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摘要：From 1994, the South Korean government has implemented a series of innovations to change English language education from teaching about English to developing students' communicative competence in English. This paper discusses the impact of a teacher certification scheme, one such innovation. The scheme is examined from three perspectives: its design, implementation, and perceived future impact. The discussion draws on documents from the certification scheme, lesson plans, video-recordings, and assessment results from assessed lessons for four candidates and interviews with these teachers. Analysis of this data shows that the scheme has the potential to make future classroom practice more communicative. However, there are a number of factors which seriously inhibit the impact of this scheme and which have implications for future innovations of this type. These include ineffective communication with teachers about the innovation, teachers' perceptions of the relevance of the promoted practice, and the degree of compatibility between the innovation and its wider educational context. Adapted from the source document

摘要：This study investigated the immediate and long-term effects of explicit and implicit classroom interventions on L2 pragmatics. The linguistic focus of the interventions was epistemic stance, which has rarely been studied in research on instructed SLA within the field of interlanguage pragmatics. Eighty-one learners of English at a Japanese university were divided into explicit (n = 37) and implicit (n = 44) groups for 3 hours of instruction. Written production data were collected before the interventions, immediately after them, and five months later. Learners' use of epistemic stance forms was analysed by using: (i) a measure of individual use of epistemic stance forms; and (ii) learner corpus analysis. The explicit intervention was found to be considerably more effective than the implicit intervention in both the short- and long-term for most of the targeted forms. However, in cases when learners lacked a form for a specific function before the intervention, both types of instruction appeared to be equally effective. While this research generally provides strong support for explicit instruction, the potential of implicit interventions for certain forms needs further investigation. Adapted from the source document

摘要：This is a response to the commentary 'English Proficiency Tests and Communication Skills Training for Overseas-Qualified Health Professionals in Australia and New Zealand' by Rosemary Wette, published in Language Assessment Quarterly, Volume 8, Issue 2, 2011. Adapted from the source document

摘要：This article highlights a preliminary study that is part of a larger research project relating to a specific-purpose English language test for overseas-trained health professionals: the Occupational English Test (McNamara, 1996). The present study highlights findings from the first phase of the project designed to prove the views of spoken communication by doctors, nurses, and physiotherapists, eliciting these views by analyzing clinical experts' feedback on instances of trainee-patient communication proffered independently of the test setting. This research aims to determine "what criteria underlie the judgements of clinical educators regarding the spoken clinical communication of native- and nonnative-English-speaking health professionals." Adapted from the source document

摘要：Scores assigned by trained raters and by an automated scoring system (SpeechRaterTM) on the speaking section of the TOEFL iBT(TM) were validated against a communicative competence criterion. Specifically, a sample of 555 undergraduate students listened to speech samples from 184 examinees who took the Test of English as a Foreign Language Internet-based test (TOEFL iBT). Oral communicative effectiveness was evaluated both by rating scales and by the ability of the undergraduate raters to answer multiple-choice questions that could be answered only if the spoken response was understood. Correlations of these communicative competence indicators from the undergraduate raters with speech scores were substantially higher for the scores provided by the professional TOEFL iBT raters than for the scores provided by SpeechRater. Results suggested that both expert raters and SpeechRater are evaluating aspects of communicative competence, but that SpeechRater fails to measure aspects of the construct that human raters can evaluate. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications, Ltd., copyright holder.]

摘要：While communicative competence is characterized by the negotiation of intended meanings in authentic contexts of language use, intercultural competence has to do with far less negotiable discourse worlds, the 'circulation of values and identities across cultures, the inversions, even inventions of meaning, often hidden behind a common illusion of effective communication' (Kramsch, Levy & Zarate 2008: 15). The self that is engaged in intercultural communication is a symbolic self that is constituted by symbolic systems like language as well as by systems of thought and their symbolic power. This symbolic self is the most sacred part of our personal and social identity; it demands for its well-being careful positioning, delicate facework, and the ability to frame and re-frame events. The symbolic dimension of intercultural competence calls for an approach to research and teaching that is discourse-based, historically grounded, aesthetically sensitive, and that takes into account the actual, the imagined and the virtual worlds in which we live. With the help of concrete examples from the real world and foreign language classrooms, the paper attempts to redefine the notion of third place (Kramsch 1993) as symbolic competence. Adapted from the source document

摘要：The European Union funded LITERALIA project connected adult language learners from four countries with the help of an online workspace and supported visits. The project was based on Tandem principles, whereby learners of different languages support one another in learning one another's language and culture, in turn taking on the roles of learners and expert informants. This article analyses project participants' intercultural learning and shows their development of intercultural maturity online. Qualitative data collected through observation, feedback and interviews are analysed and used to present a description of adults' experiences in intercultural learning. The study focuses on adult learning, drawing in particular on Mezirow's concept of "perspective transformation" (Mezirow, 1981), a concept applied to intercultural experiences by Taylor (1994). Three different models of intercultural learning -- all of them multidimensional and multifaceted -- have influenced our research: (a) intercultural competency (Taylor, 1994); (b) intercultural communicative competence (Byram, 1997); and (c) intercultural maturity (King & Baxter Magolda, 2005). However, few studies have been conducted in this area that integrate online interaction in non-formal learning settings as our study attempts. Adapted from the source document

摘要：This quasi-experimental study reports on a 10-month classroom-based longitudinal investigation, exploring the potential of authentic materials to develop Japanese learners' communicative competence in English. Sixty-two second-year university students were assigned to either a control group receiving textbook input or an experimental group receiving authentic input, and their pretreatment and posttreatment levels of overall communicative competence were assessed. Communicative competence was operationalized with a batch of eight different tests: a listening test, a pronunciation test, a C-test, a grammar test, a vocabulary test, a discourse completion task, an oral interview, and a student-student role-play. The results indicated that the experimental group outperformed the control group in five of the eight measures, suggesting that the authentic materials and their associated tasks were more effective in developing a broader range of communicative competencies in learners than the textbook materials. I discuss the pedagogical implications of these findings for language teachers and their learners.

摘要：Drawing on current theories in personality, second-language (L2) oral ability, and psychometrics, this study investigates the extent to which self-consciousness and assertiveness are explanatory variables of L2 oral ability. Three hundred sixty first-year Japanese university students who were studying English as a foreign language participated in the study. Personality was measured with the Japanese version of the NEO-PI-R (Shimonaka, Nakazato, Gondo, & Takayama, 2002), and L2 oral ability was assessed with an institutionalized group oral discussion test in which performances were judged for pronunciation, fluency, grammar, vocabulary, and communication skills. An analysis of covariance structures technique indicated that assertiveness is a significant explanatory variable of L2 oral ability and no effect was found for self-consciousness. Communication skills and fluency were slightly better explained by assertiveness than the other subconstructs of oral ability.

摘要：Language and communication skills are among the greatest challenges that non-native-English speaking international medical graduates (IMGs) face in English medical consultations. Especially when patients use unfamiliar everyday expressions or attach different meanings to medical terminology, the communicative burden on doctor-patient communication may be increased. This exploratory study investigates how IMGs attend to everyday language and medical terminology in a professional English for Specific Purposes (ESP) course, and whether or not they are aware that patients and medical professionals may interpret or perceive medical terminology differently. To provide preliminary answers, the IMGs approach to and use of two specific communication skills was studied: (1) clarifying unclear patient statements and (2) using easily comprehensible language and avoiding or explaining jargon. Two groups of IMGs were observed for a period of approximately three months during a medical professional ESP course in Australia. Data were gathered in form of field notes and artefacts. Findings indicate that participants are only marginally aware of terminological divergences. Concerning the targeted communication skills, the limited English proficiency of many IMGs was often found to result in a mismatch between proposed and executed actions. Implications for teachers of professional ESP training courses are highlighted. Awareness of problematic medical terminology issues is low among international medical graduates (IMGs). IMGs do not always adopt recommended communication strategies. Medical ESP courses should cover both lay and technical medical terminology. Reinforcing certain strategies could further acceptance and consistency in use. [Copyright The American University; published by Elsevier Ltd.]

摘要：Socio-pragmatic skills have been identified as important components of communicative competence in the workplace, yet relatively few studies have undertaken an evaluation of the effects of classroom-based support in developing both cognitive control and social competence in these areas of language proficiency. This paper reports on a collaborative study that tracks the development of skilled migrants' socio-pragmatic performance over a period of 12 weeks, from their entry into the classroom, through six weeks of instruction and then into the workplace context. Using a detailed case study, this paper examines the effects of conscious learning, as well as opportunities for social interaction, in the acquisition of appropriate ways of negotiating workplace requests. Adapted from the source document

摘要：In line with a communicative curriculum for English, it is claimed that communicative competence involves knowledge about when and how to display affectivity in talk-in-interaction. Typically, interjections have been described as a lexical means for expressions of emotion. A survey of textbooks canonical of EFL at German elementary and secondary schools reveals that interjections are often used in (constructed) conversation examples. However, the translations of the interjections given do not adequately account for their meanings and use. Illustrated by a case study on two forms and uses of 'oh', it is argued that the approach of Interactional Linguistics can provide an empirical basis for teaching interjections in the EFL classroom. Based on the finding that the competent use of interjections depends on the correct production of the segmental and prosodic form and the timely positioning in a conversational sequence of actions, didactic guidelines for teaching interjections are proposed. Adapted from the source document

摘要：One of the main objectives of the European Networked Interaction in Foreign Language Acquisition and Research (NIFLAR) project is to make foreign language learning and teaching processes more relevant and rewarding for reaching intercultural communicative competence. This is realized by offering foreign language learners and pre-service teachers opportunities to engage in meaningful interaction with each other through video-web communication (VC), according to the requirements set by relevant interaction tasks. In this article, we present the actions taken in the project to enhance students' motivation and the effect VC sessions have on motivation, as measured by pre-, mid-, and post-questionnaires participants filled in prior and after virtual interaction sessions. Significant effects were found particularly for beginner level students on those dimensions measuring aspects related to willingness to interact with native speakers. Adapted from the source document

摘要：Internet-mediated intercultural discussions have been adopted for intercultural and second-language learning. However, the notion of community development in this context has received less attention. This study employs exchange structure (ES) analysis (Stubbs, M. (1983). Discourse analysis. Oxford: Basil Blackwell) to investigate the dialogic process involved in the construction of a group-specific interactional pattern, identity, and activity within an online intercultural group. By identifying and tracking the shift of the ES and ES roles of each group, it explores how the members of each group constitute its internal activity and how the developed activity is related to intercultural learning. This study examines 14 groups of Japanese students and language learners from multicultural backgrounds who engaged in asynchronous online intercultural discussions for a 12-week period. The findings suggest that ES types and promoted intercultural learning vary among groups, develop implicitly, and are particularly influenced by frequent contributors. Furthermore, the data suggest that a certain type of ES encourages intercultural learning to move from knowledge exchanges to perspective changes. Adapted from the source document

摘要：There is growing interest in language barriers in health care (LBHC) -- interest, that is, in how the quality of health care service delivery might be compromised when patients and health care providers do not share the same first language. This article discusses LBHC as an emerging research area that provides valuable opportunities for researchers in various branches of the language sciences -- including, among others, applied linguistics, theoretical linguistics, psycholinguistics, second language acquisition -- to conduct basic research and to make contributions to the socially important area of medical communication. This article also proposes a research agenda aimed at attracting general language researchers to the study of LBHC, an agenda that is theory driven, programmatic, problem-solving oriented, and interdisciplinary in scope. In proposing this agenda, selected examples have been reviewed from the current literature that can serve as illustrative models for how future research into LBHC can proceed. Adapted from the source document

摘要：This article focuses on the use of conversation analysis (CA) to help teaching interactional competence in English to adult second language learners from lower to intermediate levels. To set the context, this article gives a brief overview on the use of CA in second language research as well as considering the construct of interactional competence in second language teaching. Based on classroom research, the article demonstrates how CA applied in the second language classroom was effective initially in raising students' awareness of both the mechanisms and norms of spoken interaction, and also eventually in helping them to become analysts of conversation and more effective conversationalists. To better understand what CA concepts needed to be taught a conversation analysis of the students' undirected conversations was undertaken revealing interactional problems not noticed through traditional methods of investigation. It is therefore suggested that a CA-informed pedagogical approach can help to teach interactional competence or competencies, by using materials designed for that purpose. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Ltd., copyright holder.]

摘要：Analyses of second language (L2) classroom interaction often categorize joking and other humorous talk by students as disruptive, off-task behavior, thereby rendering it important only from a classroom management perspective. Studies of language play, however, have illustrated that such jocular talk not only allows students to construct a broader and perhaps more desirable range of classroom identities, but also occasions more complex and creative acts of language use than those normally found in L2 instructional settings. Likewise, critical sociolinguists have observed that the use of humor may constitute opposition and/or resistance to monotonous, culturally insensitive, or even face-threatening classroom practices. This article presents a case for a particular communicative mode-humor-to be seen as a pedagogical safe house (Canagarajah, 1999, 2004; Pratt, 1991), extending this notion beyond spatial and temporal domains. Specifically, it draws on the notions of performance, calibration (Bauman, 2004; Rampton, 2006), and layered simultaneity (Blommaert, 2005; Kramsch & Whiteside, 2008) to understand how particular instances of classroom humor function in this fashion. It then considers how an understanding of humor as a safe house can inform recent theoretical discussions of communicative competence and L2 classroom interaction. Adapted from the source document