (and, so)
students’ pragmatic competence in conversational management seems to be limited Closings: 31% reply to a thanking or closing expression with a standard form (okay, you’re welcome) 53% do not respond at all 16% violate the standard English norm
Furiassi, C. (2004) “Spoken and written learner English: A quantitative analysis of ICLE-IT and LINDSEI-IT” • the same differences that exist between spoken and written modes of communication in native use are also present in ICLE-it and LINDSEI-it • short words (functional words and core lexical items), less varied and more repetitive vocabulary, verbal fillers, discourse markers, contracted forms
The expression of evaluation and attitudinal stance(Thompson and Hunston, 2000) • “the expression of the speaker or writer’s attitude or stance towards, viewpoint on, or feelings about the entities or propositions that he or she is talking about” • parameters: goodness or badness, likelihood/certaintyexpectedness, importance • conceptual: markers of subjectivity (I think, in my opinion, etc.), comparison (more…than) • lexical: evaluative adjectives, evaluative verbs, discourse labels (problem), hedges (maybe) • grammatical: modals, connectors, subordinators • textual: discourse markers
Focus on the following linguistic signals: • Markers of subjectivity personal pronouns, phrases • Evaluative and private verbs • Evaluative adjectives
Table 3. Verbs expressing evaluation along the good/bad parameter
Table 4. Most frequent private verbs in the Lindsei-it B-turns
(1) er every I think every every week and eh so they are erm always eh studying something every week and eh while in I think in Italy er when we prepare an examination a university examination we don’t er study erm so much
Table 5. Most frequent private verbs in the negative forms in the Lindsei-it B-turns
(2) when we have when we had to take decision they mm . I mean English people eh they eh . they were I don't know mm . they tended to be isolated from the rest of the group erm (3) well this is probably the story of a a painter that in the first picture is erm painting erm . ma I I don't know the name of eh of it's a mm .. I I don't know the
Table 6. Evaluative adjectives in the Lindsei-it B-turns (1)
Table 6. Evaluative adjectives in the Lindsei-it B-turns (2)
Conclusions • Predictable results: high frequency of the first person pronoun I and core evaluative and private verbs • Features of Italian learner English: • limited variety of private verbs (I think, I prefer, I love) and evaluative adjectives (good, beautiful, important, interesting) • preference for not+ positive adjectives (not so beautiful, not satisfied), mitigation of negative adjectives (a little bit ugly) • Need to compare results with other corpora and the control native corpus