Volume 9, Issue 1

This paper explores conceptual metaphor as a news-story promoter in the English-as-a-native-language (ENL) and English-as-an-international-language (EIL) contexts, using a self-constructed corpus of 605 pairs of corresponding New York Times (NYT) and Times Supplement (TS) news stories. Identified from the corpus are the non-lexicalized linguistic realizations of conceptual metaphors in the headlines of the corresponding stories. Rhetorical functions of the identified conceptual metaphors are examined and analyzed with regard to their pragmatic roles as a news-story promoter. Metaphoric variations in figurative conventionality and cultural specificity between NYT and TS headlines are also discussed to reveal the effects of intercultural audience design. The results show that non-lexicalized metaphors foreground a stylistically appealing aspect of the story to draw the reader into the body of the story, that non-lexicalized metaphors in a grander style are used in NYT headlines to engage the ENL reader, that those in a plainer style are used in TS headlines to inform the EIL reader, and that non-lexicalized metaphors in the TS are in general less culture-specific than those in their NYT counterparts. The implication for EIL learning is discussed briefly at the end of the paper.

This article is concerned with how private/personal initiatives (PIs) in development cooperation (PI aid) discursively represent their projects and aid beneficiaries. To this end it, examines Dutch and Flemish PIs active in The Gambia, West Africa, on the basis of a critical analysis of self-promotional material published on their websites. It is argued that PIs construct an image that exaggerates cultural and socio-economic differences between the European Self and the African Other, and that this needs to be understood in the context of the PIs' roots in tourism and other discourses of representing the Third World Other.

This paper discusses an advanced language assessment tool designed to assess university students' linguistic competence in L2. The tool serves the final exam of a course offered to second-year students of English language and literature. Of the three parts of the exam, (1) reading, (2) language awareness, and (3) writing, the third part (language awareness) explicitly addresses students' pragmatic competence. In the light of our work, assessing students' pragmatic competence is shown to involve the identification of certain levels of competence ensuing from the interpretive routes learners follow in their attempt to (a) interpret the communicator's intention, (b) identify the linguistic devices that lead them to this interpretation, and (c) explicitly verbalize the link between linguistic devices and interpretation. The suggested ranking of levels draws on data from statistical analysis of 190 final exam scripts. The proposed assessment of pragmatic competence manifested when dealing with written discourse is considered to be an innovative testing tool, because it is a discourse -based approach to testing pragmatic competence, where both explicit and implicit meanings are retrieved by drawing on a naturally-occurring wide range of lexical and grammatical features . More importantly, the proposed assessment constitutes an accurate testing tool because it allows for levels of pragmatic, hence linguistic, competence to naturally unveil in an authentic reading context requesting the reader's spontaneous reaction and contribution to the process of meaning making in L2.

The present study explores the relative effectiveness of two types of task repetition for teaching polite request forms to Japanese learners of English: the identical task repetition (the repetition of the same task) and the task-type repetition (the repetition of the same type of task). The performance of a treatment group was compared to the performance of a control group on pre-, post-, and follow-up tests consisting of a discourse completion test and an acceptability judgment test. The results indicated that the two treatment groups outperformed the control group, with the identical task repetition group exhibiting more statistically significant improvement in the discourse completion test (a planned written-production test) and the acceptability judgment test (a planned written-judgment test). The results implied that identical task repetition stimulates deeper perceptual and mental processing than task-type repetition in learners' recognition and production of second language (L2) request downgraders.