new vocab

Reading these articles I'm see words I've often seen but never made the effort to define, so here goes.

Semiotic

"The distinctive characteristic of human learning is that it is a process of making meaning—a semiotic process; and the prototypical form of human semiotic is language . . . . Whatever the culture they are born into, in learning to speak children are learning a semiotic that has been evolving for at least a thousand generations. … Language is not a domain of knowing; language is the essential condition of knowing, the process by which experience becomes knowledge." (Halliday, 1999: 93–94)

heuristic - (from the free dictionary)

1. Of or relating to a usually speculative formulation serving as a guide in the investigation or solution of a problem: "The historian discovers the past by the judicious use of such a heuristic device as the 'ideal type'" (Karl J. Weintraub).

2. Of or constituting an educational method in which learning takes place through discoveries that result from investigations made by the student.

3. Computer Science Relating to or using a problem-solving technique in which the most appropriate solution of several found by alternative methods is selected at successive stages of a program for use in the next step of the program.

phatic - (from Wikipedia)

In linguistics, a phatic expression is one whose only function is to perform a social task, as opposed to conveying information.^[1] The term was coined by anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski in the early 1900s.

For example, "you're welcome" is not intended to convey the message that the hearer is welcome; it is a phatic response to being thanked, which in turn is a phatic whose function is to be polite in response to a gift.

Similarly, in the English language, the question "how are you?" is usually an automatic component of a social encounter. Although there are times when "how are you?" is asked in a sincere, concerned manner and does in fact anticipate a detailed response regarding the respondent's present state, this needs to be pragmatically inferred from context and intonation.

As an example of the former: a simple, basic exchange, shared by many that see each other every day at work, but must fulfill that social obligation each morning, or at first contact:

Speaker one: "What's up?"

Speaker two: "Hey, man, how's it going?"

And each just walks on.

Neither expects an answer to his/her question. Much like a shared nod, it's an indication that each has recognized the other's existence and has therefore performed sufficiently that particular social duty.

The utterance of a phatic expression is a kind of speech act.

In speech communication the term means "small talk" (conversation for its own sake) and has also been called "grooming talking".^[2]

In Roman Jakobson's work, 'Phatic' communication is that which concerns the channel of communication, for instance when one says "I can't hear you, you're breaking up" in the middle of a cell phone conversation. This usage appears in the context of online communities and more specifically on micro-blogging (see for instance ^[3][4]).

deictic - (from Wikipedia)

In linguistics, deixis refers to the phenomenon wherein understanding the meaning of certain words and phrases in an utterance requires contextual information. Words which have a fixed semantic meaning, but have a denotational meaning that constantly changes depending on time and/or place, are deictic. A word or phrase whose meaning requires this contextual information — for example, English pronouns — is said to be deictic.

Person (pronouns), place (here, this) and time (now)

Lit Review: Part 1

Ok, so I have to get this exposé thing done since it's almost a year since I took leave to do my PhD and over a year since I 'officially' started with Bochum. I had originally thought I'd write a 3-page summary, but then searching the net, found a description of an exposé for Heidelburg written by Andreas indicating it should be 15 pages! That's actually fine, and probably good because it will be more like a one-year 'what I've done' type thing. However, to do this, as suggested by Markus, I really needed to take a good look at what has already been written in the literature. So that's what I've been doing.

The fact is, it takes me quite awhile to read, take notes, etc. When I was in Dusseldorf, I spent a day searching on the net and downloading files. Now I'm going through them. I haven't carefully read through Basharina's work, but she did her PhD on an exchange using ELF, without focusing specifically on ELF, and it was asynchronous and text-based. Then I moved on to the abstracts from the last ELF conference. Lots focused on language-related issues like core English, several others on business-related contexts, and very few, actually none, on telecollaboration, but a few on CMC. So this is where I've gotten so far...

Saw a presentation by Anne Ike. Couldn't find anything on the Web so I wrote to her. She sent me the following article:

• Ife, Anne (2008) Negotiating Variable Proficiency Levels in Lingua Franca English. In: O. Martí Arnándiz and M. Pilar Safont Jordà (eds.) Achieving Multilingualism: Wills and Ways, Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Multilingualism (ICOM), pp. 34-47.
• Studies 7 students, 2 NS and 5 ELF, comm. at being, middle and end of a classroom session to look at NS/proficient speaker dominance, turn-taking, etc.The way she counts, carries out research, etc. could be very useful for my study.
• Related to dynamic interpersonal specificity as discussed by Kenning (below).
  

Went back to the ELF abstracts and found an interesting one from Cem Aptelkin. Searched the Web for his name and came up with this:

• Aptelkin, C. (2010) Redefining multicompetence for bilingualism and ELF. International Journal of Applied Linguistics, 20(1): 95-110.
• Very recent article that provides a convincing argument for why using ELF in in ESL,EFL teaching contexts is jusfiable and preferable. Makes no explicit reference to any kind of context such as telecollaboration, but his arguments could be used to argue for ELF in telecollaboration.
  

I managed to set up the auth-proxy to get access to online journals through UniPD and so I decided to search IJAL from today back to 2006. Found some articles and downloaded them. The first one I read, I found very useful:

• Kenning, M-M. (2006) Evolving concepts and moving targets: communicative competence and the mediation of communication. International Journal of Applied Linguistics, 16(3): 363-388.
• The article is very complex and theoretical, rather than empirical or practical. The author explains: "Approaching the updating of communicative competence from a technological rather than a socio-political perspective, it argues that the conventional notion of what it is to be communicatively competent is predicated on a near equation of communication with face-to-face interaction that has become undermined by the growth in mediated communication of the past decades. Communicative competence must be broadened to accommodate and reflect the many different types of communicational practices around the world (Chapelle 2001: 1–2). (p. 364)".
  

Now on to the next ones!