Volume 53, Issue 4 -

There has been a continued interest in discovering how learners of another language acquire a target language’s anaphoric system. While our understanding of the issues has improved, the development of methodologies to assess the interpretation of anaphora in a learner’s interlanguage has not. This paper is concerned with introducing a methodology named ‘Phased Choice’ to assess anaphoric reference, which more effectively tackles the issues facing anaphoric testing. The data was gathered from an experiment that focused on English and Korean learners of Chinese acquiring the Chinese reflexive ziji ‘self’, results showing that the Korean learners are at an advantage to their English counterparts due to the similar pragmatic strategies Korean and Chinese share. Moreover, the methodology in comparison to the literature shows its strength, dealing effectively with problems past tests faced.

Politeness is an important aspect of communication, particularly across cultures where misunderstandings can have very negative relational consequences. Yet while various approaches to politeness in the context of second language learning have been developed, such approaches have either been largely atheoretical in their conceptualisation of politeness or have employed models that do not adequately capture participant understandings of politeness across cultures. In this paper, it is argued that an approach encompassing participant understandings of politeness is a more appropriate starting point for raising sociopragmatic awareness about im/politeness across languages and cultures. An interactional approach whereby raising pragmalinguistic awareness about the interactional achievement of particular meanings and actions in interaction is combined with raising sociopragmatic awareness about what underlies evaluations of those meanings and actions as im/polite is advocated. It is argued that raising sociopragmatic awareness in this way provides learners with the means to analyse differences between the politeness systems of their first and second languages, thereby allowing them to make more informed choices in regards to both constituting their L2 identities as well as their relationships with others.

This study evaluated two cognitive-oriented methods for learning figurative language in an EFL context to develop metaphoric competence. Sixty-eight Taiwanese university students participated in the experiment and were separated into two groups: one group received instruction involving conceptual metaphors, while the other group received instruction involving metaphoric mappings. A test was designed to measure the participants’ ability to recognize metaphors and metonymies. The data collected from the pre-tests and post-tests were analyzed using a multiple regression model. The results demonstrated that both methods improved learners’ awareness and retention of figurative language, confirming the beneficial influence of explicit instruction; in addition, the instruction on metaphoric mappings was more helpful in facilitating learners’ awareness of expressions involving more abstract concepts with complicated mapping relationships. The findings shed light on the effectiveness of cognitive-oriented methods in the EFL teaching and learning of figurative expressions.