The Interactional Features of Billingual Teacher Talk in the Classroom of Arabic as a Foreign Language

Communication is essential in studying Arabic as a foreign language to make the lesson interactive. This research aimed to identify and assess three aspects. First, the Teacher Talk (TT) interaction feature appeared in the Arabic Education Study Program, Faculty of Tarbiyah and Teacher Training, Raden Intan State Islamic University of Lampung. Second, each lecturer's primary type of TT interaction element. Third, the utilization of code-switching as a component of bilingual learning interactions. This research was a case study of three Arabic lecturers (T1, T2, and T3) who used Google Meets to conduct online learning. Each lecturer was videotaped three times and then examined using Miles and Huberman's qualitative approach. The findings of the L2 investigation demonstrate that 1) T1 produced twelve different types of interaction features. Furthermore, T2 produced eleven different types of interaction features. Finally, T3 produced twelve different types of interaction features. 2) The most dominant TT interaction features in the classrooms by T1 was Scaffolding (18.2 percent), T2 was Display Questions (24.6 percent), and T3 was Confirmation Check (23.1 percent). 3) In the context of bilingual classes, this study also found that L2 lecturers used other interaction features to facilitate interaction, namely code-switching from Arabic (L2) to Indonesian (L1) and vice versa. The total occurrence of code-switching by T1 was 9.1 percent (the least), code-switching by T2 was 27.3 percent, and code-switching by T3 was 63.6 percent (the most dominant). Code-switching can be an excellent alternate approach or interaction tool for facilitating communication in the classroom when learning Arabic; nevertheless, it must be used appropriately and proportionally.

Walsh’s Classroom Modes and Interactional Features of Teacher Talk in Science Class at DCS Semarang

This research aims to find out how the realization of classroom modes and interactional features of teacher talk and identify the interactional features that either support or hindrance student's learning in science class elementary level. The descriptive qualitative method is applied in this study. Twelve lessons from 7 teachers were transcribed and analyzed using the Self Evaluation of Teacher Talk (SETT) framework adapted from Walsh (2006) supported by data interview. The findings show that all four classroom modes can be seen in all of the lessons, but classroom context modes were found in a limited portion. The teachers performed all interactional features where the most frequent occurrences are teacher echo, display question, seeking clarification, content feedback, and extended teacher turn. The lesser proportion of the interactional features are scaffolding, extended wait time, referential questions, direct repair, confirmation check, extended learner turn, teacher interruptions, form-focused feedback, and turn completion. From all the interactional features that have been employed, seeking clarification, content feedback, scaffolding, and extended wait time are strategies that potentially support students learning. On the other hand, teacher echo and display questions were found to hindrance students’ learning potentially.

Transcultural brand communication: Disneyland’s social media posts from USA to Hong Kong and Shanghai

The paper attends to the increasingly heated debate on the local, the global versus the glocal approaches in transcultural brand communication with an examination of how Disneyland performs emotional branding on social media across US to Hong Kong and Shanghai. Integrating insights from brand communication with linguistics, the present study develops a framework to examine how Disneyland builds emotional attachment of the public to the brand via brand personality appeals and use of interactional features. It is found that on a global-local continuum, brand personality traits exhibit strong globalization propensity whereas interactional features demonstrate strong localization tendency in Hong Kong and Shanghai. Variations also exist in the means of emotional branding between Hong Kong and Shanghai. Finally, the paper provides an account for the differences between Hong Kong and Shanghai and concludes that neither the local approach nor the global approach but the glocal approach can tackle the challenge of transcultural brand communication and that future studies in this area should be oriented further to uncovering the global-local nexus in the process.

Reading minds: A study of deictic shifts in translated written interaction between mental-health professionals and their readers

The practice of knowledge mediation in written texts relating to the health sciences has hitherto received limited attention within Translation Studies. The overall aim of this study is to explore writer-reader interaction in a bilingual corpus of medical leaflets published on the website of the Royal College of Psychiatrists (UK). In order to do this, a comparative analysis of English source texts and Spanish target texts was conducted to identify shifts in personal reference, which served to contrast patterns in knowledge transfer processes between mental health experts and their target audiences. The study is underpinned by Thompson and Thetela’s (1995) tenet that interactive and interactional features have to be considered in conjunction. It seeks to make a contribution to the relatively understudied field of how interaction patterns differ across cultural and linguistic settings. The corpus is of special interest due to the sensitivity of its subject matter, the varied constituency it addresses and the fact that the translated texts were produced and revised by mental health professionals.

Affiliation, topicality, and Asperger’s

Objective: In storytelling environments, recipients’ questions have mainly been described as non-affiliative. This article examines how the topicality of story-responsive questions relates to the recipients’ displays of affiliation. Furthermore, we investigate whether there are differences between the practices of neurotypical participants (NT) and participants diagnosed with Asperger syndrome (AS) in this regard. While aiming to uncover the practices of story-responsive questions in general, we also seek to shed light on the specific interactional features associated with AS. Method: Our method is qualitative conversation analysis. Drawing on a dataset of Finnish quasi-natural conversations, we compare the interactional consequences of story-responsive questions asked by NT- and AS-participants. Results: We show how the NT-participants in our data use a specific set of practices to manage the topical relevance of their questions, while the AS-participants’ production of otherwise very similar questions differs precisely with reference to these practices. Discussion: We argue that the different ways in which the NT- and AS-participants treat the topicality of their questions influence the relative affiliative import of the questions in subtle, but yet significant ways. Conclusions: The affiliative import of story-responsive questions can only really be seen in retrospect, since, in their subsequent turns, the questioner can cast their action as having prepared the ground for affiliation.

Swallowing in Conversation

Swallowing—a complex physical process that involves closure of the mouth and nasal cavities, as well as the glottis, and the raising and lowering of the larynx—is at the boundary between speech and the body, yet almost nothing is known about how it works in conjunction with speech in spoken interaction. Research into swallowing, mostly in speech therapy, has explored the articulations required, how long it takes the bolus to pass through the mouth to the stomach, and the sounds that occur on the way. In the phonetics literature, swallowing is regularly excluded from study: in experiments, tokens with swallowing are excluded; and while swallowing is used to set up certain experiments, its effect on speech is not the object of such studies, though it is sometimes mentioned as a possible action during a stretch of silence, as in word search. Although speaking and swallowing are mutually incompatible, in conversation, swallowing has to be coordinated around the processes of speaking. It can be part of the preparations for speech; it can also occur within and after stretches of speech. While swallowing has been marked in conversation analytic transcripts in several languages, it is almost never commented on. Like sniffing, crying or laughing, swallowing occurs in the vocal tract and may accompany speech, but is not considered as part of the stream of speech. It is clearly related to drinking, which (Hoey, 2015; Hoey, 2017; Hoey, 2020b) shows is strategically placed in the sequential unfolding of talk. In the same spirit, this paper will treat swallowing as an interactional resource which is bound up with language, and which has particular affordances and demands. This paper fills a gap in our knowledge, by focusing on swallowing that is embedded within, before, or after stretches of speech. It considers the phonetic, linguistic and interactional features of swallowing. It thus explores how verbal conduct is intertwined with one aspect of bodily conduct.

Alzheimer’s Dementia Recognition From Spontaneous Speech Using Disfluency and Interactional Features

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is a progressive, neurodegenerative disorder mainly characterized by memory loss with deficits in other cognitive domains, including language, visuospatial abilities, and changes in behavior. Detecting diagnostic biomarkers that are noninvasive and cost-effective is of great value not only for clinical assessments and diagnostics but also for research purposes. Several previous studies have investigated AD diagnosis via the acoustic, lexical, syntactic, and semantic aspects of speech and language. Other studies include approaches from conversation analysis that look at more interactional aspects, showing that disfluencies such as fillers and repairs, and purely nonverbal features such as inter-speaker silence, can be key features of AD conversations. These kinds of features, if useful for diagnosis, may have many advantages: They are simple to extract and relatively language-, topic-, and task-independent. This study aims to quantify the role and contribution of these features of interaction structure in predicting whether a dialogue participant has AD. We used a subset of the Carolinas Conversation Collection dataset of patients with AD at moderate stage within the age range 60–89 and similar-aged non-AD patients with other health conditions. Our feature analysis comprised two sets: disfluency features, including indicators such as self-repairs and fillers, and interactional features, including overlaps, turn-taking behavior, and distributions of different types of silence both within patient speech and between patient and interviewer speech. Statistical analysis showed significant differences between AD and non-AD groups for several disfluency features (edit terms, verbatim repeats, and substitutions) and interactional features (lapses, gaps, attributable silences, turn switches per minute, standardized phonation time, and turn length). For the classification of AD patient conversations vs. non-AD patient conversations, we achieved 83% accuracy with disfluency features, 83% accuracy with interactional features, and an overall accuracy of 90% when combining both feature sets using support vector machine classifiers. The discriminative power of these features, perhaps combined with more conventional linguistic features, therefore shows potential for integration into noninvasive clinical assessments for AD at advanced stages.

Interaction Rituals and Sexual Commerce in Thailand’s Erotic Bars

This article explores bar prostitution as a distinct sexual arena. Drawing on fieldwork in six red-light districts in Thailand, the article identifies key structural and interactional features of the bars located in these areas. The analysis draws on an “interaction rituals” framework to elucidate scripted encounters between workers and customers, successive ritual chains, and the way departures or “broken chains” help to confirm the existence and vitality of normative chains. I argue, further, that the bars are organized around a distinctive moral economy—a courting-and-dating model—that allows sex workers and their clients to simultaneously downplay their involvement in prostitution and form affective ties with one another. Due to this framing, bar prostitution can be distinguished from most other types of prostitution, where opportunities for destigmatization are either minimal or nonexistent.

“Acting in Accordance with the Ordinary Legislative Procedure…”: Metadiscourse in EU Regulations on Immigration

The ongoing Pan-European integration process has profoundly influenced the nature of European law and its development, demanding a review of “the ways of how language […] is materialized” (Gibová, 2009, p. 192). EU multilingualism is thus becoming an intricate concept since “EU translation is […] becoming the language of Europe” (Gibová, 2009, p. 192) encompassing a supranational view of the world conveyed in EU-wide legislation. Very much in line with this assumption, and taking into account the teaching experience in Specialised Translation Masters’ courses training would-be professional translators, this study examines a corpus of European Parliament Regulations on immigration. In order to understand whether dissimilarities and/or congruencies occur between the EU working language, i.e., English, and the Italian versions, the metadiscourse framework by Hyland (2005), comprising both interactive and interactional features, is used as the point of departure for the analysis of parallel texts. The Regulations produced by EU institutions and conveyed and transmitted both in English as a “procedural language” (Wagner, Bech, & Martίnez, 2012) as well as in Italian have been scrutinized both quantitatively and qualitatively, in order to draw precious pedagogical implications for translation studies and professional practice for future qualified and trained translators.