School of Language and Culture

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https://hdl.handle.net/10292/554
The study of language, society and culture is at the core of the broad spectrum of knowledge known as the humanities. AUT's School of Language and Culture focuses on language in its widest sense — creative writing, English and its relationship with new media, translation and interpreting, international studies and the importance of intercultural competencies, discourse analysis and language teaching.

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Browsing School of Language and Culture by Author "Denny, H"

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  • Item
    Making the implicit explicit: pragmatics in the classroom
    (AUT University, 2010) Denny, H; Sachtleben, A
    Successful communication in a second language requires knowledge of its socio-pragmatic norms (Eslami-Rasekh, 2005), and explicit instruction can be of value to second language learners (Kasper & Roever, 2004). Various strategies for direct instruction of adult learners in workplace, academic and community settings have involved the use of authentic texts of spoken interaction and there have been compromises between the use of fully authentic data and unreal scripted models (Basturkmen, 2002; Denny, 2008; Malthus, Holmes, & Major, 2005; Riddiford & Joe, 2005; Yates, 2008). However classroom-based research into learners’ responses to socio-pragmatic focused instruction in local norms using naturalistic texts is limited (Rose, 2005). In this paper we will describe a multi-stage action research project in a New Zealand university into teaching socio-pragmatic norms using semi-authentic spoken texts to adult EAL learners in a number of contexts. The project aims to enhance classroom best practice in pragmatics teaching and learning. The current stage, the focus of this presentation, involves an undergraduate classroom, where EAL interpreting students are explicitly taught pragmatic norms using semi-authentic recordings of spontaneous native speaker role-play. The texts cover three face threatening speech acts: a complaint, conflict avoidance, and clarification and repair. The research uses student and teacher reflective journals to identify items and concepts which the students found most helpful. It tracks the transference of students’ understanding of New Zealand English pragmatics into their day-to-day conversations. Preliminary results will be presented.
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    Teachers' perceptions of the value and their practices in teaching pragmatics including the use of authentic texts
    (AUT University, 2009) Denny, H; Basturkmen, H
    Research shows that even learners with advanced levels of grammatical competence may still experience pragmatic difficulties (Bardovi-Harlig & Dornyei, 1998) and that some form of explicit instruction is helpful for acquisition (Kasper & Roever, 2004). The investigation was conducted in a tertiary level educational setting in Auckland. Data for the study were drawn from questionnaires and interviews with teachers from a range of academic, vocational and community focused English language programs. In this paper, we provide a summary of the objectives and design of the study and we focus on findings related to three key issues: areas in which pragmatics-focused materials are seen as lacking; barriers to teachers’ use of authentic texts in teaching pragmatics and the methods and activities teachers use in teaching pragmatics, including a range of methods and activities that are well known and some that are less well known. This research has been funded by AKO Aotearoa and it is the preliminary stage of a broader scale action research project in which teachers working as research participants develop and evaluate their own pragmatics-focused materials based on authentic listening texts.
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    Teaching conversation and negotiation skills using teacher-made, semiscripted conversation models (New Zealand)
    (TESOL, 2008) Denny, H
    No abstracts in this publication.
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    Teaching the socio-cultural norms of conversation and negotiation to lower level migrants and refugees
    (AUT University, 2011-11-29) Healy, J; Healy, J; Macdonald, F; Denny, H
    Teaching the socio-cultural norms of spoken communication to second language learners, especially refugees and migrants, is important (Yates, 2008). However there is little research into the effectiveness of classroom strategies used to teach them (Kasper & Roever, 2004), particularly to lower-level learners. In this presentation we will describe an action research project which evaluates the use of semi-authentic recorded samples to teach socio-cultural norms to low-level EAL refugee learners. Preliminary results show that strategies effective with higher-level learners (Denny, 2008) are not necessarily those resonating with lower-level learners. Implications for the teaching of socio-cultural norms at lower levels are explored.
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