Get 20M+ Full-Text Papers For Less Than $1.50/day. Start a 14-Day Trial for You or Your Team.

Learn More →

A preliminary study of the thinking processes and speech act comprehension patterns of Contonese learners of English

A preliminary study of the thinking processes and speech act comprehension patterns of Contonese... AbstractThe paper aims to reveal the thinking processes and identify comprehension patterns of three groups of Cantonese learners of English who were secondary students while they were working on a multiple-choice speech act comprehension exercise. The elicited verbal protocols provide significant information for interlanguage pragmatic comprehension and development from the learners.A multiple-choice pragmatic comprehension exercise which consisted of five English direct and indirect speech acts (requests, apologies, refusals, compliments and complaints) in contextualized dialogues was conducted to 156 Cantonese learners of English. They were studying from F2 to F6 of about ages 14 to 18 in three Hong Kong secondary schools during the research period. The comprehension exercise scores showed that the interlanguage pragmatic competence of the three groups of secondary students progressed steadily. The students� verbal protocols exhibited that they were less reliant on literal meaning in interpretation of meaning, and adopted more varied and complex processing strategies from F2 to F6 gradually. The variety and complexity of comprehension strategies and patterns illustrate the characteristic features of the formal representation stage in Bialystok�s cognitive processing model. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Lodz Papers in Pragmatics de Gruyter

A preliminary study of the thinking processes and speech act comprehension patterns of Contonese learners of English

Lee, , Cynthia
Lodz Papers in Pragmatics , Volume 8 (2): 23 – Nov 1, 2012
Download PDF
23 pages

Loading next page...
 
/lp/de-gruyter/a-preliminary-study-of-the-thinking-processes-and-speech-act-fgoIbga1bN
Publisher
de Gruyter
Copyright
©[2012] by De Gruyter Mouton Berlin
ISSN
1898-4436
eISSN
1898-4436
DOI
10.1515/lpp-2012-0012
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

AbstractThe paper aims to reveal the thinking processes and identify comprehension patterns of three groups of Cantonese learners of English who were secondary students while they were working on a multiple-choice speech act comprehension exercise. The elicited verbal protocols provide significant information for interlanguage pragmatic comprehension and development from the learners.A multiple-choice pragmatic comprehension exercise which consisted of five English direct and indirect speech acts (requests, apologies, refusals, compliments and complaints) in contextualized dialogues was conducted to 156 Cantonese learners of English. They were studying from F2 to F6 of about ages 14 to 18 in three Hong Kong secondary schools during the research period. The comprehension exercise scores showed that the interlanguage pragmatic competence of the three groups of secondary students progressed steadily. The students� verbal protocols exhibited that they were less reliant on literal meaning in interpretation of meaning, and adopted more varied and complex processing strategies from F2 to F6 gradually. The variety and complexity of comprehension strategies and patterns illustrate the characteristic features of the formal representation stage in Bialystok�s cognitive processing model.

Journal

Lodz Papers in Pragmatics – de Gruyter

Published: Nov 1, 2012

Keywords: interlanguage; pragmatic comprehension; teenagers; Cantonese; English

There are no references for this article.