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Teaching Successful Spoken Requests in a UK EAP Context

Teaching Successful Spoken Requests in a UK EAP Context. Christian Jones & Nicola Halenko School of Languages and International Studies University of Central Lancashire. Teaching Successful Spoken Requests in a UK EAP Context. Instructional effect upon interlanguage pragmatic competence

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Teaching Successful Spoken Requests in a UK EAP Context

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  1. Teaching Successful Spoken Requests in a UK EAP Context Christian Jones & Nicola Halenko School of Languages and International Studies University of Central Lancashire

  2. Teaching Successful Spoken Requests in a UK EAP Context Instructional effect upon interlanguage pragmatic competence What makes a successful request? Implications for teaching and learning

  3. Research into Interlanguage Pragmatics(ILP) • Research has clearly shown that NS and NNS differ in the production of speech acts • Pragmatic development is a slow process under natural conditions • Learners receiving pragmatic instruction often outperform those who do not (e.g. Alcon Soler 2005) • Explicit and deductive instruction is more effective for learning than implicit and inductive teaching (Norris and Ortega 2000, 2001) • Requests extensively researched in EFL contexts (e.g. Alcon Soler 2005) • Very little in a study abroad or EAP context

  4. Teaching pragmatically effective requests (Halenko and Jones, 2011) Study 1 DESIGN: One group receiving interventional treatment/one control group (12 weeks) 26 Chinese EAP learners, all at B2 level (CEFR) Data collected using discourse completion tasks (DCTs) Pre- and immediate post-test evaluations Delayed post-test (six weeks) Semi-structured interview

  5. Sample of a written DCT At the tutor’s office • You have just received an essay back and want to discuss it with your tutor. S/he is very busy. You go to your tutor’s office after the class. You want to make an appointment to see her/him as soon as possible. What would you ask? You:

  6. Treatment Explicit teaching • Sociopragmatic Sample activity: students discuss situations they need to make spoken requests and discuss the appropriateness of given samples • Pragmalinguistic Sample activity: students analyse moves in spoken requests, pre-request and request language. This is followed by focussed practice

  7. Results • Significant gains made in DCT scores from pre-post-test for experimental group • No significant gains for the control group at these stages or at the delayed test stage • A significant decrease in scores at the delayed-test stage for the experimental group • Students felt instruction was useful and helped them to communicate more effectively in and around the university setting

  8. Summary of study one • Explicit instruction effective, at least in the short term • The need for regular instruction indicated by weaker delayed test scores • The UK EAP environment alone did not seem to contribute to development of successful spoken requests • Students themselves feel it is worthwhile

  9. What makes a successful spoken request? (Jones and Halenko, under review) Study 2 DESIGN: Analyse successful spoken requests from study one (those with a mean score of three or more) Using corpus tools, (Lextutor) find out the most frequent words and chunks used Compare these to general reference corpus to find out keywords Qualitatively examine two contrasting scenarios (high social distance, low social distance ) to show which moves students used

  10. Results Most frequent words (see table 1) Most frequent words in comparison to reference corpora(see table 2) Keywords (see table 3) Most frequent chunks in two scenarios (see table 4) Keywords in two scenarios (see table 5)

  11. Samples of successful and unsuccessful requests

  12. Samples of successful and unsuccessful requests

  13. Results • Successful requests often, but not always, contained predictable ‘request language’ • Successful requests did not have to be 100% accurate • Successful requests needed to contain the appropriate level of formality and expected ‘moves’ for the context

  14. Teaching implications • Explicit teaching of pragmatically appropriate spoken requests is effective in this context, although there is a clear need for regular revision • Teaching needs to go beyond the level of the request itself and also raise awareness at the level of discourse: context, appropriacy, expected ‘moves’ • Successful request data could be used as a model for learners

  15. References • Alcon Soler, E., (2005). Does instruction work for learning pragmatics in the EFL context? System 33, 417–435. • Halenko, N., & Jones, C. (2011) Teaching pragmatic awareness of spoken requests to Chinese EAP learners in the UK: Is explicit instruction effective? System 39, 240–250. • Jones, C., & Halenko, N. (under review).What makes a successful spoken request? Using corpus tools to analyse learner language in a UK EAP context. • Kučera, H., & Francis, W. (1967). A computational analysis of present-day American English. Providence, Rhode Island: Brown University Press

  16. References Lexical Tutor available from: http://www.lextutor.ca/ Leech, G., Rayson, P., & Wilson, A. (2001). Word frequencies in written and spoken English: Based on the British National Corpus. London: Longman. Norris, J., & Ortega, L. (2000). Effectiveness of L2 instruction: a research synthesis and quantitative meta-analysis. Language Learning 50, 417–528.

  17. Questions?

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