Politeness and pragmatic transfer in L2 pronominal address usage

This study investigates how Chinese learners of Spanish, who have a T/V distinction in their first language (L1), use the T/V address forms in Spanish as a second language (L2). Findings show that the learners rely mainly on their L1 pragmatic knowledge to employ the T/V in the L2. Despite having relatively good grammatical control of T/V, the learners produced frequent T/V alternation due to negative pragmatic transfer. In Chinese using V normally conveys speaker’s perception of a high-power differential and in relationships that are borderline T or V usage, shifting from T to V can convey deference and tends to co-occur with face-threatening or face-enhancing acts. The learners transferred from Chinese their tendency to use V to express deference and overutilized this politeness strategy in Spanish regardless of their relationship with the addressee. This problematic usage may generate negative social consequences and calls for pedagogical intervention.

Teaching the pragmatics of English as an international language: A focus on pragmatic markers

The current era of globalization and emergence of English as an international language (EIL) has brought about new opportunities for L2 pragmatic learning and teaching. The common view of pragmatic learning as an approximation to native-likeness is changing towards conceiving pragmatic ability as a tool to interact with people of different cultural and linguistic backgrounds, the majority of whom are non-native speakers (NNSs) of English. While such reality is widely acknowledged, few attempts have been made to teach pragmatic competence in EIL. Addressing this concern, the present study investigates the effects that a pedagogical intervention on EIL pragmatics has on the oral use of pragmatic markers (PMs): a key tool for successful communication in the current increasingly multicultural and multilingual society. Seventy-three Spanish EFL students were divided into an instructional ( n = 34) and a control group ( n = 39). The instructional group received 4 interventional sessions that included (1) awareness of the legitimacy of EIL, (2) meta-pragmatic awareness of pragmatic behavior across the world, (3) task-supported instruction on PMs, and (4) strategy-based instruction. Pragmatic competence was assessed by students’ use of PMs in oral academic presentations. The results revealed that the instructional group had more significant changes in the frequency and variety of PMs used than the control one, as they widened the repertoire of PMs uttered in their academic presentations. These findings project the future of pragmatic instruction in EIL and provide directions for reorienting the EIL curriculum towards the integration of L2 pragmatics.

Evaluating Non-STEM Students’ understanding of Evolution: Basis for designing Pedagogical Intervention

Teaching human evolution, for it to yield fruitful results, should be initialized by understanding the perspective of the learners. This study was conducted to aid in achieving that objective, and also to provide ways for educators to come up with strategies that can be perceived and appreciated by learners, particularly those who are not inclined with science. The majority of the respondents are believers in the theory of human evolution. Most of the respondents expressed their belief that modern humans are successors of ape-like organisms. The majority of the same set of informants mentioned their need for clarity about the stages that humans underwent during the course of history, while almost all of those respondents stated that the utilization of various graphic materials to elucidate these evolutionary concepts. It was recommended that educators engage in learning methods that call the attention and those that can be easily understood by the students

The design and implementation of an English for Research Publication Purposes course: A corpus-based genre-analytic pedagogical intervention

La presión sobre los académicos que usan el inglés como segunda lengua para que publiquen sus investigaciones en revistas en inglés se ha extendido recientemente a los estudiantes de posgrado inscritos en programas de doctorado. Sin embargo, en las instituciones de educación superior de todo el mundo, se ofrecen pocos cursos de formación en English for Research Publication Purposes (ERPP) con el objetivo de proporcionar a los estudiantes estrategias retóricas efectivas que podrían facilitarles la integración en sus comunidades disciplinarias. En este artículo presentamos el diseño e implementación de un curso de formación en ERPP, dirigido a estudiantes de doctorado en Artes y Humanidades, que se basa en la recopilación previa de un corpus de artículos de investigación seleccionados por los mismos participantes, un análisis de género de los textos y un enfoque crítico-pragmático para la enseñanza de las características socioculturales que sustentan todo el proceso de publicación de la propia investigación. Basándonos en el análisis de las respuestas a un cuestionario de evaluación del curso, también pretendemos indagar en las percepciones de los participantes en relación con la intervención pedagógica. Los resultados indican que, mediante la participación activa en el curso, los estudiantes reconocen haber adquirido una mayor comprensión del contexto socio-pragmático relacionado con el proceso de publicación, incluyendo un mayor entendimiento de las estructuras retóricas predominantes en los artículos de investigación y resúmenes, de las prácticas académicas prevalentes a nivel nacional e internacional, y de la potencial variación de estrategias comunicativas en sus áreas disciplinarias específicas.

Predicting Students’ Interest in Aging-Related Careers: Suggestions for Pedagogical Intervention

College students often hold negative attitudes toward elders and rank this area of practice at the bottom of their future professional life; colleges and universities have an important role to play in changing attitudes and attracting more professionals to work with older adults. This study examined factors contributing to students’ attitudes toward older adults to provide suggestions for pedagogical intervention. Data was collected from 195 undergraduates participating in an online survey with questions on the quality of relationships with a grandparent and other nonfamilial older adults, previous experience and future interest in pursuing a career in an aging-related field, and The Fabroni Scale of Ageism (Fabroni et al., 2010). Path analyses using hierarchical multiple regression revealed that high quality relationships with older adults (i.e., both grandparents and nonfamilial elders) was associated with less negative attitudes and more interest in pursuing a future career in age-related jobs/internships. Although both types of relationship quality were significant in the model (p<.05), path coefficients demonstrated that relationships with nonfamilial elders have a greater impact on participants’ attitudes (β= -.250, p=.001 versus β= -.146, p=.045). Previous working/internship experiences with older adults also predicted a greater willingness to pursue a future career in an aging-related field (β= .333, p<.001). Findings suggest that colleges could increase students’ interest in pursuing aging-related careers with multiple interventions, such as developing opportunities to interact and build relationships with older adults in the community, updating information on job opportunities, pay scales, and advancement opportunities, and providing more gerontological course or modules.

Identifying pedagogical intervention in MOOCs learning processes: a conversational agent proposal

Monitoring students in virtual learning environments can be a time-consuming task. Professors and tutors must accompany students in an agile manner. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the use of discussion forums posed new challenges. This work proposes a conversational agent to automatically detect which pedagogical intervention is necessary to guide students in MOOCs environments. Through the attributes of the students' post messages, it is possible to classify which action will be carried out by the agent, applying specific dialogue patterns. In some more specific cases, the tutor's attention is immediately requested. The proposal was evaluated through a feasibility study to verify if semantic detection can contribute to guide the intervention process. According to the results, it is possible to support the tutor, as only 35.2% of interactions required the tutor's action.

Sociálne aspekty čitateľskej gramotnosti s akcentom na dieťa zo sociálne znevýhodňujúceho prostredia na Slovensku

Reading literacy as functional literacy, i.e. the ability to understand and use written text, is alarming for students from disadvantaged backgrounds in Slovakia. In relation to children from less favourable backgrounds, the Slovak education system has long been unable to adequately compensate for educational inequalities determined by social origin. The most important stimuli affect children before they enter primary school. The study presents selected research on supporting child readers within the context of the family, based mainly on foreign sources, where this research has a rich tradition. Factors in the so-called home literacy environment, especially reading together or so-called dialogic reading of a parent with a child, as well as the size of the family library, were identified as particularly important. At the end of the paper, the possibilities of socio-pedagogical intervention are outlined.

Didactic Engineering as a research method in physics teaching

Several mathematical concepts have application in physics; this paper reports the results of a pedagogical investigation based on the methodology known as didactic engineering, which has been proposed with the aim of improving the skills exhibited by a group of eleventh grade students from a private institution in the interpretation of kinematic graphs. The concept of the slope of the straight line and how this mathematical concept can represent velocity or acceleration according to the variables considered in the kinematics graph provided was enhanced in the pedagogical intervention. This methodology offers a process of internal validation, after comparing the results obtained in a knowledge test at two different points in time (pre-test and post-test). The results allowed us to identify improvements in all students in terms of basic kinematics graph interpretation skills, and a group of students stood out by advancing in more complex reasoning and interpretation processes. These results contribute to the improvement of the pedagogical practices of Physics teachers at secondary and middle school levels, making them more competent when they enter higher education.

Using a class wiki to facilitate community and linguistic inclusivity

I describe the implementation of a class wiki in an introductory linguistics class. There were two pedagogical goals: (1) facilitate asynchronous student engagement and collaborative learning; (2) provide opportunities for students to engage with various linguistic issues having to do with justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion. Assessment for the wiki was done using a version of specifications grading (Nilson 2015), so that students could choose their level of engagement with the wiki. A full description of the wiki is available at https://cbjorndahl.github.io/CMUNoLWiki/, which includes detailed descriptions, learning objectives, and prompts given to students for each wiki cate-gory. The present paper focusses primarily on the pedagogical motivations, design of the pedagogical intervention, and a reflection of its effectiveness.