Linguistic Competence

In this special edited volume, the Editors and invited English Medium Instruction (EMI) researchers, from different parts of the world, outline the latest research methods in EMI. Providing academic instruction using English is rapidly growing in many countries where English is a second or foreign language and there is a growing interest in researching the effectiveness and affects of EMI across different educational levels. This volume includes chapters on everything from research into classroom interaction, teachers’ and students’ perceptions and motivation, to language challenges and strategies and the pedagogical implications of translanguaging in EMI classrooms. These specific topics were chosen to reflect different approaches to researching EMI. Each chapter focuses on a specific type of research methodology. It begins with an overview of the literature of the topic under discussion. Then an example study is provided to illustrate how this methodology can be used to investigate EMI. Each chapter identifies the process that the EMI researcher went through to conduct their research, key dilemmas they faced, and focuses particularly on the methodological issues they encountered. By exploring these issues, this volume hopes to inform theory (or the lack thereof) underlying research into the phenomenon of EMI. This volume is indispensable for EMI: tutors, curriculum developers, policymakers, teachers, as well as students at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels. It is particularly valuable for researchers from across the globe reading in the fields of applied linguistics, language education, English for Academic Purposes (EAP), English Language Teaching (ELT), and Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL).

Abstract : 1. What are we doing when we do grammar ? / 2. So what is grammar?/ 3. Where do the rules in book grammars come from ? / 4. So is grammar just about the links between words ? / 5.Language grammar always happens at the same time as lots of other things in your brain / 6. What should grammar teachers teach ? / 7. Do students learn useful language control from studying grammar books? / 8. Can teachers teach grammar? / 9. How can language teachers be most useful? / 10. Do grammar mistakes matter? / 11. Is accuracy more important than fluency?

This is the outline of a seminar on grammar teaching given as a teacher inservice for Chinese English teachers in Zhengzhou, Henan, China, on 13 May 2008. Thor May has been teaching language and linguistics since 1976.

Pojęcie kompetencji językowej stało się na gruncie wielu dziedzin nauki na tyle przydatne, że za jego pomocą próbuje się rozwiązać wiele teoretycznych problemów. Jest ono zwykle kojarzone z twórcą gramatyki generatywno-transformacyjnej, Noamem Chomsky’m, który odszedł od rozróżnienia na langue i parole Ferdynanda de Saussure’a ze względu na specyficzne rozumienie langue jako „jedynie systematycznego inwentarza jednostek” i zastąpił je dychotomią kompetencja – wykonanie, przyjmując koncepcję kompetencji Humboldta jako systemu procesów generatywnych. Poświęcił on uwagę zdolnościom umysłowym o charakterze wiedzy intuicyjnej i nieuwiadamianej, właściwej wszystkim rodzimym użytkownikom języka, a nie – jak proponował de Saussure – niezależnemu od człowieka układowi ściśle ze sobą powiązanych znaków językowych. W pierwszej części pracy zaprezentowano tzw. klasyczną definicję kompetencji i (pośrednio) wykonania Chomsky’ego, następnie – dość skrótowo – ewolucję myśli badacza na przestrzeni blisko czterdziestu lat.

Linguistic competence, communicative competence, and interactional competence have had profound impact on second language teaching, learning, and testing. Although a significant number of studies have been conducted on these three competences, they have not been conflated for discussion in a single study. Adding this piece to the jigsaw, the current paper explores all the three competences in more depth. This paper had a twin purpose of 1) providing a historical account of the linguistic, communicative and interactional competences, and 2) reviewing of the literature on them in order to identify gaps, if any, with the intention to propose new research ideas pertinent to the three types of competence. In order to achieve the study aims, intensive literature survey was conducted.  Based on the review of the related studies on linguistic, communicative and interactional competences, this article provides recommendations for effective classroom practice and future research.  

The paper analyses a space where the linguistic repertoire joins up creativity, that's music. Specifically, the author considers the song as a creative field where some bands can reproduce linguistic structures and functions mirroring the current repertoire. The discussed case study refers to the Boom Da Bash, a band from Salento whose originality consists in the strong and deep mixture of systems in order to create texts of protest and civil commitment. In the musical production of Boom Da Bash, the role of Italian, of dialect and of foreign languages (in particular English), along with recurring code-switchings, serve to convey ideological and identity contents in a peculiar expressive way. The described textual innovation can be considered as a productive input for the development of linguistic and cultural meta-competences of young speakers.

Abstract
Nowadays authentic reading matter is extensively used in the teaching of English for academic purposes. However choosing and deploying such materials is not as straightforward as it might at first seem. In this paper, the pros and cons of authentic materials are assessed and difficulties in their deployment are discussed, together with suggestions for their successful utilisation.

The conduct of this study was motivated by the relative dearth of research in Turkey to
investigate the language proficiency of foreign language teacher trainees. To obtain student views about the issue, data were collected through a questionnaire administered to 36 teacher trainees from the 2nd, 3rd and 4th year students each in an English language teacher training program in Turkey. Besides, 36 volunteering teacher trainees from the 1st and 3rd year students each were given the same State Staff Foreign Language Proficiency Exam (KPDS) to shed light on the questionnaire results. The findings point to the participants’ complaint and problem of English decreasing in proficiency level throughout their teacher training process and their attribution of
this problem mainly to the curriculum and teaching practices, which should lead every stakeholder, but firstly teacher trainers, to reconsider foreign language teacher education in Turkey.

(résumé non intégré dans la publication)
En Thaïlande, où l’on compte plus de cinquante langues et dialectes appartenant à cinq familles linguistiques distinctes, les Thaï des grands centres urbains pensent - et veulent que l’on pense - que le multilinguisme du pays n’est pas leur affaire. Le système scolaire, d’autre part, a fait le choix, aussi ambitieux qu’idéaliste, de l’anglais et de quelques autres grandes langues internationales, langues à la fois géographiquement lointaines et typologiquement très différentes, aux dépens des langues des pays voisins, qui contribueraient pourtant au développement des capacités linguistiques des écoliers !

The present article deals with some syntactical, morphemic and lexical variations of Phu Tai, a Southwestern Tai language which is spoken in Northeastern Thailand and Central Laos. The examples discussed include serialized sentence patterns (“to give” and “to be made of”), pre-verbal morphemes expressing present continuous and future and a few lexical items (“beautiful”, “(maternal) grandmother” and “where”). On the basis of this corpus of linguistic variations, this article proposes three possible kinds of linguistic maps. In addition, the author, who has been interacting with many Phu Tai informants for 3 years, expresses his views about Phu Tai speakers’ language usage, attitudes towards Phu Tai language and Phu Tai language revitalization programs.

Keywords: Phu Tai, Northeastern Thailand, dialectology

The translator must have a sort of competencies to carry out his work, namely: linguistic competence, communicative competence, organizational competence, syntactic competence, textual competence, pragmatic competence, cultural or encyclopedic competence, ideological competence and methodological competence.

Le thaï - et ce constat vaut pour les langues de la même famille linguistique - et le français semblent partager une large base de phonèmes vocaliques et consonantiques. Ce constat permet-il de penser que l’acquisition de la phonétique française pourrait s’en trouver facilitée ? Cette réflexion se fonde sur l’observation de l’apprentissage de primo-apprenants de la région Isan (de langue maternelle phu thaï) et donne le point de vue d’un locuteur français natif.

Abstract: While multilingualism in countries having many languages of recognized status, such as India which has 2 official languages (Hindi and English) and around 15 national languages, actually boosts the capacities of the learners attempting to acquire new languages, the sociolinguistic difference of status between Thai and local dialects of Thailand may explain the difficulty for Thai students to learn new languages and to switch languages. Thai being the predominant language of education is the written language and the medium through which Thai students learn their first grammar. Needless to say that, far from being only a tool for broader communication, Thai is the very tool of linguistic analysis for the students educated in the Thai system of education. Thai system of writing will thus be the conscious or unconscious tool for noting or memorizing other languages, while its grammatical categories, sometimes borrowed from other linguistic systems, will be the privileged medium in any further linguistic analysis when learning languages. The examples dealt with in this paper will be selected from some experiences of teaching and interacting with Phu Thai students studying French at Mahasarakham University.

Key Words: local languages of Thailand; Phu Thai; diglossia; code-switching; teaching a foreign language at the university level

The central thesis of this paper is that a cognitively and academically beneficial form of bilingualism can be achieved only on the basis of adequately developed first language (L1) skills. Two hypotheses are formulated and combined to arrive at this position. The “developmental interdependence” hypothesis proposes that the development of competence in a second language (L2) is partially a function of the type of competence already developed in L1 at the time when intensive exposure to L2 begins. The “threshold” hypothesis proposes that there may be threshold levels of linguistic competence which a bilingual child must attain both in order to avoid cognitive disadvantages and allow the potentially beneficial aspects of bilingualism to influence his cognitive and academic functioning. These hypotheses are integrated into a model of bilingual education in which educational outcomes are explained as a function of the interaction between background, child input and educational treatment...

Intertextuality in its broadest sense—the relationship between two texts—is a pervasive feature of academic writing, as manifested by features such as citations to earlier texts and the sets of features such as structure and organisation which are shared by texts in a given genre and/or academic discipline.

Many of the intertextual features of academic writing, such as the choice of reporting verb and verb form, have been thoroughly researched and described (e.g., Charles, 2006; Shaw, 1992). Much is also know about a specific, highly problematic form of intertextuality: plagiarism (e.g., Pecorari & Shaw, 2012). However, less attention has been given to the ways in which novice academic writers become aware of conventional intertextual practices, and less still to the transferability of this feature to writing in the workplace.

This paper will present the results of a corpus-based investigation of intertextuality in two domains: the leisure-time reading which lower-division undergraduates do, and a common workplace genre.  By triangulating the results from these two corpora with existing findings about the intertextual features of academic texts it will be possible to describe the extent to which these features overlap with, or diverge from, each other.  This will thus provide an indication of the features which can reasonably be expected to transfer from one domain to another, and which cannot, and should therefore be the subject of explicit instruction in the English for Specific Academic Purposes classroom.

References
Charles, M. (2006). The Construction of Stance in Reporting Clauses: A Cross-disciplinary Study of Theses. Applied Linguistics, 27, 492–518.
Pecorari, D. & Shaw, P. (2012). Types of student intertextuality and faculty attitudes. Journal of Second Language Writing, 21, 149–164.
Shaw, P. (1992). Reasons for the correlation of voice, tense and sentence function in reporting verbs. Applied Linguistics, 13, 302–319.

La presencia cada vez mayor de las Tecnologías de la Información y la Comunicación (TIC) en las distintas actividades humanas ha provocado una transformación no solo a nivel de medios, sino también de prácticas sociales que desafían los cambios generacionales e impactan más directamente a la población adulta. Esto, sumado a la creciente importancia que las propias instituciones a nivel mundial declaran sobre la eficacia para manejar la tecnología, equiparándola con la comunicación lingüística, suponen un desafío en la búsqueda de buenas prácticas educativas, en las que no solo se reflejen las dimensiones del ejercicio disciplinar, sino también el uso eficaz de las herramientas digitales. Por tal motivo, la presente tesis doctoral ofrece un panorama sobre los avances de la tecnología educativa aplicada a la enseñanza de lenguas, la correspondiente teoría con el público adulto y el análisis del desarrollo de competencias lingüístico-comunicativas en modalidades e-learning, blended learning y presencial, contextualizadas en la Universidad San Ignacio de Loyola. A través de dicho trabajo, se propone la constante reconfiguración de la práctica educativa sostenida en el uso de la tecnología, sus beneficios directos y la revaloración de su papel en el desarrollo de personas y sociedades.

Linguistic competence and teaching performance among English teachers in EFL (English as a Foreign Language) classrooms have been at the center of linguists' discussion, both theoretical and applied in the 21st century. This study attempts to examine the importance of balancing linguistic competence and teaching performance in learning and teaching of English classrooms. Moreover, this study aims at exploring the different ways of linguistic competence and teaching performance defined by linguists. It also investigates how differing interpretations of these two concepts influence learning and teaching in foreign language classrooms. Following the idea above, an online survey was conducted to discover the EFL teachers' beliefs about linguistic competence and teaching performance in EFL teaching practices. The result indicated that most of them have a clear idea toward the concept of linguistic competencies and teaching performance and believed that it is important for EFL teachers to have a good command of linguistic competence in order to help them perform better in their teaching practices/performances. Therefore, linguistic competencies and teaching performance should be placed equally.

(résumé non intégré dans la publication)
En Thaïlande, où l’on compte plus de cinquante langues et dialectes appartenant à cinq familles linguistiques distinctes, les Thaï des grands centres urbains pensent - et veulent que l’on pense - que le multilinguisme du pays n’est pas leur affaire. Le système scolaire, d’autre part, a fait le choix, aussi ambitieux qu’idéaliste, de l’anglais et de quelques autres grandes langues internationales, langues à la fois géographiquement lointaines et typologiquement très différentes, aux dépens des langues des pays voisins, qui contribueraient pourtant au développement des capacités linguistiques des écoliers !

This article demonstrates how Karl May systematically applies several stylistic devices to represent the diverse linguistic environment of America in his western novel, Der Schatz im Silbersee. This system, it is argued, supports, though not always consistently, May's agenda of promoting good characters over bad, making the text more authentic, and helping German readers identify with the characters.

Enhancing English Language Teaching (ELT) through films in General Foundation Programs (GFPs), Oman is a practical research paper which aims at exploiting of technologies in ELT in order to develop linguistic competence and learner autonomy of students in the GFP. Research in communicative approach to language has shown that competence in oral and written language grows as the learners actively use the language in and out of the classroom. The aim of this paper is to engage learners in activities that demand their autonomous participation and develop linguistic competence and learner autonomy. The vital question every teacher has to ponder upon is " Can we expect what was taught in the previous class is retained in the next class? " The present study focuses on how films can aid in enhancing ELT in the GFP in Oman. The research data collected will be empirical and qualitative in nature. GFP students will be the main subjects of this research. The research will be carried out on different levels and groups in the GFP. The activities based on films expose the learners to authentic language input, help them learn how language operates and challenge them to use the language independently. The rich visual imagery, the action and motions of the films deliver the learners with multi-sensory involvement (Arcario, 1993). Infusing technology into Education serves a variety of purposes in language teaching. The observation of cultural aspects such as traditions helps to understand the function of the language. By this pragmatic approach an innovative teacher can aid students' critical thinking skills as well as their linguistic competence. Hence it is suggested that a judicious selection of digital materials along with several learner-friendly tasks can be incorporated in syllabus of ELT.

Die Benachteiligung von Schulerinnen und Schulern mit Migrationshintergrund im deutschen Bildungswesen ist durch die empirische Bildungsforschung vielfach belegt worden. Eine wesentliche Ursache ist dabei die nicht ausreichende sprachliche Kompetenz in der Schulsprache, die eine adaquate Nutzung von unterrichtlichen Lernangeboten einschrankt. In diesem Beitrag berichten [die Autoren] uber eine Studie zum Zusammenhang von Mathematikkenntnissen und sprachlicher Kompetenz mit 556 Kindern aus 25 Klassen der ersten Jahrgangsstufe. Die Ergebnisse deuten darauf hin, dass Erstklassler mit Migrationshintergrund bei Defiziten in der Schulsprache in speziellen Bereichen des mathematischen Wissensaufbaus benachteiligt sind. (DPIF/Orig.) The handicap of students with migration background within the German educational system has often been substantiated by empirical educational research. One of the main reasons for this disadvantage is insufficient competence in the language of instruction, which...

Posing the problem of linguistic competence involves analyzing or on the contrary assuming previous conceptions about many radical realities or at least it involves examining the concepts to be used to determine the degree of reality of them all. In order to avoid all possible beliefs on the blind assumption of concepts previous to the conception of linguistic competence (the concept of language, a language, speaking, the nature of competence, science, linguistics, etc.) it is necessary to make an initial foray into the problem.

This paper focuses on some representations that Valencian students of Education have as regards plurilingualism, language transmission and the construction of identity in linguistic autobiographies. These students are learning to face the challenge of a plurilingual education. With this in mind, the object of study here has been these learners’ perceptions of the relationship between identity and education, the process of language acquisition, and different aspects of Valencian sociolinguistic reality. This reality is based on a bilingual educational system (Valencian-Castilian Spanish), which is official since 1983. More specifically, this paper centres on two extended concepts students commonly used to express their linguistic identity as regards their first language and their second language. On the one hand, the use of the expressions “castellanoparlante” (Castilian Spanish native speaker) and “valencianoparlante” (Valencian native speaker) is explored. Such usage entails the existence of two unchangeable ethnolinguistic groups. On the other hand, the different uses of the term “lengua materna” (mother tongue) are also examined, i.e.: mother tongue as origin (the language or languages that have been learned first), mother tongue as internal identification (the language or lan¬guages one identifies with) or external identification (language or languages one is identified with), and mother tongue as competence (the language or languages that one masters) or function (the language or languages that one uses the most).

Prepared for UNESCO Seminar on “Sharing Intangible Cultural Heritage: Narratives and Representations,” Oaxaca, January 2009. The material presented here was developed in lectures given at the University of California, Berkeley; Michigan State University, Kalamazoo; the University of Illinois at Chicago; the University of California at San Diego; and the Australian Academy of the Humanities, University of Melbourne.

Em diálogo direto com questões voltadas para a compreensão das dimensões linguísticas presentes em torno dos realinhamentos planetários, sociais, ecológicos, econômicos, políticos e imaginários impulsionados pela globalização contemporânea, o presente artigo
está focado no diálogo sobre o papel e a importância da linguagem para a definição e mesmo determinação dos processos e transformações operadas por essa globalização, principalmente, levando em consideração a necessidade de inserir a língua no centro desse
debate, como importante categoria de análise para a reflexão sobre a dinâmica das transformações em curso.

ABSTRACTSocialization is defined as the incorporation of a child into society on the basis of social and linguistic interaction. Central to this process is a child's advancement in communicative skills. As a child progresses in linguistic competence, the structure of interaction changes to accommodate his newfound skills, and underlying these changes are the Luo attitudes and beliefs on child-rearing, language acquisition, and the position of children in society. (Socialization; speech acquisition; social interaction; language attitudes.)

Linguistic competence, language, a language and speech acts constitute realities to be found in  speaking.  They  all  are  nothing  but  aspects  of  the  same  reality,  the  activity  of  speaking  created and executed by human subjects who are free and creative, absolute and contingent, transcendent and historical. Since speaking is something known by speakers even before the performance  what  linguistic  competence  is  can  only  be  guessed  out  through  self-reflection  and verification of it in the verbal behavior of speakers.

Linguistic competence, communicative competence, and interactional competence have had a profound impact on second language teaching, learning, and testing. Although a substantial number of studies have been conducted on these three competences, they have not been conflated for discussion in a single study. Adding this piece to the jigsaw, the current paper explores these three competences in depth. This paper had a twin purpose of 1) providing a historical account of the linguistic, communicative and interactional competences, and 2) reviewing of the literature on them in order to identify gaps, if any, with the intention to propose new research ideas pertinent to the three types of competences. In order to achieve the study aims, an intensive literature survey was conducted. Based on the review of the related research on linguistic, communicative and interactional competences, this article offers recommendations for effective classroom practice and future research.