Department of English Foundation Programme

The advent of the concept of communicative competence in applied linguistics and English Language Teaching constituted a break from previous accounts of language, as it advocated a more social view of language use. However, it was subsequently reified narrowly by the ensuing pedagogical models of communicative competence. This and the fact that English gradually became the default lingua franca in ethnolinguistically diverse contexts point to the need to reinvestigate how English is nowadays used. These observations are illustrated here with examples from naturally occurring spoken interactions of some Asian university students in London. What is shown is that the students were making use of all their linguistic resources, and they were thus achieving various communicative objectives. Such linguistic practices highlight the situated and contingent nature of language-mediated meaning-making, and resonate with the analytic sensibilities and sensitivities of the body of research on English as a lingua franca, translanguaging and superdiversity.

This paper sets out to look at the naturally occurring audio-recorded discourse from a group of international students at the University of London, while they were holding meetings in order to establish an international students society (part of a PhD research project). In particular, it looks at instances in which these international students were drawing lexis from all across their linguistic repertoire, and in doing so they were managing to achieve politeness in their conversations. In the main part of this paper below, first, there is a review of some of the major politeness theories in sociolinguistics, as well as a discussion of how politeness has been investigated in ELF conversations between speakers from diverse sociocultural backgrounds. Building on these considerations, there follows an analysis of the way that politeness was achieved in two extracts from the participants’ meetings. As it was found, the overall pragmatic function of ‘achieving politeness’ was further broken down into two sub-functions. The first one was ‘displaying discursive sensitivity through avoiding profanity’, and the second one was ‘increasing politeness through showing awareness of the interlocutors’ linguistic background’.

This paper looks at the naturally occurring discourse of the meetings of an international student society at the University of London, with the aim to discuss instances of flexible language use and their pragmatic significance while they were using English as a common language. In particular, it looks at how the students were using language flexibly, that is, how they were making use of the entire gamut of their available linguistic resources by drawing extensively from them, and how they were thus achieving various communicative objectives. Speakers’ flexible language use whereby they draw linguistic elements from various linguistic resources which they have available has come to be known under various terms, such as ‘code-switching’, ‘code-mixing’, and so on, and this chapter starts with a discussion of the most widely used of them. It also explains why the term ‘flexible language use’ was used instead of another one. Then, it moves on to the flexible language use of the students in the investigated meetings. In doing so, what is yielded is that the students were thus achieving the pragmatic function ‘making specific meaning’, which appears in the title of this paper, and which is broken down into the sub-functions ‘filling in a lexical gap’ and ‘using a more precise word’.

The focus of this paper is on how meaning making is achieved with reference to ELF and what competencies are discernible in ELF interactions. In particular, two
research questions are investigated: Which wordings and features of discourse are characteristic of interactions in contexts where English is used as a lingua franca, and how do they contribute to meaning making? To what extent do successful ELF interactions require competencies which are additional to those already described in the literature, and how can they best described and accounted for? Adopting a linguistic ethnographic perspective, meetings of the committee members and the officers of an international students society at the University London were observed and audio-recorded while English was used as a lingua franca. The data were analysed qualitatively tapping into analytic traditions such as Conversation Analysis
and Discourse Analysis. What was found was that interlocutors extensively drew linguistic elements from their linguacultural backgrounds, whether these were
their mother tongue or other varieties of English with which they had come into contact before, and they were inserting them in their ELF conversations with their
colleagues. These linguistic innovations of the interlocutors seemed to emerge due to a variety of functional-pragmatic motivations and to achieve various interactive functions. This paper will focus on linguistic innovations with which the ELF interlocutors managed to make specific meaning in the sense of filling some kind of lexical gap. This particular function did not seem to be achieved at random, but on the contrary it was strategically well thought out and well elaborated on, as it is shown in the provided excerpts and also as it was reported in the accounts of the participants themselves in the post-session discussions which took place with them, as it will be shown.

This PhD research study looks at meaning-making practices in interactions of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF). In particular, two research questions are investigated: Which wordings and features of discourse are characteristic of interactions in contexts where English is used as a lingua franca, and how do they contribute to meaning-making? To what extent do successful ELF interactions require competencies, skills and practices which are additional to those already described in the literature, and how can they best be described and accounted for? The data comprised naturally occurring spoken discourse from international students who were holding meetings in order to establish an international student society at the University London, and were analysed qualitatively drawing eclectically on the analytic traditions of ethnography and conversation analysis. In the first analytical chapter, it was found that the students were making specific meaning through translanguaging, and this contributed to the achievement of the pragmatic functions ‘filling in a lexical gap’ and ‘using some more precise lexis’. In the second chapter, it was shown that the students were again translanguaging setting out to be polite by achieving the pragmatic functions ‘displaying discursive sensitivity through avoiding profanity in English’ and ‘increasing politeness through showing awareness of the interlocutor’s linguistic background’. In the third analytical chapter, it was yielded that the students negotiated the meaning of culturally contested expressions, and thus the functions ‘refining the culturally contested elements of an expression’ and ‘replacing a culturally contested expression altogether’ were achieved. Finally, in the fourth analytical chapter, what was argued was that there were instances in which the students were attempting to manage the relational and build rapport with their interlocutors with word play through the functions ‘making an idiomatic expression more relevant to the rest of the in-group’ and ‘making an idiomatic expression more relevant to a wider audience’. Subsequently, the implications of the findings were discussed from the perspective of their significance regarding revising communicative competence and related models of competence, reconceptualising language functions and social semiotics, and reappraising the practice of translanguaging in superdiverse contexts. Finally, it was shown that these findings could be pedagogically useful for English language planning and policy from the particular perspective of curriculum and syllabus design, coursebooks and materials development, teaching approaches and methods, and testing and assessment.

Swales' Create A Research Space (CARS) model for Moves Analysis of Research Article Introductions (RAIs) has been frequently applied in different disciplines. However, in the case of research conducted among RAIs written in the field of Philosophy in the setting of the University of Santo Tomas, research needs to be done to determine how the local discourse community structures this important research article component. To achieve this, thirty (30) RAIs from the said discipline were examined on a per-sentence level to identify the Moves and underlying Steps that characterize each of the samples. These Moves and Steps were then summarized to reveal distinct RAI features that help provide the field of Philosophy research writing its own identity.

This paper attempts to demonstrate collocation from a disaster-report article and how certain constraints in word-combinations influence collocability.  These constraints are identified using corpus data followed by an enumeration of practical means of demonstrating these constraints vis-a-vis the teaching of vocabulary in the classroom.  To achieve these, a 491-word online disaster-report on Typhoon Yolanda/Haiyan was selected.  From this article, 13 nodes (words) and their corresponding collocates were identified to form a Semantic Field or node-collocate combination.  Two fixed expressions were also identified from the said article. In order to identify the constraints that influence how words collocate or combine with other words, the following verbs from the above-mentioned Semantic Field were identified, “lash”, “struck”, “knocked out”, “ripped”, as well as the fixed expressions:  “in the wake of” and “faced with a scenario”.  Using Carter’s (1998) constraints on word-combinations in English, the relevant constraints on word-combinations of the above verbs and fixed expressions were identified using corpus data from the following corpora: ICE – Philippines, ICE – New Zealand, and the Brown Corpus. Lastly, upon identification of the constraints vis-à-vis the use of corpus data, ways on how teachers can demonstrate these word combination constraints in the classroom were presented.

This paper primarily attempts to provide readers with a means of analyzing texts by using an approach that is considered important by applied linguists, that of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL). This work identified the similarities and differences between two texts, a movie review and a news article that dealt with the same topic, namely, the movie " Star Wars: The Force Awakens ". In identifying the texts' similarities and differences, the Systemic Functional Linguistic principles of Tenor/Interpersonal Metafunction and Field/Experiential Metafunction were applied. From the interpersonal metafunction analysis, it can be concluded that both texts share similar moods and modalities. However, a closer inspection would reveal that Text 1 appears to negotiate a positive review of the film through an extensive demonstration of declarative statements that talk about the merits of the film and that of the director's while Text 2 is more of a reportage of relevant information and interviews from the film. In terms of the Experiential metafunction, Text 1 delves on material and relational processes that advance the film, the director, and the characters, whereas Text 2 differs as it focuses more on advancing the film while putting little emphasis on the director and the movie characters.

This paper attempts to demonstrate Norman Fairclough's Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) framework by conducting internal and external level analyses on two online news articles that report on the Moro Islamic Liberation Front's (MILF) submission of its findings on the " Mamasapano Incident " that happened in the Philippines in 2015. In performing analyses using this framework, the social context and background for these texts, as well as the relationship between the internal discourse features and the external social practices and structures in which the texts were produced are thoroughly examined. As a result, it can be noted that from the texts' internal discourse features, the news articles portray ideological and social distinctions among social actors such as the Philippine Senate, the SAF troopers, the MILF, the MILF fighters, and the civilians. Moreover, from the viewpoint of the texts as being external social practices, the texts maintain institutional identities as news reports, but they also reveal some evaluative stance as exemplified by the adjectival phrases that the writers employed. Having both the internal and external features examined, it can be said that the way these texts were written seems to portray power relations that exist between the Philippine government and the MILF.

The research article abstract is one of the most important sections of any journal article, but conventions on how it is written may vary in accordance with the contexts that surround them. This study analyzes the moves that occur among a corpus of 29 semi-randomly selected online research article abstracts taken from three Middle East and North Africa (MENA)-based journals in applied linguistics. Using Hyland's (2000) Introduction-Purpose-Methods-Product-Conclusion (I-P-M-Pr-C) move structure as framework and as a result of the analysis of the corpora, it can be surmised that the Purpose (P), Method (M), and Product (Pr) moves are the most prevalent across the corpora of two of the three journals. In addition, only three abstracts out of 29 feature the complete and sequenced I-P-M-Pr-C structure that Hyland developed. These results suggest the following: Hyland's move structure may be individually evident across the corpus, but it is not sequenced in the order that Hyland's structure is originally presented. This study also posits the influence of journal-writing conventions, such as abstract lengths, on how writers compose their abstracts and thus results in the foregrounding of some moves (e.g., Purpose, Method, Product), the backgrounding of others (e.g., Introduction, Conclusion), and the existence of mixed moves. Lastly, implications for the teaching of writing and other directions of related research are provided. explains that the abstract is one of the most common means of communication among a number of academic genres such as research articles, short reports, conference presentations, and lectures, among others. Regardless of how researchers view the abstract, it is defined as a description or factual summary of a much longer report (i.e., research article). elaborates that the abstract is an abbreviated but accurate representation of the contents of a document, which is eventually prepared for publication. adds that the abstract is the summary of a research article, and it is written in the beginning of an academic paper. Lastly, Hwang, Nguyen, and Su (2017) describe the abstract as the paragraph that shows a brief description of all the contents in a research article.

This paper primarily attempts to provide readers with a means of analyzing texts by using an approach that is considered important by applied linguists, that of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL). This work identified the similarities and differences between two texts, a movie review and a news article, that dealt with the same topic, namely, the movie “Star Wars: The Force Awakens”. In identifying the texts’ similarities and differences, the Systemic Functional Linguistic principles of Tenor/Interpersonal Metafunction and Field/Experiential Metafunction were applied. From the interpersonal metafunction analysis, it can be concluded that both texts share similar moods and modalities.  However, a closer inspection would reveal that Text 1 appears to negotiate a positive review of the film through an extensive demonstration of declarative statements that talk about the merits of the film and that of the director’s while Text 2 is more of a reportage of relevant information and inte...

This paper attempts to demonstrate Norman Fairclough’s Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) framework by conducting internal and external level analyses on two online news articles that report on the Moro Islamic Liberation Front’s (MILF) submission of its findings on the “Mamasapano Incident” that happened in the Philippines in 2015. In performing analyses using this framework, the social context and background for these texts, as well as the relationship between the internal discourse features and the external social practices and structures in which the texts were produced are thoroughly examined. As a result, it can be noted that from the texts’ internal discourse features, the news articles portray ideological and social distinctions among social actors such as the Philippine Senate, the SAF troopers, the MILF, the MILF fighters, and the civilians. Moreover, from the viewpoint of the texts as being external social practices, the texts maintain institutional identities as news repo...

The research article abstract is one of the most important sections of any journal article, but conventions on how it is written may vary in accordance with the contexts that surround them. This study analyzes the moves that occur among a corpus of 29 semi-randomly selected online research article abstracts taken from three Middle East and North Africa (MENA)-based journals in applied linguistics. Using Hyland's (2000) Introduction-Purpose-Methods-Product-Conclusion (I-P-M-Pr-C) move structure as framework and as a result of the analysis of the corpora, it can be surmised that the Purpose (P), Method (M), and Product (Pr) moves are the most prevalent across the corpora of two of the three journals. In addition, only three abstracts out of 29 feature the complete and sequenced I-P-M-Pr-C structure that Hyland (2000) developed. These results suggest the following: Hyland's move structure may be individually evident across the corpus, but it is not sequenced in the order that H...