Volume 35, Issue 2 -

Universities are responsible for introducing students to disciplinary fields and their knowledge traditions. A common way to cater for processes of this kind is to organize students’ work through the production of text in a genre common in their field. Previous research has pointed to the challenges involved as students appropriate disciplinary ways of reasoning through writing, yet further attention needs to be directed to the communicative challenges involved at the very beginning of the process. Based on 14 video-recorded face-to-face encounters between environmental experts and individual MSc Engineering students, this study focuses on supervision at the outline stage of producing a report, and explores it as a communicative practice. The results from our study show how the students’ outline documents functioned as resources for separating the performing of a study from the crafting of its textual presentation. The results also illuminate, in detail, how access points to disciplinary reasoning and arguing were introduced through verbal discourse.

Recent years have seen a rapid influx of reviews in the field of different aesthetic and consumption domains, which is indicative of the importance assigned by present-day society to what we choose to experience and consume. Given their prevalence, there is a need to find an adequate analytic framework which allows insightful understanding of the discursive construction of such reviews. This paper aims to propose such a framework by combining tools from the Appraisal model with ideas from argumentation theory. The combined methodology is demonstrated using one text from a corpus of wine reviews written by the extraordinarily influential wine critic Robert Parker. The analysis takes into consideration both meanings that are internal to the text and meanings that are text-external, so-called world knowledge. I argue that the technique of reconstruction adopted from argumentation theory helps to highlight and explain how the appraisal works in the text. The findings are generalizable to the extent that the methodology can be used for any type of review text, especially in the domain of present-day luxury consumption, which is not overtly argumentative but which can still be found to have an assessment-basis format that leads its readers toward a certain worldview that they are invited to co-construct and see as rational.

The process of licensing within the medical profession is built on a practical work of defining what competences constitute the profession, of determining how these competences can be acquired, and of specifying how they can be assessed. In order to obtain a medical license in the United States, medical students are evaluated on the basis of clinical encounters with standardized patients. By demonstrating how medical students’ performances in clinical encounters are assessed, this study illustrates how the assessment of professional competence is practically accomplished. Because it frames the work of assessment as a situated interactional and practical work, the study focuses on how three faculty members in a series of panel meetings carried out the practical work of rating candidates’ performances. The data were taken from a corpus of audio-recorded panel meetings where the physician-raters first watched the video-recorded student performances, rated them individually, and finally reached a consensus collectively for each clinical encounter. In examining how they accomplished coming to an agreement for the examinees’ performances, we see that by using different local strategies, panelists made themselves accountable as both competent physicians and efficient raters. We also notice that panelists made a distinction between being accountable for efficient raters and being accountable for competent physicians when they were supposed to concede their ratings.

The present study aims to demonstrate how writers display their stances in information-oriented written discourse. In particular, the paper analyzes nominal sentences in three newspaper subgenres, and explicates how the Japanese copulas da and dearu , which are normally considered stylistic variants in written language, are used by journalists as important grammatical resources for expressing their epistemic and evaluative stances toward certain types of information conveyed in nominal sentences. Da in newspaper discourse is used as a marker of the writer’s commitment to the relevance of the information in the given discourse context. Dearu , on the other hand, marks the writer’s own interpretive and evaluative stance. In addition, the non-use of a copula (i.e., a bare nominal) also conveys a certain stance of the writer, namely that the information presented is taken to be factual. The specific kind of stance expressed through the use and non-use of these copula types is closely linked to the functional objectives and concerns of the particular genres.

This paper is a conversation-analytic examination of video-recorded interactions between questioners and test takers during an English oral proficiency exam for international teaching assistants (ITAs). We focus on the test takers’ repair strategies identified in our data, and describe how distinct repair strategies influence the repair solution in the next turn. The test takers’ open-class repair initiator (e.g., “sorry?”) is likely to be treated as a hearing problem, and thus is responded to with the questioners’ repetition of the question. In contrast, the test takers’ targeted repair initiator (e.g., “what do you mean by x?”) is likely to be treated as an understanding problem, and thus is responded to with the questioners’ reformulation of the question. This reformulation generally helps the test takers successfully respond to the question despite the initial understanding problem. The findings have implications for teaching oral communication skills to ITAs, repair strategies in particular. They also contribute to improving performance-based oral proficiency exam by introducing different sequential trajectories that emerge from problems in hearing or understanding.

The use of “pragmatic repetition,” the iteration of one’s own speech or the speech of a co-participant, while known to occur in conversation, has been overlooked in the language sciences. This study presents a method for establishing incidence, characteristics, and functions of pragmatic repetition during conversational exchanges. The method is applied to three discourse samples: a screenplay, a television reality show, and an unscripted telephone conversation. The analysis characterizes each repetition in terms of localness (immediate, delayed, or distant in the discourse); degree of preservation (identical or altered); source (self or other); the linguistic unit (word, phrase, clause, or sentence); and type of phrase (formulaic or novel). Three functional categories were identified: maintaining conversational form, enhancing content, and fostering social purposes. Results indicated that 22% of the telephone conversation and 19% of the reality show conversations constituted repeated material as compared to 9% in the screenplay. Analysis of characteristics and functions of pragmatic repetition revealed significant differences between samples. Findings from this study verify the newly developed quantification methodology, solidify the role of repetition in the pragmatics of language, and lead to better understanding of normal discourse.