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Overview of research

Evaluation and point of view in the oral production of Italian learners of English Virginia Pulcini (University of Turin, Italy). Spoken Learner Corpus Colloquium 24-25 January 2008 Université catholique de Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium. Overview of research.

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Overview of research

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  1. Evaluation and point of view in the oral production of Italian learners of EnglishVirginia Pulcini (University of Turin, Italy) Spoken Learner Corpus Colloquium24-25 January 2008Université catholique de Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium

  2. Overview of research • Pulcini, V. (2004) “A corpus of ‘informal academic interviews’: the Italian Component of the LINDSEI project” • situational setting, subjects, structure of the interview • characteristics of this genre: goal-oriented, semi-structured, asymmetric, institutional and cross-linguistic.

  3. Pulcini,V. and C. Furiassi (2004) “Spoken interaction and discourse markers in a corpus of learner English” • teachers use twice as many discourse markers than students • Teachers: backchannels (mhm, uhu, I see, oh), please, now, right (comprehension and agreement), textual markers of option and contrast (or, but) • Students: response forms (yeah, no), fillers and hedges (I mean, I think), phatic devices (you know), markers of addition and continuity (and, so)

  4. students’ pragmatic competence in conversational management seems to be limited Closings: 31% reply to a thanking or closing expression with a standard form (okay, you’re welcome) 53% do not respond at all 16% violate the standard English norm

  5. Furiassi, C. (2004) “Spoken and written learner English: A quantitative analysis of ICLE-IT and LINDSEI-IT” • the same differences that exist between spoken and written modes of communication in native use are also present in ICLE-it and LINDSEI-it • short words (functional words and core lexical items), less varied and more repetitive vocabulary, verbal fillers, discourse markers, contracted forms

  6. The expression of evaluation and attitudinal stance(Thompson and Hunston, 2000) • “the expression of the speaker or writer’s attitude or stance towards, viewpoint on, or feelings about the entities or propositions that he or she is talking about” • parameters: goodness or badness, likelihood/certaintyexpectedness, importance • conceptual: markers of subjectivity (I think, in my opinion, etc.), comparison (more…than) • lexical: evaluative adjectives, evaluative verbs, discourse labels (problem), hedges (maybe) • grammatical: modals, connectors, subordinators • textual: discourse markers

  7. Focus on the following linguistic signals: • Markers of subjectivity  personal pronouns, phrases • Evaluative and private verbs • Evaluative adjectives

  8. Table 1. Personal pronouns and possessives in Lindsei-it

  9. Table 2. Evaluative phrases in the Lindsei-it B-turns

  10. Table 3. Verbs expressing evaluation along the good/bad parameter

  11. Table 4. Most frequent private verbs in the Lindsei-it B-turns

  12. (1) er every I think every every week and eh so they are erm always eh studying something every week and eh while in I think in Italy er when we prepare an examination a university examination we don’t er study erm so much

  13. Table 5. Most frequent private verbs in the negative forms in the Lindsei-it B-turns

  14. (2) when we have when we had to take decision they mm . I mean English people eh they eh . they were I don't know mm . they tended to be isolated from the rest of the group erm (3) well this is probably the story of a a painter that in the first picture is erm painting erm . ma I I don't know the name of eh of it's a mm .. I I don't know the

  15. Table 6. Evaluative adjectives in the Lindsei-it B-turns (1)

  16. Table 6. Evaluative adjectives in the Lindsei-it B-turns (2)

  17. Table 7. Adjectives used with the word “film”

  18. Table 8. Adjectives used with the word “movie”

  19. Table 9. Adjectives used with the word “play”

  20. Table 10. Adjectives used with the word “country”

  21. Table 11. Adjectives used with the word “experience”

  22. Table 12. Adjectives used with the word “woman”

  23. Table 13. Adjectives used with the word “girl”

  24. Table 14. Adjectives used with the word “lady”

  25. Conclusions • Predictable results: high frequency of the first person pronoun I and core evaluative and private verbs • Features of Italian learner English: • limited variety of private verbs (I think, I prefer, I love) and evaluative adjectives (good, beautiful, important, interesting) • preference for not+ positive adjectives (not so beautiful, not satisfied), mitigation of negative adjectives (a little bit ugly) • Need to compare results with other corpora and the control native corpus

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