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POSTER SESSIONS

FRI, 15:30-16:30, Özger Arnas

PS1) Using Learner Corpora to Investigate Correlations between Stylistic Awareness and Accuracy

Shozo YOKOYAMA (University of Miyazaki, JP)
Chizuko SUZUKI (Nagasaki Junshin Catholic University, JP)
Tamao ARAKI (Miyazaki Prefectural Nursing University, JP)
Akira SAWAGUCHI (University of Miyazaki, JP)

Learner corpora are valuable resources not only for the description of learner language, but also for language teaching and learning. Publishing medical research in English has become a necessary duty for both medical practitioners and researchers worldwide. Thus, there would be great advantages in analyzing learner written data in order to understand their error patterns, which could help students acquire better writing competence. This poster presentation aims to investigate and analyze the lexical patterns of a small learner corpus. The data was obtained from 1st- year PhD students in a Graduate School of Medicine in Japan, and was analyzed using correspondence analysis. The students were required to produce an English abstract of at least 200 words on a given mock medical experiment. Research findings indicate that there may be no correlation between lexical choices made by learners and their stylistic awareness on the one hand, and accuracy on the other hand. It can further indicate that even advanced EFL learners, in spite of their grammatical accuracy, need stylistic guidance before submitting academic articles and, that students can possibly be classified into learning pattern groups.

PS2) Ideas in Practice: Taking a Cultural-Response Approach to Teaching Language and English Literature

Aida KOCI (South Eastern European University, MK)
Liljana SILJANOVSKA (South Eastern European University, MK)
Vlera EJUPI (South Eastern European University, MK)

The teaching of the target culture should be integrated within foreign language teaching. Many teachers are not aware of the importance of integrating the teaching of culture within language teaching. Therefore they concentrate mainly on teaching linguistic structures and assign culture a subsidiary role. Furthermore, aware of their lack of cultural competence, they feel uncomfortable when it comes to teaching culture. Indeed, superficial knowledge is among the essential reasons for the failure in transmitting cultural content. What is more, teachers' blind reliance on the textbook as an irrefutable authority has also been a major obstacle in integrating a cultural element within language learning.

PS3) The Materialisation of an Idea

Tereza HANZLOVÁ (Charles University, CZ)

The proposed poster should set forth the essential ideas underlying Simon Mawer's novel The Glass Room (2009), which does not only draw a magnificent portrayal of the first Czechoslovak Republic, but also pays particular attention to the exploration of the Modernist architecture, namely the work of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. The novel is nourished by the philosophy of this pioneer of modern architecture whose personality provided a direct inspiration for one of its characters.

In the same way in which the novelist Simon Mawer allies literature and architecture and thus merges together the two spaces - poetical and physical, the architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe joined architecture, technology and philosophy, reconciling the spiritual and the material. There may be a concern over the clarity of the distinction as the two artistic expressions of space are mingled together, nevertheless, it is the impossibility of such a distinction which makes the work of the two artists unique, since they transcend the borders of their individual preoccupations combining different dimensions. The proposed poster should echo the resulting ''hybridity'' by its interdisciplinary character - the texts will be illustrated by sketches and the whole graphics of the poster will reflect the symbiosis of literature, architecture and philosophy.

PS4) Mexican Students' Attitudes and Motivation Regarding English and French: A Comparative Study

Anna V. SOKOLOVA G. (Metropolitan Autonomous University, MX)

Martha BELTRÁN (Metropolitan Autonomous University, MX)

The Common European Framework of Reference for Languages stressesthe importance of focusing on both affective and cognitive aspects of language learning. Numerous researches have confirmed the existence of a close relationship between attitudes and motivations as a complex phenomenon with many variables. In this respect, the attitudes and motivation of the students enrolled in the English language courses and those of the French language learners were compared within the educational context of one of the Mexican universities. The data to analyze were obtained through questionnaires and group discussions organized with the survey participants. The students' sociocultural, academic and demographic features, together with the place conferred to English and French in the national and international arenas, were of great of importance in the construction of the attitudes and motivation in question. It is expected that the results of this research can give ideas about what is possibly happening in other higher education institutions in connection with foreign-language learning in Mexico.

PS5) The Illustrations of Children in Charles Dickens' Novels

Elif Derya ŞENDURAN (Middle East Technical University, TR)

Charles Dickens created not only his novels but the illustrations in those novels as well. He explained the illustrations in his mind to the famous illustrators with respect to clothing, expressions and gestures of his characters (Cohen 3) "in graphic detail” (Cohen 18). According to Dickens, illustrations were essential due to the fact that he was born to a world without any visuals. The sales of his novels increased as a result of the effect of illustrations on the public (Cohen 5), they also created an imaginative insight in the reader. On the other hand, Charles Dickens also focused on "the emotional life and the psychological development of children” in his novels (Vrettos 72) and wanted his illustrators to convey his imagery to the illustrations. This poster demonstrates the illustrations of children, drawn by the famous illustrators of the time: George Cruikshank and Halbot Knight Browne (Phiz), for the novels Bleak House, David Copperfield, Oliver Twist, regarding the figurative and literal meaning.

PS6) Phonetic and Pragmatic Analysis of Speech Presented in the Media in Three Language Versions (English, German, Slovak) - An Overview of Research in Progress

Magdaléna BILÁ (Prešov University, SK)
Anna DŽAMBOVÁ (Prešov University, SK)
Alena KAČMÁROVÁ (Prešov University, SK)

The aim of our session is to present the outcomes of preliminary research into the discourse of audiovisual text, further research objectives and to gain feedback from language professionals on the ongoing research. Our pilot study focused on semantically identical utterances in the quasi-authentic conversational speech in three language versions (original English and dubbed German and Slovak). For the purpose of research, sitcom Friends was selected. We analyzed pause duration (including statistics on data), syntactic structure and their interrelation. In addition, pragmatic aspects were considered. In further research we plan on expanding the corpus and objectives; the latter will include the identification of pause - tonic stress - melody interrelation and that of a speaker's communicative intention brought about by the cooperation of the three suprasegmentals. The objective is to establish specific manifestation of orality, the interaction of the three investigated suprasegmentals with regard to orality, and pragmatic interpretation of their interrelatedness in the selected audiovisual text. Phonetic and pragmatic analyses of an utterance represent a combination of quantitative and qualitative approaches. Hence, the research methods will include computer analysis, perceptual tests, descriptive and inductive statistics, language and discourse analyses.

PS7) Thoughts on Informalisation: What Is It and How Can We Analyse It?

Raffaele ZAGO (University of Pavia, IT)

A number of studies have pointed out that a process of ‘informalisation', ‘colloquialisation', or ‘conversationalisation' is active in contemporary English. Such process, which has been observed in socio-cultural, qualitative approaches to language (e.g. the works of Fairclough), in corpus-based, quantitative studies (e.g. Pearce 2005; Leech et al. 2009), as well as in studies regarding computer-mediated communication (e.g. Montero-Fleta et al. 2009), can be framed within the long-term, general pattern of drift towards more oral styles underlined by Biber and Finegan (1989) in their analysis of fiction, essays, and letters over a period of four centuries. Based on the first results of an ongoing PhD thesis, the present poster has the following objectives: (1) illustrating the state of the art of research on the informalisation of English; (2) underlining both the complex, evasive nature of the concept of informality, which is intuitively clear for the speaker but descriptively problematic for the linguist, and the analytical underspecification of the phenomenon of informalisation, at times described in an unsystematic fashion; (3) attempting to assess to what extent ‘informalisation', ‘colloquialisation', ‘conversationalisation', and the ‘tendency towards orality' overlap; (4) operationalising informalisation by compiling a list of linguistic markers or carriers of informality.

PS8) Teaching Writing for International Organizations in an E-Learning Environment: A Case Study

Anna ROMAGNUOLO (Università della Tuscia, IT)
Simona PARIS (Università della Tuscia, IT)
Piepaolo GALLO (Università della Tuscia, IT)

This paper will report on one of the authors' three year-experience of teaching English for International Organizations and their discourse, a module especially developed for the distance learning Master in Comunicazione nelle Organizzazioni e Imprese Internazionali launched by the Linguistic Center of the University of la Tuscia, in Viterbo, Italy, in 2008. The specific features, aims and target of the Master will be briefly explained and followed by the discussion of the program development, technical difficulties encountered and results obtained. The organization and management of the English course provided in a virtual learning environment implied selecting suitable theoretical frames and adjusting correction and evaluation methods to individual and group activities conducted on Moodle, which will also be summarized in this report.

PS9) The Living Image: Biographical Narratives in Campaign Commercials

Anna ROMAGNUOLO (Università della Tuscia, IT)

The purpose of this study is to highlight recurrent features in US presidential advertising campaigns, with a particular focus on TV electoral commercials and autobiographical films used at national conventions to extol the nominee's virtues and boost his popularity. The typical generic structure of presidential candidates' campaign stories, greatly exploiting family- life narratives and national myths, will be examined both in TV adverts and political films for their relevance to individual and collective self-representation.