Kenneth Keng Wee Ong

Disagreement, confusion, disapproval, turn elicitation and floor holding: Actions as accomplished by ellipsis marks-only turns and blank turns in quasisynchronous chats

This study evidences turn actions done by ellipsis marks-only turns and blank turns as employed in quasisynchronous chats that are not discussed in prior literature. A brief introduction to the research background of ellipsis marks in online chats is followed by a description of the data collected before delving into the actions done by ellipsis marks-only turns and blank turns. Data were culled from multi-party chats among tertiary students during a critical reasoning class. A Conversation Analysis-informed approach is applied in this article to analyze the preference organization of elliptical turns that illustrate several turn actions which include responses signaling disagreement, confusion and disapproval besides initial actions of eliciting responses and holding the floor. More than punctuation marks or paralinguistic restitution of silences, their interpersonal meaningfulness in sequential context and differentness/similarity vis-a-vis temporal silences are demonstratively shown in microscopic and interpretive description of chat excerpts.This study evidences turn actions done by ellipsis marks-only turns and blank turns as employed in quasisynchronous chats that are not discussed in prior literature. A brief introduction to the research background of ellipsis marks in online chats is followed by a description of the data collected before delving into the actions done by ellipsis marks-only turns and blank turns. Data were culled from multi-party chats among tertiary students during a critical reasoning class. A Conversation Analysis-informed approach is applied in this article to analyze the preference organization of elliptical turns that illustrate several turn actions which include responses signaling disagreement, confusion and disapproval besides initial actions of eliciting responses and holding the floor. More than punctuation marks or paralinguistic restitution of silences, their interpersonal meaningfulness in sequential context and differentness/similarity vis-a-vis temporal silences are demonstratively shown in microscopic and ...

Metalinguistic Filters Within the Bilingual Language Faculty: A Study of Young English-Chinese Bilinguals

This study reports two metalinguistic parameters that constitute the schematic control of lateral inhibitory links between translation equivalents within the bilingual lexico-semantic system of Green’s (Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 1:67–81, 1998a, Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 1:100–104, 1998b, The bilingualism reader, Routledge, London, 2007) inhibitory control (IC) model. Building on Green’s postulation that the bilingual lexico-semantic system is controlled by a hierarchy of schemas under a supervisory attentional system, the bilingual unconsciously filters activated lemmas during fluent spontaneous codeswitching, such that lemmas that are semantico-syntactically versatile or morphosyntactically transparent are likely to reach a threshold of activation first while other lemmas are inhibited. To investigate the issue, we collected code-paired naturalistic and elicited data with a focus on code-switched determiner phrases from 140 Mandarin-English simultaneous bilinguals who were post-secondary students in Singapore. We found that the semantico-syntactic and morpho-syntactic dissimilarities between Mandarin and English activated both filters. As most Mandarin determiners are economical vis-à-vis their English counterparts, their lemmas were selected frequently while English lemmas were largely inhibited. It was also found that our participants preferred English nouns in filling the lexical category for their interpretable feature of number, a feature that is normally absent in Mandarin nouns.

Argumentation and Floor Management in Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning

Previous studies have demonstrated that floor management is determined by various factors – topic, communicative action and participants’ interpretations of the immediate interactional context (Edelsky, Lang Soc 10:383–421, 1981), institutional roles (Mehan 1979), sociocultural norms (Jones and Thornborrow, Lang Soc 33:399–423, 2004) and participatory structures (Jenks 2007). Jenks claimed that when discussants share the same task-based referential knowledge in two-way participatory structures, floor management is flexible and can go in any direction. However, correlates underlying floor variations despite shared referential information were not investigated. This study fills this research gap by analysing online knowledge construction in multi-party quasisynchronous chat (QSC) using Weinberger and Fischer’s (Comput Educ 46:71–95, 2006) multi-dimensional framework. Based on a QSC corpus consisting of online student discussions, the key finding is that argumentation influences floor management in a more predictive manner than shared referential information ipso facto. This association between argumentation and floor management provides a deeper insight into the dynamics of online discussions within a structured chat interaction among students.

A Review of “Cognitive bases of second language fluency”

The book Cognitive Bases of Second Language Fluency addresses an important gap in second language (L2) fluency research – Segalowitz has put together an ambitiously interdisciplinary monograph that coherently reviews and synthesizes findings on L2 oral performance across the broad fields of behavioural and neurocognitive sciences, social sciences, formal disciplines and philosophy, with noticeably more space devoted to findings within behavioural/brain sciences. The author succeeds in his overarching objective – to convince linguists and language fluency researchers alike on the need to adopt a more nuanced approach to conceptualizing L2 fluency. Christened as a ‘cognitive science perspective’, it is essentially a dynamic systems theory (DST) framework. The author carefully qualifies his stated objective, noting that he is not presenting a complete L2 fluency theory but rather a philosophical reconceptualization of L2 fluency as a harmonious synthesis of several isolated and monodisciplinary perspectives to form a more holistic perspective. However, my preference as a reader would be for the slim 210-page book to be expanded beyond the expressed role of countering academic myopia in exclusive disciplinary domains by including the key findings and concerns in language–speech development and processing that are left untouched by the author. Importantly, the relevance of a cognitive science framework to language pedagogy, which is limited to a brief discussion of five pages in the concluding chapter, could be further elaborated. Chapter 1 opens with a primer followed by a brief argument for a cognitive science approach that is lacking in L2 acquisition literature. Segalowitz then eases the reader into the key points of Levelt’s (1989) blueprint for the monolingual speaker and De Bot’s (2007) ontological modifications for the bilingual speaker. The book is one of a few which cites the updated Levelt, Roeflofs, and Meyer (1999) model for lexical access in speech production. The key tenets of DST are also introduced to help readers understand the conceptual applicability of DST to the multidimensionality of L2 fluency development. The main caveats of DST are discussed fairly and addressed later by Segalowitz, particularly in the concluding chapter. For example, he cited Dörnyei’s comment that the contribution of DST is largely limited to the conceptual level and not well extended to methodological considerations. He highlights this shortcoming and skilfully addresses it in the following chapter on measuring L2 fluency. Chapter 2 delves into the empirical problems associated with the lack of experimental controls in several studies on the speech correlates of fluency. Specifically, Segalowitz advocates controlling for individual variation in L2 oral processing by considering corresponding L1 (first language) baseline values. He also recommends that task-specific effects should be standardized for complexity, load and difficulty. An oft-overlooked distinction in