Band 32, Heft 6

This paper addresses the fact that in spite of the descriptive and wellintentioned ambitions of much sociolinguistic-ethnographic research, members of studied groups often continue to interpret such research as a largely vertically organized socio-political activity that communicates a prescriptive social and linguistic normativity the researcher is inevitably taken to embody. We argue that while many researchers agree that sociolinguistic fieldwork is inherently political, actual descriptions of informants’ awareness of this are still rather scarce. In the process, we demonstrate how members’ metascientific reflexivity can be particularly active precisely in and during fieldwork encounters and in the entire research event, complicating the idea of a pure and disinterested description and understanding.

The process of internationalisation of higher education can be seen as fluctuating between two main discourses: economic competition and academic internationalisation (Bolsman & Miller 2008). Within the former type of discourse, internationalisation is constructed as a means to generate income, in competition with other institutions, through the provision of research and teaching services of a high quality to as many ‘clients’ as possible. From the point of view of academic internationalism, internationalisation is represented as a joint enterprise by institutions from different countries for the advancement of human knowledge and intercultural understanding. In this paper we aim to explore the views of the teaching staff of two bilingual universities in Spain in connection with the process of internationalisation of their institution, placing a special emphasis on its impact on language policy. The sample for this study was made up of 173 university teaching staff who completed a questionnaire in which they were asked to express their views on issues such as internationalisation at higher education institutions, academic mobility and their attitudes towards multilingualism. The participants belonged to two officially bilingual universities in Spain, namely the University of Lleida (UdL) and the University of the Basque Country (UBC). Variables such as the sociolinguistic context, gender, mother tongue and age were considered when scrutinising the participants’ answers with a view to drawing a picture of internationalisation which included opinions on academic mobility and multilingualism from the teaching staff’s perspective.

The study analyses teenagers’ e-mail requests during academic cyber-consultation, exploring how the performance of request modifiers is influenced by participants’ perceptions of the degree of imposition of the speech act and social distance with the recipient. A total of 295 e-mail requests, 145 produced by British English speakers (BES) and 150 performed by International English speakers (IES), were randomly selected from all the e-mail requests that International Baccalaureate students sent to their learning mentor between September and December 2011. They were analysed with regard to the use of internal and external request mitigators and participants’ judgments of the degree of request imposition and social distance with the e-mail recipient. Results of the study show that participants do not frequently rely on mitigators, but whenever they perceive the need to mitigate the request, pragmatic variation is observed between BES and IES. Thus, when the request is perceived as demanding, BES activate their pragmalinguistic knowledge and use a wider range of internal modifiers (both lexical and syntactic). In contrast, IES seem to lack pragmalinguistic knowledge to soften the request. Finally, although teenagers do not perceive their relationship with their learning mentor as one of +social distance, BES and IES show variation in their choice of form of address. Findings from the study suggest the need to incorporate training on e-mail politeness in future pragmatics-based pedagogical interventions.

The aim of this study was to explore pragmalinguistic strategies employed by a group of Iranian English language learners when making refusals to invitations, requests, offers and suggestions in their first (Persian) and second (English) languages. Data were collected from 86 participants through a Discourse Completion Test (DCT). The social variables under study were gender and social power differentials between the interlocutors. As a novel attempt in studies of interlanguage pragmatics, cultural schemas underlying refusals of Iranian English language learners were also investigated through Focus Group Interviews (FGI). The findings indicated that the participants used refusal head acts, the core components realising refusals, with similar frequency in their L1 (Persian) and L2 (English). However, differences were observed in the use of supportive move strategies in the Persian and English responses of the participants. The FGI responses associated certain Persian cultural schemas, in particular tă’ărof (ritual politeness) and ru-dar-băyesti (state/feeling of distance-out-of-respect), with the production and interpretation of refusals by the Iranian students both in Persian and English to a large extent.