April 2007 Vol2 Issue1

The Linguistics Journal
April 2007
Volume 2, Issue 1
Editors: Paul Robertson and John Adamson

Published by the Linguistics Journal Press
Linguistics Journal Press
A Division of Time Taylor International Ltd
Trustnet Chambers
P.O. Box 3444
Road Town, Tortola
British Virgin Islands
http://www.linguisticsjournal.com
© Linguistics Journal Press 2007
This Ebook is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception
no reproduction of any part may take place without
the written permission of the Linguistics Journal Press.
No unauthorized photocopying
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored
in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without the prior
written permission of the Asian EFL Journal.
linguisticsj@yahoo.com
Editor: Dr. Paul Robertson
Senior Associate Editor: Dr. John Adamson
Associate Editor: Darren Lingley
ISSN 17381460
Linguistics Journal Volume 2 Issue 1 2
Table of Contents:
Foreword by John Adamson………………………………. 46
1. Larisa Nikitina and Fumitaka Furuoka………………. 727
Beliefs about Language Learning: A Comparison between
Novice and Intermediate Level Students Learning Russian at
a Malaysian University
2. Hessa Al Falasi…………………………………………. 2842
Just Say “Thank You”: A Study of Compliment Responses
3. Mohammad Ali SalmaniNodoushan………………… 4368
Politeness Markers in Persian Requestives
4. Mohammad Reza Talebinezhad and Giti Mousapour Negari…. 6990
The Effect of Explicit Teaching of Concept Mapping in
Expository Writing on EFL Students’ Selfregulation
5. Farzaneh Khodabandeh………………………………………… 91127
A Contrastive Analysis of English and Persian Newspaper Headlines
6. Daniel Nkemleke………………………………………………… 128142
“You will come when?”The pragmatics of certain
questions in Cameroon English
7. Raphiq Ibrahim…………………………………………………. 143161
Does Exposure to Second Spoken Language
Facilitate Word Reading Ability?
8. Yan Wang………………………………………………………. 162183
A Functional Study of the Final Particle mono
in Japanese Conversational Discourse
Foreword
For this first edition of the Linguistics Journal for 2007 we are pleased to present eight
articles. Congratulations to all the authors whose papers have been accepted. Interest in
the journal has increased significantly from the end of 2006 and so the structure of the
editorial board has been changed accordingly. Three new Associate Editors, Helmut
Daller, Julian Good and Biljana Cubrovic have been appointed to supervise submissions
and there are now more than thirtyfive editors reviewing papers. Let us hope this healthy
situation for the journal continues.
The first paper by Larisa Nikitina and Fumitaka Furuoka looks at beliefs about Russian
language learning among novice and intermediate level students at Universiti Malaysia
Sabah (UMS) in Malaysia. Using an adapted selfreported questionnaire based on
Horwitz (1988), Nikitina and Furuoka explore the similarities and differences between
the two sets of learners. Their quantitative analysis concludes that “the tenacity of
learners’ beliefs depends on whether those beliefs were shaped by the microcontext (the
learning situation) or macrocontext”, the former of which is less stable. The most
“malleable” beliefs concern language aptitude, perceptions of how difficult learning is,
and how communication and learning strategies should be used.
The second paper comes from Hessa Al Falasi at the American University of Sharjah,
in the United Arab Emirates. Al Falasi’s study investigates compliment responses among
mostly female Arabic learners of English, asking whether pragmatic transfer can occur.
Using discourse completion tests (DCTs) and interviews to study the compliment
response strategies by native speakers (NSs) and Arabic nonnative speakers (NNSs) of
English, findings suggest that some L1 pragmatic norms were in fact transferred over to
English usage. It is revealed that these norms are sometimes perceived by Arabic
speakers as being universal in nature. Al Falasi’s study stands in interesting contrast to a
Thaibased study published in the Linguistics Journal June 2006 edition by Payung Cedar.
The next paper is by Mohammad Ali SalmaniNodoushan from the University of
Zanjan in Iran who investigates politeness markers in Persian requestives. This study very
much complements an article published in the January 2006 edition by Hamid Allami on
‘griping’. In Nodoushan’s study, the effects of 465 complainers' sex, age, perceived
situational seriousness, and social class on the use of conversational strategies in their
complaining behavior are observed. Two nonparametric tests were conducted, a Mann
Whitney U Test and Kruskal Wallis H Test, the results of which Nodoushan represents in
a ‘cline of significance’ for each of the independent variables in question.
Mohammad Reza Talebinezhad and Giti Mousapour Negari, both from Isfahan
University in Iran, look at the effect of explicit teaching of concept mapping in expository
writing on Iranian EFL students’ selfregulation. This highly practical study employs
Printrich et al’s (1991) questionnaire on motivation strategies for learning among sixty
university students, divided into experimental and control groups. Findings reveal that
concept mapping had a positive effect on the subjects under investigation.
Farzaneh Khodabandeh, from Mobarakeh Payameh Noor University in Iran, contrasts
English and Persian newspaper headlines. Khodabandeh’s study employs Conversation
Analysis to analyze the syntactic and lexical features in the headlines and reveals that
there were similarities in the use of dynamic verbs, active voice, short words, declarative
sentences, finite clauses, and simple sentences. Differences were seen in the use of tense
forms, headline types, modification, and omission of words.
Daniel Nkemleke from the Technische Universität Chemnitz in Germany looks at the
pragmatic use of questions in Cameroon English, particularly the speech act of ‘asking’
in informal contexts. 160 questions not conforming to native English categories of
questions in Quirk et al (1985) were identified from recorded data of Cameroonian Bantu
‘home’ languages. The paper concludes that the ‘interplay’ of syntax between English
and ‘home’ languages may result in the type of question forms found in the data.
Raphiq Ibrahim from the University of Haifa and Rambam Medical Center in Israel
asks whether exposure to second spoken language facilitates word reading ability, the
purpose of which is to provide direct evidence of a causal role for bilingualism in reading
acquisition. Three groups of first graders of monolingual Hebrew speakers, bilingual
RussianHebrew speakers and monolingual Arab speakers are observed in various
reading skills, the data of which is analyzed with oneway ANOVA and correlations to
compare the reading speed, errors of text and measures of vocabulary between Hebrew
and Arabic groups. Among the conclusions drawn is that early exposure to L2 has a
positive effect on reading ability showing that bilingualism is a “powerful predictor of the
speed and effieciency of reading acquisition”.
The final article based on the MA dissertation by Yan Wang from the University of
WisconsinMadison looks at a functional study of the final particle mono in Japanese
conversational discourse. Using a discourse analytic approach, the employment of mono
in sequence organization and how it shows attitudes towards propositions and addresses
are both examined. This study illustrates how this particle reveals a speaker’s subjectivity
and operates as a modality marker in conversational discourse.
We hope you enjoy reading these articles in the Spring edition of the Linguistics
Journal and look forward to your own contributions in 2007.
John Adamson, Ed.D.
Senior Associate Editor
The Linguistics Journal
Beliefs about Language Learning:
A Comparison between Novice and Intermediate Level Students
Learning Russian at a Malaysian University
Larisa Nikitina and Fumitaka Furuoka
Universiti Malaysia Sabah, Malaysia
Bio Data:
Larisa Nikitina (B.A., M.A.) is a lecturer at Universiti Malaysia Sabah where she teaches
the Russian language. Her current research interest focuses on the affective aspects of
language learning and the study of language learning motivation.
Fumitaka Furuoka (Ph.D.) teaches Economics at Universiti Malaysia Sabah. He is the
author of numerous publications that employ quantitative analysis in various social
sciences fields. His most recent major publication is the book entitled New Challenges for
Japan's Official Development Assistance (ODA) Policy: Human Rights, Democracy and
Aid Sanctions (Universiti Malaysia Sabah Press, 2006). Fumitaka Furuoka's research
interests include the quantitative analysis and measurement of psychometric qualities of
tools employed in the field of second language acquisition to assess learners'
characteristics.
Abstract
Elaine Horwitz’s influential research on the nature of students’ and teachers’ beliefs
about language learning in the 1980s initiated a multitude of inquiries into the subject.
Malaysia as a multicultural and multilingual country provides an interesting socio
linguistic setting to explore the nature of beliefs about language learning. However,
research on this topic in the Malaysian context is lacking. This study aimed to address
this gap and examined beliefs about learning a foreign language held by 107 Russian
language students at Universiti Malaysia Sabah (UMS). The present inquiry juxtaposed
beliefs held by the beginners and intermediate learners in order to assess which areas of
beliefs were commonly shared by the two groups of learners and which areas contained
considerable differences in beliefs. This study employed a selfreported questionnaire
based on Horwitz’s (1988) Beliefs About Language Learning Inventory (BALLI) as a
research instrument, with some modifications done to suit the Malaysian context.
Statistical analysis detected five items where opinions of two groups of students were
significantly different. Although participants in this study were the Russian language
students, there are no obstacles to viewing the findings of this research in a broader
perspective of foreign language learning and teaching.
Key words: foreign language learning, foreign language teaching, language learning
beliefs, Malaysia, the Russian language
1. Introduction
In the 1980s, Elaine Horwitz of the University of Texas at Austin initiated research on
beliefs about language learning held by language students and teachers. Since then the
topic has been attracting considerable interest and a multitude of studies exploring
language learning beliefs were done in different countries (Truitt, 1995; Park, 1995;
Kuntz, 1999; Kunt, 1997; Peacock, 1998; Sakui & Gaies, 1999; Kimura et al., 2001;
Siebert, 2003; Bernat, 2006).
Researchers looked at language learning beliefs from different perspectives. Mori (1999)
examined relationship between language learning beliefs and epistemological beliefs,
Wenden (1999) focused on the relationship between metacognitive knowledge and
learners’ beliefs, Yang (1992) looked at the connection between language learning beliefs
and the use of learning strategies while Carter (1999) explored the link between learners’
beliefs and autonomy. Despite the availability of extensive research on language learning
beliefs, studies on this topic in the Malaysian context are lacking. The present inquiry
aims to address this gap.
Malaysia as a multiethnic and multilingual country represents an interesting socio
linguistic setting. First of all, multilingualism is promoted in Malaysia. While Malay is
the national and official language of the country, English is widely used for business
transactions, in superior courts and every day life. There are radio and TV stations that
broadcast programs mainly in the English language. Moreover, in government primary
and secondary schools, mathematics and science subjects are taught in English.
Other major languages and dialects spoken in Malaysia are Hokkien, Cantonese, Hakka,
Teochew and Hainanese among the Chinese dialects; Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Punjabi,
Hindi, Gujarati and Urdu among Indian languages; there are also numerous indigenous
languages and dialects. A large part of the Malaysian population speaks two, three or
more languages and dialects.
Secondly, the Malay and English languages are compulsory school subjects.
Schoolchildren attending Chinese and Tamil vernacular schools learn Mandarin and
Tamil, respectively, and the Arabic language is taught at some schools. However, foreign
languages are not a part of school curriculum in Malaysia. 1 Therefore, students who begin
learning foreign languages at tertiary level despite their extensive language learning
experiences in either formal (e.g. school) or informal (e.g. through contacts with family
and friends) settings have had no previous experience of learning a foreign language, i.e.
language not spoken in their immediate surroundings. Therefore, it would be interesting
to inquire what set of beliefs about language learning do Malaysian university students
hold and whether the length of foreign language instruction influences those beliefs.
The present research study was conducted among learners of the Russian language at
Universiti Malaysia Sabah (UMS) with the aim to assess and compare language learning
beliefs of Malaysian university students at different stages of their foreign language
program.
2. Literature Review
Human beliefs on a wide number of subjects are shaped by peoples’ surroundings,
backgrounds and previous experiences. As Barcelos (2000, p.4) asserts, “Beliefs cannot
be separated from our identities, actions, and social experiences”. It has been recognized
that students enter a language classroom with a set of ideas as to what learning a foreign
language involves. Such assumptions have been described as “folklinguistics” (Preston,
1991). Students who begin learning a new language usually have some ideas about the
language difficulty, their own ability to master the new language, etc. From their previous
language learning experience they might have gathered what learning strategies work best
for them and have formed their own views about classroom proceedings and teacher’s
role.
Richardson (1996, p.103) describes beliefs as “psychologically held understandings,
premises, or propositions about the world that are felt to be true”. Working definition of
language learning beliefs in the present study is that language learning beliefs are
intangible property of human mind about what is right/true or wrong/false in the process
of foreign language acquisition which may change depending upon the length of
instruction.
Rokeach (1968) maintains that some beliefs may be quite central and well entrenched
while other beliefs are peripheral and are hinged on less fundamental assumption. A
question whether human beliefs are malleable was raised by psychologists and
educationalists. However, research studies yield contradictory results. While some
inquiries lend support to the proposition that learners’ beliefs are resistant to change
(Peacock, 2001) others indicate that beliefs do evolve over time and teachers play
important role in shaping learners’ beliefs (Rubin, 1987; Wenden, 1987). The latter
conclusion appears more feasible to the present authors since people – and learners –
need to constantly adapt to their new circumstances, and this involves making some
rectifications to one’s personal beliefs and assumptions.
In this connection, context should be viewed as an important factor when exploring
students’ beliefs. A number of studies lend support that learners’ beliefs are context
specific (Tumposky, 1991; Yang, 1992; Sakui & Gaies, 1999; Chawhan & Oliver, 2000).
A study conducted by Tumposky (1991) compared language learning beliefs of Russian
exchange students in the USA to the beliefs of American students learning Spanish and
French in American universities. As reported by Tumposky (1991), the Russian students
believed that when learning a foreign language it was important to practice a lot and take
linguistic risks while American students did not share those beliefs. Also, the Russian
students, coming from a multilinguistic environment of the former USSR believed that
learning a language was important in order to “know” native speakers of English while
American students in Tumposky’s study did not share this opinion. As Tumposky (1991,
p.62) concluded, “It seems that culture does contribute to the belief system of foreign
language learners”.
A more recent study conducted by Siebert (2003) in the USA considered the influence
of ethnicity and nationality on the beliefs of students learning English in American
universities. Participants in Siebert’s study came from different countries, such as Brazil,
Egypt, Japan, Russia, Syria, Taiwan, Thailand, etc. All students were taking intensive
English language courses. According to the results of Siebert’s study, national origin did
have an influence on students’ beliefs about language learning. The most significant
differences concerned such aspects of language study as length of time one needs to
master the English language, the difficulty of English, and foreign language aptitude.
Thus, Japanese students tended to have less confidence in their own language ability than
did students from the Middle East. Also, there were differences regarding the length of
time needed to master a foreign language between students of different nationalities.
Differences in language learning beliefs among learners of different national origins
and ethnicity lend support to an assumption that learners’ background is an important
aspect to consider when examining language learning beliefs. Wenden (1999) mentions
the importance of “social knowledge” about the target language and culture. This
knowledge is shaped by and “acquired from the environment which is the setting for
learning” (Wenden 1999, p.435). However, the role of context in shaping learners’ beliefs
has not been accorded sufficient attention in previous studies. It is suggested in this study
that language learning/teaching context should be separated into macro and micro levels,
and be viewed as macrocontext and microcontext. The former incorporates socio
cultural mores and predominant views on multilingualism and the attitudes towards
language learning in learners’ society. The latter includes individual learners’ previous
experiences of language study (successful or otherwise) and their current learning
situation.
Separating context into two different levels adds some structure to learner’s language
beliefs which allows a better insight into organization and nature of those beliefs. For
example, this would allow making tentative propositions as to which of the learners’
assumptions are more central since they were shaped by the societal factors – or macro
context and, therefore, be more resistant to change. On the other hand, learners’ beliefs
shaped by microcontext could be viewed as peripheral and, as such, of a more transient
nature.
Some researchers examined how learners’ beliefs are modified in the course of
language learning. Allen (1996) employed contextual approach to investigate whether
and how teacher’s beliefs influence learners’ beliefs. In her study, initially, there was a
mismatch between the learner’s and teacher’s beliefs. Thus, the subject, a Lybian student
learning English in Canada, thought it was better to learn language from native speakers,
placed a considerable importance on acquiring nativelike pronunciation and preferred
teacherdirected activities in the classroom. Those views did not coincide with the
teacher’s perspective on language learning. By the end of semester, the student’s and
teacher’s beliefs converged. The student realized that learners should take more initiative
in their learning and that to become a competent speaker one did not need to have an
excellent pronunciation, all of which reflected his teacher’s opinion.
Kern (1995) conducted a longitudinal study among university students of French at the
beginning of their first semester of the language study and at the end of their second
semester. Though he found very little change over time, he concedes that some beliefs are
more easily modified than others. Kern maintains that students take heed of and interpret
messages from their language teachers regarding what the latter consider an appropriate
approach to language learning. As language students’ involvement with their instructor is
quite intensive, in order to ensure a more successful learning outcome students may
choose to arrange their learning behaviour to accommodate the perceptions of their
teachers. This is an important observation to consider. Apparently, the nature and stability
of language learning beliefs could be probed further by examining similarities and
differences of beliefs held by learners at different stages of their language program.
Kuntz (1999) investigated beliefs about language learning among schoolchildren of
different languages (French, German, Latin, Spanish) at five levels of language
instruction. Though the learners in her research were of much younger age than
university students, the results provide some useful insights for the present study. Kuntz
assessed beliefs that had been most commonly shared by the students of different
languages at different levels of instruction as well as beliefs that had differed significantly
between the groups of learners. She concluded that learners’ assumptions about foreign
language learning do change with the length of instruction, and some beliefs weaken
while others grow stronger. Especially, beliefs concerning communication strategies
underwent most significant changes. For example, students of all languages at more
advanced levels expressed stronger disagreement with the statements that learning a
foreign language is mostly a matter of translation, and that one has to know all the words
for a good reading comprehension. Also, the students acquired more realistic beliefs
about time span needed for learning a foreign language. Kuntz (1999, p.33) concludes
that “these changes may reflect program activities and personal experiences”.
The current research aims to investigate whether length of instruction effects students’
language learning beliefs. Questions of significance here are: (1) Do the novice and
intermediate level learners hold uniform beliefs about language learning? (2) What are
the areas where the learners’ beliefs are most uniform and what are the areas where those
beliefs are most inconsistent? and (3) Do the intermediate level students have more
realistic views regarding language learning?
3. Research Method
Participants
One hundred seven students learning the Russian language at Universiti Malaysia Sabah
(UMS) participated in this research. Thirtyone (31) students completed one semester of
the language program and were at the beginners’ level; seventy six (76) students
completed three semesters of the Russian language study and reached the intermediate
level. Foreign language is a compulsory course for the participants; the duration of the
program is four semesters.
Instrument
The students were given questionnaires, one per person. First part of the questionnaire
elicited information regarding demographic profile of the respondents (e.g. age, gender,
mother tongue, etc). Second part of the questionnaire employed a 5point Likert scale
ranging from “strongly disagree” to “strongly agree” statements.
Horwitz’s (1988) Beliefs About Language Learning Inventory (BALLI) was consulted
and modified to suit the objectives of this study and the Malaysian context. In Horwitz’s
BALLI items are grouped into five themes: (1) language difficulty, (2) foreign language
aptitude, (3) nature of learning, (4) learning strategy, and (5) motivation. The instrument
employed in the present inquiry omits those statements of Horwitz’s BALLI that deal with
learner’s motivation. It was done because motivation is a psychological construct that
involves incentives – extrinsic or intrinsic to learn and, as such, is not based on the
premise that something is right/true or wrong/false, which is an inseparable part of the
concept of beliefs. Secondly, the instrument used in this study includes a new parameter
to examine the learners’ beliefs about the importance of learning a foreign language.
Considering the Malaysian sociolinguistic context (i.e. multilingual environment,
widelyspread usage of the English language), the learners’ opinions about the
importance of learning a foreign language was an interesting aspect to examine. Finally,
questionnaire items that assess the same parameters of the learners’ beliefs are grouped
together in this research.
The instrument used in the present inquiry contains 20 items and focuses on the
following areas of the learners’ beliefs: (1) foreign language aptitude (items 14), (2)
difficulty of language learning (items 58), (3) nature of language learning (items 912),
(4) learning and communication strategies (items 1316), and (5) the importance of
learning a foreign language (1720)
The first four sections of the questionnaire examined the beliefs which were shaped by
the learners’ previous and present learning experiences (i.e. microcontext domain). The
fifth section of the questionnaire sought the learners’ opinions about foreign language
learning and multilingualism, which incorporated macrocontext domain.
Procedure
The questionnaires were distributed in December 2005 during the first class of the second
semester of academic year 2005/2006. The students completed answering the
questionnaires in the class and returned the forms to the lecturer. Thus the response rate
was 100 percent. In order to ensure that the respondents expressed their own views, they
were encouraged to give answers individually without consulting their classmates.
Research Hypothesis
This study has one research hypothesis regarding the relationship between language
learning beliefs and length of language instruction. It is hypothesized here that there were
significant differences in the language learning beliefs between the novice and
intermediate students including the learners’ perceptions about their own foreign
language aptitude, the perceived level of difficulty of the language under study, the nature
of language learning, the employment of learning and communication strategies, and the
importance of learning a foreign language.
Data Analysis
In this study, descriptive and inferential statistics were employed to analyze the data. The
frequencies of the occurrence for each of the questionnaire statements were computed
first. Then, analysis of the data was performed using the SPSS software, version 13.
Frequencies, percentages, means and standard deviations for each statement are reported
in Tables 15. In the data analysis, responses “strongly disagree” and “disagree” were
grouped as disagreement with a statement, while “strongly agree” and “agree” answers
were interpreted as agreement.
Ttest was used to test the research hypothesis. The respondents were separated into
two groups according to the duration of their language program: (1) the beginner students
who had studied Russian only one semester, and (2) intermediate level students who had
completed three semesters of the Russian language program.
4. Findings
The participants in this study were predominantly science students (71%, n=76). The
majority of the respondents (97.2%, n=104) were between 19 to 22 years old; there were
considerably more females (60.7%, n=65) than males (39.3%, n=42). By ethnic groups,
Chinese students represented 42.1% (n=45) of respondents, Malay students represented
14% (n=15), Indian 10.3% (n=11), Kadazan 15.0% (n=16), and others 18.7% (n=20). 2
Regarding linguistic background, the majority of respondents (45.8%, n=49) indicated
the “Chinese” language as their mother tongue; 26% (n=28) of respondents listed the
Malay language, 10.3% (n=11) “Indian”, 9.3% (n=10) Kadazan, and 8.4% (n=9) “other”
as their mother tongue. None of the respondents was monolingual. Bilinguals represented
24.3% (n=26) of the cohort; the majority of respondents (39.3%, n=41) spoke three
languages, while a considerable number spoke four (21.55%, n=23) or five (14.0%, n=15)
languages and/or dialects. All the respondents learned the Malay and English languages
at school, and more than half of them (54.2%, n=58) learned three languages (Malay,
English, and Mandarin). As these data indicate, all of the students have had an extensive
language learning experience. However, none of the respondents mentioned learning a
foreign language at school. 3
As results of the data analysis show, students held quite definite beliefs about language
learning. Only one statement of the questionnaire gathered the majority of neutral
responses (i.e. “I believe that I have a special ability to learn the Russian language”).
Regarding the existence of foreign language aptitude (see Table 1), the majority of
students agreed that children were more adept language learners than adults (statement
#1). They expressed overall agreement that some people have special language ability
(#2). The respondents were undecided as to whether they personally had a special talent
for language study (#3), and disagreed that people who are good at science and
mathematics are less adept language learners (#4).
Table 1: Foreign Language Aptitude (Items 14)
Item 1 2 3 4 5 Mean Standard
(SD D N A SA) Deviation
1. It is easier for children than adults to
learn a foreign language.
Overall 1 12 16 47 31 3.89 0.98
Beginners 0 6 7 15 3 3.48 0.92
Intermediate 1 6 9 32 28 4.05 0.96
tvalue 2.798**
2. Some people are born with a special
ability which helps them to learn a
foreign language.
Overall 6 16 36 35 14 3.33 1.06
Beginners 3 6 11 10 1 3.00 1.03
Intermediate 3 10 25 25 13 3.46 1.05
tvalue 2.066*
3. I believe that I have a special ability
to learn foreign languages.
Overall 5 29 46 23 4 2.93 0.91
Beginners 2 5 14 9 1 3.06 0.92
Intermediate 3 24 32 14 3 2.87 0.99
tvalue 1.013
4. People who are good at mathematics
and science are not good at learning
foreign languages.
Overall 27 54 21 3 2 2.06 0.86
Beginners 3 20 7 1 0 2.19 0.65
Intermediate 24 34 14 2 2 2.00 0.92
tvalue 1.062
Note: Tables 15 use the following abbreviations
1=SD (Strongly Disagree), 2=D (Disagree), 3=N (Neither agree nor disagree), 4=A (Agree),
5=SA (Strongly Agree).
* indicates significance at 0.05 level, ** indicates significance at 0.01 level
The ttest indicates significant shift in beliefs concerning two statements (#1 and #2).
As the results show, beliefs that children are better at languages than adults (t= 2.798)
and that some people are born with special ability to learn languages (t= 2.066) were
stronger among the intermediate level students.
Table 2: Difficulty of Language Learning (Items 58)

5. The Russian language is: (1) very
difficult; (2) difficult; (3) medium
difficult; (4) easy; (5) very easy.
Overall 11 37 55 4 0 2.49 0.73
Beginners 3 9 18 1 0 2.55 0.72
Intermediate 8 28 37 3 0 2.46 0.73
tvalue 0.561
6. If someone spent one hour a day

learning the Russian language, how long
would it take him/her to become fluent?
(1) less than 1 year; (2) 12 years; (3) 35
years; (4) 510 years; (5) not possible to
learn Russian with 1 hour per day study.
Overall 11 41 33 13 9 2.70 1.08
Beginners 3 14 10 3 1 2.52 0.92
Intermediate 8 27 23 10 8 2.78 1.13
tvalue 1.128
7. I think it is difficult to understand the
Russian language.
Overall 1 8 20 69 9 3.72 0.76
Beginners 0 3 12 15 1 3.45 0.72
Intermediate 1 5 8 54 8 3.84 0.75
tvalue 2.373**
8. I think that Russian grammar is
difficult.
Overall 0 7 18 56 26 3.14 0.82
Beginners 0 5 7 13 6 3.65 0.98
Intermediate 0 2 11 43 20 4.07 0.71
tvalue 2.156*
The next section of the questionnaire explored the students’ beliefs about the difficulty
of language learning (see Table 2).
As the results show, the majority of students at all levels considered the Russian
language of medium difficulty (#5), and thought they could become proficient in 12
years with 1 hour per day study (#6). Likewise, the majority of students in both groups
agreed that it was difficult to understand the Russian language (#7) and that Russian
grammar is difficult (#8). Agreement of the learners at the intermediate level was
considerably higher for the last two statements compared with the beginner learners (t=
2.373 and t= 2.156 for statements #7 and #8, respectively).
Answers to the questions regarding the students’ beliefs about the nature of language
learning (see Table 3) indicate that students at two levels share strikingly uniform
opinions as to how a language should be learned. The majority of students at each level
agreed that learning a language mostly involves memorizing new vocabulary (#9) and
grammar (#10), and requires different strategies from learning other school subjects (#11).
By contrast, they disagreed that learning a language is about performing translation from
one’s mother tongue. Especially consistent in this section was the belief that learning
grammar constitutes an important part of the language program with a very small
discrepancy in opinions between the groups (t= 0.050).
Regarding learning and communication strategies (see Table 4), the majority of
students at both levels agreed that excellent pronunciation was important (#13), disagreed
that one should speak only when able to produce errorfree language (#14) were willing
to practice the language with native speakers (#15) and take linguistic risks at guessing
unknown words (#16). In this section of the questionnaire, only one statement regarding
the importance of an excellent pronunciation (#13) produced different opinions between
two groups of students (t= 2.020); the intermediate level students attributed less
importance to a good accent than the novice learners.
Table 3: Nature of Language Learning (Items 912)
9. Learning a foreign language is
mostly about memorizing many new
words.
Overall 2 13 11 59 22 3.80 0.96
Beginners 0 4 2 16 9 3.97 0.94
Intermediate 2 9 9 43 13 3.74 0.97
tvalue 1.123
10. Learning a foreign language is

mostly about learning many of
grammar rules.
Overall 1 17 14 49 26 3.77 1.02
Beginners 1 4 2 18 6 3.77 1.02
Intermediate 0 13 12 31 20 3.76 1.03
tvalue 0.050
11. Learning a foreign language

requires different strategies from
learning other academic subjects.
Overall 0 11 15 53 28 3.92 0.90
Beginners 0 2 4 21 4 3.87 0.71
Intermediate 0 9 11 32 24 3.93 0.97
tvalue 0.328
12. Learning the Russian language is

mostly a matter of translating from my
native language.
Overall 10 35 32 28 2 2.79 1.00
Beginners 5 9 7 10 0 2.71 1.10
Intermediate 5 26 25 18 2 2.82 0.96
tvalue 0.496
Table 4: Learning and Communication Strategies (Items 1316)

13. It is important to speak the Russian
language with excellent pronunciation.
Overall 0 10 32 49 16 3.66 0.84
Beginners 0 1 7 17 6 3.90 0.74
Intermediate 0 9 25 32 10 3.57 0.86
tvalue 2.020*
14. You should not say anything in the

Russian language until you say it
correctly.
Overall 35 52 9 11 0 1.96 0.91
Beginners 10 15 2 4 0 2.00 0.96
Intermediate 25 37 7 7 0 1.95 0.89
tvalue 0.270
15. If I heard someone speaking the

Russian language, I would approach
them and try to practice speaking
Russian.
Overall 1 16 36 40 14 3.47 0.93
Beginners 0 5 5 16 5 3.68 0.94
Intermediate 1 11 31 24 9 3.38 0.92
tvalue 1.494
16. It is OK to guess a Russian word if

you don’t know its meaning.
Overall 5 10 26 55 11 3.53 0.97
Beginners 2 4 7 16 2 3.39 1.02
Intermediate 3 6 19 39 9 3.59 0.94
tvalue 0.997
The final section of the questionnaire sought the students’ opinions about the
importance of learning a foreign language. The results are reported in Table 5.
Table 5: Importance of Learning a Foreign Language (Items 1720)

17. It is important that everyone knows a
foreign language (other than English).
Overall 2 4 31 39 31 3.87 0.94
Beginners 1 2 7 11 10 3.87 1.05
Intermediate 1 2 24 28 21 3.87 0.90
tvalue 0.013
18. I think knowing a foreign language

besides English is important for me.
Overall 0 5 8 51 43 4.23 0.79
Beginners 0 3 2 12 14 4.19 0.94
Intermediate 0 2 6 39 29 4.25 0.71
tvalue 0.336
19. I think everybody should have an

opportunity to learn a foreign language
either at school or university.
Overall 1 0 4 54 48 4.38 0.65
Beginners 1 0 1 17 12 4.26 0.81
Intermediate 0 0 3 37 36 4.43 0.57
tvalue 1.268
20. I think a welleducated person should
know foreign language(s).
Overall 2 15 24 34 32 3.74 1.09
Beginners 2 4 4 13 8 3.68 1.19
Intermediate 0 11 20 21 24 3.76 1.05
tvalue 0.364
Answers to the questions demonstrate an amazing uniformity of the students’ beliefs
regardless of the length of language instruction. Thus, the majority of respondents at each
level thought that knowing a foreign language was important for everyone (#17) and
personally for themselves (#18). They overwhelmingly supported the statement that
foreign languages should be taught at schools or universities. Though there has been no
significant divergence in students’ opinion in this section of the questionnaire, the
intermediatelevel learners tended to hold a somewhat stronger belief regarding the
importance of foreign language learning.
5. Discussion and Conclusion
Statistical analysis done in this study revealed five (5) significant discrepancies in the
beliefs of the beginner and intermediate level students. Two statements each concerned
language aptitude and the difficulty of learning the Russian language; one statement
involved learning and communication strategies.
First of all, the beliefs that children learn foreign languages easier and faster than adults
and that some people have an inherent talent for learning languages were stronger among
the intermediate level students. Such responses may reflect the students’ waning
confidence in the success of learning outcome. This could be due to the students’ making
comparisons between their previous and present language learning achievements.
Languages that the participants learned at primary and secondary school (e.g. Malay,
English, Tamil, Mandarin) and at a younger age were widely spoken in their immediate
surroundings. This allowed the learners to practice newlyacquired skills outside the
classroom and cement their knowledge. However, learning a foreign language in a
country where possibilities to practice the language are very limited can be a challenging
task. Slower than expected progress in attaining fluency in the Russian language may
have led the students to a conclusion that special talent for language learning is needed
and that starting age is an important factor in language learning.
Secondly, statements that it is difficult to understand the Russian language and that
Russian grammar is difficult received stronger agreement from the intermediate level
students. This result is not controversial. As students advance in their language study,
they become exposed to increasingly complex linguistic structures. This makes them
aware of different aspects of language learning and shows that mastering different
language skills (listening, speaking, reading, writing) requires various degrees of effort
on the part of learners.
Lastly, the importance of an excellent pronunciation is another variable where the
divergence in the beliefs between the beginner and intermediate level students was
statistically significant. The intermediate level students gave less value to speaking with a
nativelike accent thus demonstrating enhanced learning and communication strategies
than did the beginner students.
Beliefs that were most consistent between two cohorts of learners involved in this study
were in the areas of the nature of language learning (section 3 of the questionnaire) and
the importance of learning a foreign language (section 5). Only slight differences
transpired in the opinions of the novice and intermediate level students and no
statistically significant relationship was detected. Regarding the nature of language
learning, although both groups agreed that a major part of language learning was
memorizing new words, the intermediate level students were slightly more aware that
enriching one’s vocabulary was not the most important part in achieving good language
proficiency. Also, a greater proportion of the intermediate level students viewed foreign
language study as a necessary and integral component of education.
To conclude, findings of the present research lend support to a proposition that the
tenacity of learners’ beliefs depends on whether those beliefs were shaped by the micro
context or macrocontext. Beliefs formed by the microcontext (e.g. learning situation)
tended to be less stable. In this study, the most malleable beliefs concerned the learners’
perception of language aptitude, their assessment of the difficulty of language learning
and employment of communication and learning strategies.
By contrast, beliefs shaped by the macrocontext (i.e. prevailing attitudes within society
toward language learning and multilingualism) were more tenacious. An interesting
finding of the present research was that all the participants were very enthusiastic about
learning a foreign language and thought that everybody should have an opportunity to
learn a foreign language either at school or university. This attitude reflects Malaysia’s
sociolinguistic context where multilingualism is not only promoted but is the way of life.
This finding could be of interest to educational policymakers and school curriculum
planners since it lends support to the idea of introducing foreign languages program at an
earlier stage of education, such as primary or secondary schools.
Results of this study offer some useful insights into language learning beliefs of
students living in a multilingual and multicultural country. The findings indicate that
language learning beliefs do evolve over the duration of the language program. However,
there are limitations to this research. First of all, the participants in this study were from
the same university and the sample size was relatively small. Therefore, some caution
should be exercised regarding applicability of the findings to other Malaysian university
students. For future research, a wider population sample from various institutions of
higher learning in Malaysia could be considered. Secondly, the present inquiry employed
the Likert scale questionnaire, which is recognized as economical and effective research
technique. However, as Sakui & Gaies (1999, p.486) maintain, “Questionnaires
consisting of closed items allow respondents only to state their beliefs – and then only the
beliefs which are included in the questionnaire”. Future studies on the topic may consider
including data from interviews, learning diaries and openended questionnaires to
supplement research findings.
To conclude, knowledge of students beliefs about language learning is important for
language instructors as it can provide a valuable insight into the learners’ perceptions of
and ideas on language learning. This is especially important for expatriate teachers who
have different learning experiences and backgrounds from their students. Ideas and
opinions about language learning tend to influence students’ learning behaviour.
Therefore, assessing learners beliefs could help to identify potential “problem areas” and
make some adjustment to the classroom procedure.
Notes
1
More recently, teaching of the Arabic and Mandarin languages at schools has been
promoted. Also, some residential schools offer the Japanese and German language
courses.
2
Among “others” such ethnic groups as “bajau”, “bajaudusun”, “sinokadazan”, “sino
dusun”, “bidayuh”, “iban” were listed.
3
Mandarin being a lingua franca for the Chinese community cannot be considered as a
“foreign” language in Malaysia, since ethnic Chinese represent about 24% of the
country’s population.
References
Allen, L. (1996). The evolution of a learner’s beliefs about language learning.
Carleton Papers in Applied Language Studies, 13, 6780.
Barcelos, A. (2000). Understanding teachers’ and students’ language learning
beliefs in experience: A Deweyan approach (John Dewey). Unpublished doctoral
dissertation. The University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa.
Bernat, E. (2006). Assessing EAP learners’ beliefs about language learning in the
Australian context. The Asian EFL Journal Quarterly, 8(2), 202227. Retrieved
December 11, 2006 from http://www.asianefljournal.com/June_06_eb.php
Carter, B.A. (1999). Begin with beliefs: exploring the relationship between beliefs and
learner autonomy among advanced students. Texas Papers in Foreign Language
Education, 4(1), 120.
Chawhan, L. & Oliver, R. (2000). What beliefs do ESL students hold about language
learning? TESOL in Context, 10(1), 226.
Horwitz, E. (1988). The beliefs about language learning of beginning university
foreign language students. Modern Language Journal, 72, 283294.
Kern, R. (1995). Students’ and teachers’ beliefs about language learning. Foreign
Language Annals, 28(1), 7192.
Kimura, K., Nakata, Y., Okumura, T. (2001). Language learning motivation of EFL
learners in Japan. JALT Journal, 35(1), 4768.
Kunt, N. (1997). Anxiety and beliefs about language learning: a study of Turkish
speaking university students learning English in north Cyprus. Unpublished
doctoral dissertation, University of Texas at Austin.
Kuntz, P. (1999). Secondary Students’ Beliefs about Language Learning. (ERIC
Document Reproduction Service, No. ED427514).
Mori, Y. (1999). Epistemological beliefs and language learning beliefs: What do
language learners believe about their learning? Language Learning, 49(3), 377
415.
Park, G. (1995). Language learning strategies and beliefs about language learning
of university students learning English in Korea. Unpublished doctoral dissertation,
University of Texas at Austin.
Peacock, M (1998). The links between learner beliefs, teacher beliefs, and EFL
proficiency. In Perspectives: Working Papers, 10(1). City University of
Hong Kong, 125159.
Peacock, M. (2001). Preservice ESL teachers’ beliefs about second language learning: A
longitudinal study. System 29(2), 177195.
Preston, D. (1991). Language teaching and learning: Folk linguistic perspectives. In J.
Alatis (Ed.), Georgetown University Round Table in Language and Linguistics
1991 (pp. 583603). Washington DC: Georgetown University Press.
Richardson, V. (1996). The role of attitudes and beliefs in learning to teach. In J.
Sikula, T.J. Buttery and E. Guyton (Eds.), Handbook of research on teacher
education (pp.102119). New York: Macmillan.
Rokeach, M. (1968). Beliefs, attitudes and values: a theory of organization and
change. San Francisco: JosseyBass.
Rubin, G. (1987). Learner strategies: Theoretical assumptions, research history and
typology. In A. Wenden and J. Rubin (Eds.), Learner strategies in language
learning (pp.1529). London: Prentice Hall.
Sakui, K. & Gaies, S.J. (1999). Investigating Japanese learners’ beliefs about language
learning. System 27(4), 473492.
Siebert, L. (2003). Student and teacher beliefs about language learning. The ORTESOL
Journal, 21, 739
Truitt, S.N. (1995). Beliefs about language learning: A study of Korean university
students learning English. Texas Papers in Foreign Language Education, 2(1),
114.
Tumposky, N.R. (1991). Student beliefs about language learning: A crosscultural
study. Carleton Papers in Applied Language Studies, 8, 5065.
Wenden, A. (1987). How to be a successful language learner: Insights and Prescriptions
from L2 learners. In A. Wenden and J. Rubin (Eds.), Learner strategies in
language learning (pp.103117). London: Prentice Hall.
Wenden, A. (1999). An introduction to metacognitive knowledge and beliefs about
language learning: Beyond the basics. System, 27, 435441.
Yang, N.D. (1992). Second language learners’ beliefs about language learning and their
use of learning strategies: A study of college students of English in Taiwan.
Unpublished doctoral dissertation, The University of Texas, Austin.
Just Say “Thank You”: A Study of Compliment Responses
Hessa Al Falasi,
American University of Sharjah, United Arab Emirates
Bio Data:
Hessa Ghanem Al Falasi is in her third year of teaching. She is teaching Grade 6 and 7 in
Fujairah School for Basic Education, a government school in Fujairah. She is also
completing an MA in TESOL in the American University of Sharjah. She is interested in
assessment and evaluation. Ms. Al Falasi is currently working on her thesis, which is a
textbook evaluation of the new English national curriculum “UAE English Skills”.
Abstract
This study aims at finding out whether Arabic learners of English (Emarati Females in
particular) produce targetlike compliment responses in English and whether pragmatic
transfer can occur. Discourse completion tests (DCTs) and interviews were used to study
the strategies employed when responding to compliments by native speakers (NSs) and
Arabic nonnative speakers (NNSs) of English. Findings suggest that Arabic (L1)
expressions and strategies were sometimes transferred to English (L2). This study also
indicates that Emarati female learners of English transfer some of their L1 pragmatic
norms to L2 because they perceive these norms to be universal among languages rather
than being language specific. It also indicates that Arabic NNSs of English have some
misconceptions about NSs that affect the way they respond to their compliments. Some
important cultural and pedagogical implications are discussed at the end of the paper.
Key words: pragmatic transfer, compliment responses, raising cultural awareness in the
EFL/ESL classroom.
Introduction
Communicating with speakers of other languages is a complex behaviour that requires
both linguistic and pragmatic competence. Whether we speak in a first or second
language, we are influenced by sociocultural norms and constraints that affect the way we
communicate. Rizk (2003) points out that what is considered appropriate in one language
might not be so in another. Praising a girl of being fat, for instance in a Western African
community is considered a compliment; while in an American context it is perceived as
an insult.
Most of the problems that EFL learners face in intercultural communication are mainly
pragmatic. Teachers of EFL often choose not to stress pragmatic knowledge in their
classrooms, focusing instead on linguistic knowledge. EslamiRasekh (2004) warns that
this might result in pragmatic failure when EFL learners actually communicate with
native speakers (NSs), something that is attributed to some other cause, such as rudeness.
The only way to minimize pragmatic failure between NSs and NNSs is by acquiring
pragmatic competence, that is, “the ability to use language effectively in order to
understand language in context” (El Samaty 2005, p. 341). Emarati EFL students are not
exposed to the target community and culture and they find it extremely difficult to
produce or sometimes understand a speech act.
Compliment responses are one type of speech acts that differs considerably from Arabic
to English. Native speakers of English might consider the way Arabic speakers respond
to compliments offending or bizarre, because they understood only the words without the
cultural rules that govern them and vice versa. This study aims at finding out whether
Arabic learners of English produce targetlike compliment responses and whether
pragmatic transfer can occur. It examines how compliment responses are used in the
UAE culture and the differences between them and the ones used in the American culture.
Despite the wealth of empirical studies conducted about speech acts in general, few data
based studies have ever focused on L1 transfer of compliment responses. More research
is necessary in this area to better understand the relationship between L1 transfer and
compliment responses in L2 use. The present study contributes to the limited collection
of research done on compliment responses in Arabic. This will be achieved by: (1)
reviewing studies on pragmatic transfer and compliment responses, (2) discussing the
methodology and results of the present study, and finally (3) suggesting some classroom
implications that could apply to EFL teaching in the UAE context.
Literature Review
Pragmatic Transfer
Intercultural miscommunication is often caused when learners fall back on their L1
sociocultural norms in realizing speech acts in a target language. This is referred to as
pragmatic transfer. Rizk (2003) defines pragmatic transfer as “the influence of learners’
pragmatic knowledge of language and culture other than the target language on their
comprehension, production, and acquisition of L2 pragmatic information” (p. 404).
Pragmatic transfer can be either positive, which is considered an evidence of
sociocultural and pragmatic universality among languages, or negative, which indicates
inappropriate transfer of L1 sociolinguistic norms into L2. This often results in pragmatic
failure, or being unable to understand the meaning of an utterance in the target language.
(Liu, 1997). Negative pragmatic transfer, as Rizk (2003) explains, takes the form of
translating some “formulaic expressions/ phrases” functioning to express different speech
acts in (L1) to express the equivalent speech act in L2. (p.405). El Samaty (2005)
mentions one factor that might influence pragmatic transfer and that is learners’
perception of “what constitutes a language specific or a universal issue” (p.342). Learners
would not transfer an L1 pragmatic feature to L2 if they know that it is language specific.
Research on Pragmatic Transfer
Pragmatic studies dealing with different speech acts have been conducted since the early
1980s. These studies focused on L1 in most cases, but later, L2 and crosscultural
variations have been introduced. The L2 pragmatic transfer studies have shown that
despite being linguistically competent in a second language, learners are likely to transfer
L1 pragmatic rules in their L2 production (El Samaty, 2005). Takahashi and Beebe (1987)
hypothesized that there is a positive correlation between L2 proficiency and pragmatic
transfer. They argued that more proficient learners tend to transfer L1 sociocultural
norms more than less proficient learners because they have enough control over L2 to
express L1 sentiments at the pragmatic level. EslamiRasekh (2004) supports this claim
by stating that linguistically competent learners do not necessarily possess comparable
pragmatic competence. “Even grammatically advanced learners may use language
inappropriately and show differences from targetlanguage pragmatic norms”.
In 1986, Blumkulka and Olshtain used discourse completion tests to analyze the
utterance length of requesting strategies in Hebrew. They collected the data from non
native speakers of Hebrew at three proficiency level, and they found out that high
intermediate learners produced utterances longer than the utterances of lowintermediate
and advanced learners, which was considered by the researchers as pragmatic failure
( Ghawi 1993, p.39).
Compliments and compliment responses
A compliment is one form of speech acts and it can be defined as “an utterance
containing a positive evaluation by the speaker to the addressee” (Liu,1997). There is an
infinite number of words that could be chosen to compliment, but the set of lexical items
and grammatical patterns we use in our daily interaction when complimenting and have
high frequency in our daily discourse are very restricted. According to Wolfson (1986),
twothirds of English compliments use the adjectives "nice, good, beautiful, pretty, great",
and 90% make use of just two verbs "like and love” (p.116). The lack of creativity in the
form and content of English compliments is related to their function in discourse. Herbert
(1986) demonstrates that compliments are used to “negotiate solidarity with the
addressee” (p.76). Their aim is to make the addressee feel good and their formulaic
nature minimizes the chance that they will be misinterpreted by the addressee.
On the surface level, there is not much difference between Arabic and English cultures
in the use of compliments. However, if we look at compliment responses, differences
arise. When communicating with native speakers of English, Arabs may sometimes
sound bizarre or offending. This is duo to some differences in the way the two cultures
use compliment responses. In the Arab society, it is a deeplyrooted religious belief that
humility is a virtue. Even when accepting a compliment, Arabs tend to return the
compliment (which might sound insincere to NSs), or insist on offering the object of the
compliment to the speaker (something that might be embarrassing to the NSs who did not
expect this behavior). Therefore, differences may result in serious communicative
interference in cross Arabic and English culture communication.
Research on Compliment Responses
The first researcher who discussed compliment responses from a pragmatic perspective
was Pomerantz in 1978. She claimed that Americans face two dilemmas when responding
to compliments: (A) they have to agree with the speaker, and (B) they have to avoid self
praise. Urano (1998), further explains this dilemma by stating that when a recipient of a
compliment responds by agreeing with the speaker (Condition A), it violates Condition B
as this response goes against the sociolinguistic expectations of the speaker. On the other
hand, if the speaker doesn’t accept the compliment to avoid selfpraise, the response will
be facethreatening since it violates Condition A. To mediate this conflict, recipients of
compliments resolve to a variety of solutions: (1) Acceptance, (2) Rejection, and (3) Self
praise avoidance.
Herbert (1986) revised Pomerantz’s taxonomy by analyzing American English
speakers’ compliment responses. He collected more than a thousand samples of
compliment responses from American college students in a threeyears period project.
Surprisingly, only 36.35% compliment responses were accounted for by acceptance.
Herbert ended up with a threecategory, twelvetype taxonomy of compliment responses.
(Table 1)

Response Type Example

A. Agreement
I. Acceptances
1. Appreciation Token Thanks; thank you; (smile)
2. Comment Acceptance Thanks; it’s my favourite too.
3. Praise Upgrade Really brings out the blue in my eyes, doesn’t it?
II. Comment History I bought it for the trip to Arizona.
III. Transfers
1. Reassignment My brother gave it to me.
2. Return So’s yours.
B. Nonagreement
I. Scale Down It’s really quite old.
II. Question Do you really think so?
III. Nonacceptances
1. Disagreement I hate it.
2. Qualification It’s alright, but Len’s is nicer.
IV. No Acknowledgment (silence)
C. Other Interpretations
I. Request You wanna borrow this one too?

Table 1. Herbert’s Taxonomy of Compliment responses (Herbert 1986, p. 79)
Since then, a number of contrastive studies have been conducted to compare
compliment responses in different languages and language varieties. Arabic and South
African English speakers were found to prefer accepting compliments rather than reject
them. Speakers of Asian languages, on the other hand, were likely to reject compliments
(Urano, 1998). In 1989, Wolfson collected observational data on compliments from
authentic interaction between native and nonnative speakers over a period of two years.
She found out that L2 speakers did understand the function of compliments as “a social
lubricant” in the American culture. They had difficulty in responding appropriately to
compliments (Ghawi 1993, p.40). In another contrastive study of compliment responses
between Chinese learners of English and American NSs of English, Chen (1993), found
out that the majority of Chinese NNSs of English rejected compliments, compared to the
American NSs who accepted and appreciated those compliments.
More recently, Cedar’s (2006) contrastive study of compliment responses used by Thai
NNSs of English and American NSs of English revealed significant differences in
responses to English compliments between the two groups. While Americans tended to
accept compliments and elaborate positively in their responses, Thai NNSs of English
refrained from elaborating and used formulaic expressions in their responses. Cedar
explained this by stating that “the English conversational competence of Thai subjects
was not developed enough to express their feelings of positive elaboration” (p.15).
Despite the above reviewed studies on compliments and compliment responses, the lack
of studies on Arabic learners of English in this area is obvious.
Research questions
As mentioned earlier, the purpose of this study is to examine pragmatic transfer in
compliment responses by Arabic learners of English. Three related research questions
emerged:
1. What are the similarities and differences in compliment responses between female
NSs and Emarati female NNSs of English?
2. When speaking in English, will Emarati females’ compliment responses be closer
to Arabic or English?
3. Does language proficiency play a role in their use of compliment responses?
In order to answer these questions, it is necessary to first examine the patterns of
compliment responses by Americans and Emarati females in their L1, and second to
observe compliment responses by Emarati females in their L2 (English).
Methodology
For validity and reliability, I used triangulation by not concentrating on just one source of
information. I approached the topic from different points of view by combining
quantitative data from discourse completion tasks (DCTs) and qualitative data from
interviews. I also used theories and background knowledge from books and journals
articles that guided me to approach my topic in the right way.
Participants
The subjects of the study were all female participants divided into three main
groups:
- Group1: American NSs of English = 10 ( HCT teaching staff)
- Group2: Emarati NNs + English majors = 10. All of them are English Teachers
at the Fujairah Elementary School for Girls.
- Group3: Emarati NNs nonEnglish majors = 6. 2 Housewives + 4 Math teachers
at the Fujairah Elementary School for Girls.
The reason why females were chosen for this study is because they tend to use
politeness strategies more than men do. According to Guodong & Jing (2005), many
research studies support this claim. They explain that studies on the relation of gender
and language have found out that women are more sensitive than men to being polite.
Studies conducted by Liao & Breneham and Brown in1996 and 1998 also found that
women are more status sensitive than men. Therefore, it is predictable that women will
use more politeness strategies than men do. What is also important to note, as Liu (1997)
explains, is that women are traditionally assumed in both cultures to be more concerned
than men with personal topics such as physical appearance, clothing, food and diet.
Tools
1. Discourse Completion Test :
The Discourse Completion Test (DCT) consists of six scenarios, in which participants are
expected to respond to compliments. These scenarios were designed to meet the purpose
of this study and to elicit data on compliment responses from both NSs and NNSs of
English. The final version in English was translated by the researcher to Arabic. Groups 1
and 2 took the English version, and group 3 took the Arabic version.
2. Interviews :
This tool was used to account for the reasons of the participants’ responses and minimize
the researcher’s bias when interpreting the data.
Findings
The data collected from the three groups through the discourse completion test will be
presently analyzed for the six scenarios. The analysis will be based on Herbert’s
taxonomy of compliment responses to examine the similarities and differences between
native and nonnative speakers of English.
Scenario 1:
You have just finished presenting your research paper. At the end of the class (when you
were just leaving the classroom), one of your classmates say: “You did an excellent job! I
really enjoyed your presentation”. You answer: _________________
Almost all of the NSs responses to this scenario were agreement. Their responses varied
between appreciation token “oh, thank you!”, to comment acceptance “thanks! I’m glad
you enjoyed it”, and praise upgrade “you have no idea how hard I worked for that!”. Only
one NS responded by disagreeing and questioning “Really? I thought it was just ok”. On
the other hand, almost all of the native speakers of Arabic (NSAs), have responded by
either transfer (returning the compliment) “oh, your presentation was much better”, or
interpreting it as a request “do you want me to help you with your presentation?” Only
one of the NSAs responded with a simple “thank you”. The responses of NNSs who took
the English version of the DCT showed more use of the agreement responses like
“thanks!” and “It’s nice of you to say so”. However, they also showed literal translation
of Arabic formulaic expressions used as compliment responses. These translations
included “I’m your pupil”, which is a scale down expression that means the speaker is
much better than the addressee, and “I’m ashamed” which might strike a NS as extremely
out of place, but is literally translated from the widely used Arabic formulaic expression
(‫ﺗﻮﺍﺿﻌﻨﺎ‬ ‫)ﺃﺧﺠﻠﺘﻢ‬ akhjaltom tawaado’na.
Scenario 2:
You have some friends and relatives over for coffee and cake that you baked. Someone
says: “Tastes Yummy!”. You answer:_________________
Eight of the ten NSs responded with “thanks” and then offering to give the speaker the
recipe “would you like the recipe?”. The other two responded by giving information or
history, “it’s a family recipe”. NNSs who answered in Arabic used questions “really? Did
you really like it?”, disagreement “no it’s not, you’re just complimenting me!”, and
reassignment “my mom gave me the recipe”. NSAs who answered in English did not use
those two strategies in their responses. Instead, they resolved again to literally translating
Arabic formulaic expressions like “Your taste is yummy”, and “I added my magic to it /
that’s because I dipped my sweet finger in it”. Only one person responded with “thank
you”.
Scenario 3:
You were shopping for a skirt and a stranger (male) approaches you and says: “This
would look amazing on you!” You answer:____________________
NSs all responded with either no acknowledgment, or by not accepting the compliment
“what’s it got to do with you?”. NNSs who answered in Arabic and English also
responded with no acknowledgment, or by offending the man.
Scenario 4:
You were shopping for a skirt and a stranger (female) approaches you and says: “This
would look amazing on you!” You answer:__________________
NSs responded with either a question “really?/ oh, so do you think I should buy it?” or an
appreciation token “thanks / thank you”. NNSs who responded in Arabic used formulaic
expressions like “May Allah bliss you” jazaaki allah khair, “May Allah make all your
days beautiful” Allah yhalli ayyamek. NNSs who answered in English used tokens of
appreciation “thanks/ how sweet of you to say so”, or returned the compliment by
translating Arabic formulaic expressions “Your eyes are beautiful” oyoonech el helwa.
Scenario 5:
Some friends are over at your house. One of them looks at a clock hanging on the wall
and says: “I love your clock. It looks great in your living room!”. You answer: _____
NSs responded with comment history “It was a present from my daughter/ I bought it in
Harrods”, or acceptance “yes, I loved it when I bought it”. NNSs who answered in Arabic
interpreted this compliment as a request and responded with offering the clock to the
speaker and insisting that they take it. NNSs answering in English also insisted that the
speaker take the watch “you must take it! I swear, you must!”. Only one NNS answered
with an appreciation token “you like it! Thank you!”.
Scenario 6:
You’re wearing a new shirt and a colleague looks at you and says: “This shirt looks great
on you! Blue is a great color for you.” You answer: ___________________
NSs responded with appreciation tokens “thanks/ you made my day!”, questions “is it
really?/ do you think so?”, disagreement “I dunno, I prefer pink”, and comment
acceptance “oh, it’s my favorite color. Thanks”. NNSs who answered in Arabic
responded with returning the compliment “you’re more beautiful/ this is because you
have a good taste”, disagreement “thanks, but I know this is only a compliment”, and
questions “really? Swear!!”. NNSs who answered in English returned the compliment by
translating Arabic formulaic expressions “your eyes are beautiful and they see everything
beautiful”, disagreement “please don’t say that, you’re embarrassing me!”, scale down
“oh, it’s so cheap! I bought it in the sales”, and comment acceptance “thanks, I like it
too”.
Discussion
It was clear from the above analysis that in most cases, female Emarati learners of
English did not produce targetlike compliment responses. They unconsciously brought
about some L1 expressions and strategies which might result in communicative
breakdown. For instance, they literally translated Arabic formulaic expressions used in
compliment responses and these expressions were not always suitable for the compliment
given in English. They intended their responses to be polite but they were not appropriate.
For example, the expression “I’m ashamed” would be more appropriate when an offence
is committed, rather than to show gratitude and appreciation. These strategies were used
both by English and nonEnglish majors, which means that communicating with NSs
might slightly affect their use of compliment responses, but does not have changed it
completely to a targetlike response.
Another important issue that rises from the findings is that NNSs had some
misconceptions about the way NSs responded to compliments. These misconceptions
have affected the way NNSs would deal with NSs considering compliment responses.
This was illustrated through scenario 3 (see above). In the UAE culture, compliments
from men are generally not accepted unless the man is a member of the family. However,
if they happen, the appropriate response from the female would be to simply ignore the
man. Responses to other compliments are normally answered based on the real
circumstance or position the addressee is in at the moment he/she is greeted.
Scenario 3 illustrates a situation that many females in the UAE are likely to find
themselves in while shopping. The responses of the NNSs were analysed above and they
ranged from no acknowledgement, to offending the male. After groups 2, and 3 finished
their DCTs, I asked them the following question “how do you think a female NS would
respond in this situation?” All of the NNSs answered that a NS would be happy to get this
compliment, would highly appreciate it, and would thank the man. While, as obvious
from the data analysis above, all but one NS answered that they would either ignore the
man or tell him to mind his own business. When I asked the NNSs how this idea they
have of NSs affected them, half of them stated that it does not affect them in any way; the
other half, however, explained that an American male would expect the female to be
happy when complimented while a local male would know that this female would be
insulted. “If the man who complimented me was a foreigner, I would accept the
compliment and thank him, if it was a local guy”, said one of the interviewee, “I would
certainly ignore him”.
Another issue is the way NSs and NNSs view compliments. Compliments in the UAE
had turned into a routine and they are perceived to be insincere most of the time. There
are several factors that affect the use of compliments in the UAE, like social distance, age,
gender, and social status. Some of the reasons why people in the UAE use compliments
are, as Boyle (2005) explained, “1) to avoid hurting other people’s feelings; 2) to give
people some hope and encouragement; 3) to protect one self from more powerful people;
4) because they want other people to compliment them too; 5) it’s encouraging” (p.356).
For these reasons, many people use compliments even if they were insincere, as a means
of making people feel good. That’s why it was found in NNSs responses expressions like
“oh, this is not true, you’re only complimenting me!” and “Really? Or is it just a
compliment?”
It was obvious also that language proficiency did not play a role in producing target
like compliment responses. Both English majors and non majors produced the same
compliment responses. The only difference is that group 2 translated those responses
literally to English.
Other deviations from the native norms are the following: (1) NNSs used longer
compliment responses because there is a general understanding that the longer the
response to compliments, the more sincere it is, (2) NNSs, sometimes, responded to
compliments with a joke that might be misunderstood by speakers of other languages, (3)
because of their strong ties with their religion, Emarati NNSs have their faith in (Allah)
God deeply embedded within their speech acts. That’s why most of the compliment
responses are in the form of a small prayer that the speaker be blessed from Allah, and
he/she gets whatever they want with the help of Allah allah eykhaleech, allah ysallemch.
Conclusion
The present study explored pragmatic transfer of compliment responses in Arabic
learners of English in comparison with the data from native speakers of American
English. The findings of the study show that Arabic learners did not produce targetlike
responses to compliments. This suggests that it’s not enough to build learners’ linguistic
competence and that it might be necessary to also develop their sociocultural, which will
in turn develop their understanding of the frames of interaction and rules of politeness
within the target culture. It is also important to provide learners with knowledge of the
linguistic forms or stylistic strategies appropriate to convey the intended meaning in
different contexts or situations.
The study offers two pedagogical implications, one for syllabus designers and the other
for instruction. First, when designing textbooks, syllabus designers should examine
learners’ needs considering the understanding and production of speech acts in the target
language and which of these speech acts they are likely to come across. Learners should
be made aware of NSs usage of the variety of expressions to realize a certain function,
depending on the situation where they are used. This could be accomplished by eliciting
compliment responses from their own culture, and presenting the target culture’s way of
responding to compliments to raise their awareness.
Second, Emarati EFL learners have no contact with NSs of English, and that calls for
more communication in the classroom, as it contributes to interlanguage development.
This could be achieved through: (a) using authentic materials from the target language
that will help learners understand as many native and nonnative varieties and
communicative styles as they can be expected to come across, (b) focusing on learner
centred activities like role plays and real discussions to develop efficient strategies of the
target language, (c) teamteaching with NSs to give the students a chance to interact and
learn English under the supervision of a NS.
References
Boyle, R. (2005). Pragmatics as content and structure in argumentation. Proceedings of
the 10 th TESOL Arabia Conference, 9, 353360.
Chen, R. (1993). Responding to compliments: A contrastive study of politeness strategies
between American English and Chinese speakers. Journal of Pragmatics, (20), 4975.
El Samaty, M. (2005). Helping foreign language learners become pragmatically
competent. Proceedings of the 10 th TESOL Arabia Conference, 9, 341351.
EslamiRasekh, Z., EslamiRasekh, A., & Fatahi, A. (2004). The effect of explicit
metapragmatic instruction on the speech act awareness of advanced EFL students.
TESLEJ(8),2. Retrieved May 5 th , 2006, from http://wwwwriting.berkeley.edu/TESl
EJ/ej30/a2.html
Cedar. P. (2006). Thai and American Responses to Compliments in English. The
Linguistics Journal, June, Vol. 1 No. 2, pp. 628. http://www.linguistics
journal.com/June 2006_pc.php
Ghawi, M. (1993). Pragmatic transfer in Arabic learners of English. El Two Talk, 1(1),
3952.
Guodong, L. & Jing, H. (2005). A contrastive study on disagreement strategies for
politeness between American English & Mandarin Chinese. Asian EFL Journal(7), 1.
Retrieved May 5 th , 2006, from http://www.asianefljournal.com/march_05_lghj.php
Herbert, K. (1986). Say “thank you” or something. American Speech, 61(1), 7688.
Retrieved April 13, 2006 from the JSTOR database.
Liu, S. (2003). Studies on negative pragmatic transfer in international pragmatics.
Guangxi Normal University Journal. Retrieved April 1, 2006, from
http://www.gxnu.edu.cn/ Personal/szliu/negative%20pragmatic%20transfer.doc
Rizk, S. (2003). Why say “NO!” when you refuse? TESOL Arabia 2002 Conference
Proceedings, 7, 401431.
Takahashi, T. & Beebe, L. (1987). The development of pragmatic competence in
Japanese learners of English. JALT Journal,(8), 131155.
Urano, K. (1998). Negative pragmatic transfer in compliment responses by Japanese
learners of English. Unpublished manuscript, University of Hawai'i at Manoa,
Honolulu. Retrieved May 1, 2006, from
http://www2.hawaii.edu/~urano/research/esl660.html
Wolfson, N. (1986). Compliments in crosscultural perspectives. In J. M. Valdes, Culture
bound: Bridging the cultural gap in language teaching (pp. 112120). New York:
Cambridge University Press.
Politeness Markers in Persian Requestives
Mohammad Ali SalmaniNodoushan, University of Zanjan, Iran
Bio Data:
Dr Mohammad Ali SalmaniNodoushan is Assistant Professor of TEFL at the University
of Zanjan, Iran. He has been teaching BA and MA courses at different Iranian
Universities for the past fifteen year and is a member of the editorial boards of Asian EFL
Journal, The Linguistics Journal, and IManager's Journal of Educational Technology. He
is also editorinchief of Iranian Journal of Language Studies (IJLS). His areas of interest
include language testing and English for Specific Purposes (ESP).
Abstract
In a study of the effects of complainers' sex, age, perceived situational seriousness, and
social class on the use of conversational strategies in their complaining behavior, 465
subjects of varying age, sex, and social class were observed and tape recorded in
spontaneous conversation by 25 field workers. The field workers also filled out a
checklist that provided the data of the study, which were then input into two
nonparametric tests: (a) MannWhitney U Test, and (b) Kruskal Wallis H Test. The
results of data analysis showed that 'repetition of complaint' was an important strategy in
connection to the 'perceived situational seriousness' of the topic of complaint. Sex was
found to cause the differential use of three conversational strategies, social class to cause
the differential use of two conversational strategies, and perceived situational seriousness
and age each to cause that of only on conversational strategy. A cline of significance is
suggested for each of the independent variables in question. Suggestions are made for
further research.
Key words: sociolinguistics; pragmatics; speech act theory; facethreatening acts; non
facethreatening act; griping; troublestelling; politeness; whinging; sociopragmatics
1. Introduction
Direct complaint (DC) is a facethreatening act through which a speaker makes
complaints about someone or something that is present in the speech act scene (Murphy
and Neu, 1996; Olshtain and Weinbach, 1993). Indirect complaint (IC) or Griping, on the
other hand, can be described as a nonfacethreatening speech act in which the
responsible party or object of the complaint is not present during the interaction within
which the speech act is performed (D’AmicoReisner, 1985). Both direct and indirect
complaints have the potential of leading to lengthy interactions between speaker and
addressee; however, it is usually in the indirect complaint or griping that one finds
conversational material upon which shared beliefs and attitudes may be expressed
(Tatsuki, 2000). As such, the indirect complaint (IC) becomes a solidaritybuilding
device since it freely invokes the listener to engage in a series of commiserative
responses to demonstrate attention and concern, or to maintain intimacy and stable social
relationships.
Closely related to the concept of griping is what in Australian English is called
whinging. Using Natural Semantic Approach, Wierzbicka (1991, pp.1812) defines
whinging as:
a) I say something bad is happening to me
b) I feel something bad because of this
c) I can’t do anything because of this
d) I want someone to know this
e) I want someone to do something because of this
f) I think no one wants to do anything because of this
g) I want to say this many times because of this
Wierzbicka (1991) compared her own definition of whinge with the definitions of
complaints (direct and indirect) to highlight the range of meanings a word can have with
respect to the culture in which it is a part.
According to both Tannen (1990) and Michand & Warner (1997), indirect complaints
frequently serve as backchannels or evaluative responses in an extended structure of
discourse exchanges; they may invoke expressions like “Oh, that’s horrible!”, “Yeah, I
know what you mean” ,and “That’s too bad.” (cf. Allami, 2006).
2. Review of the related literature
Brown and Levinson's (1978) definition of the notion of face created interest in the study
of speech acts that had to do with face. One such speech act is complaining. The earliest
attempts at studying complaints were made in the 1980s. Jefferson and Lee (1981) and
Jefferson (1984a, 1984b) studied ‘troublestelling’ encounters from a conversation
analysis point of view. Katriel (1985) conducted a research on griping. Katriel examined
the ritual gripings among Israelis. All of these studies referred to the potential of
establishing solidarity through griping.
As Allami (2006) notices, Bayraktaroglu (1992), in a study on Turkish commiserative
responses, found that griping was a common speech act among friends and intimates.
Bayraktaroglu said:
When one of the speakers informs the other speaker of the existence of a
personal problem, the subsequent talk revolves around this trouble for a number
of exchanges, forming a unit in the conversation where trouble is the focal point
…, [involving] the speaker who initiates it by making his or her trouble in
public, the troubleteller, and the speaker who is on the receiving end, the
‘troublerecipient.
(Bayraktaroglu, 1992, p. 319, cited in Allami, 2006)
Bayraktaroglu also distinguished griping from troublestalking in that the latter is a type
of oral narrative which is initiated by the former.
Indirect complaint (IC) refers to the expression of dissatisfaction to an interlocutor
about someone or something that is not present. An indirect complaint is defined as a
negative evaluation wherein the addressee is neither held responsible for the perceived
offense nor capable of remedying the perceived offense. Native English speakers usually
use indirect complaints as a positive strategy for establishing points of commonality; they
frequently employ indirect complaints (ICs) in an attempt to establish rapport or
solidarity between themselves and their interlocutors.
One of the early attempts at studying ICs was made by Boxer (1993a). In boxer's study,
295 interlocutors produced 533 indirect complaints. Boxer identified three different types
of IC themes (personal, impersonal, and trivial), and six types of IC responses (nothing or
topic switch, question, contradiction, joke/teasing, advice/lecture, and commiseration).
The study focused mainly on the role of gender, social status, social distance, and theme
in connection to ICs. Since half of interlocutors in Boxer's study were Jewish, it was
possible to investigate ethnicity. Boxer found that approximately 25% of griping
sequences, in her study, served to distance the interlocutors from one another while 75%
of the gripings were found, by a group of ten native Englishspeaking raters, to be
rapportinspiring. Boxer's study found that speakers of English often employed gripings
in sequential interaction in an attempt to establish solidarity. It was also found that
women mostly commiserated with ICs, while men contradicted or gave advice. Boxer
noticed that ESL textbooks, with respect to gender, did not include ICs or included them
but did not treat them as ICs. The study, therefore, suggested that nonnative speakers
(NNSs) should know that commiserating with complaints is important in that it signals to
the speaker (S) that the hearer (H) is supportive; this builds solidarity.
In another study by Boxer (1993b), indirect complaints as well as commiseration in
conversations between Japanese ESL learners and their E1 peers were studied. Boxer
used spontaneous speech or field notes. In this study, 295 interlocutors were recorded in
spontaneous conversation (195 women and 100 men). The issue that emerged was that of
how to respond to an indirect complaint. The results showed that natives used (a)
joking/teasing, (b) nonsubstantive reply ("hmn"), (c) question, (d) advice/lecture, (e)
contradiction, and (f) commiseration. With NSs most responses were commiseration with
some questioning. For NNSs, the major category was nonsubstantive, sometimes
accompanied by some questioning and some commiseration. The study concluded that
the Japanese ESL learners were missing out on opportunities for conversation by not
engaging in the interaction more fully; they did not utilize talk in the same way as NSs
did.
In a study in 1993 by Frescura, eighty three subjects provided the taperecorded role
play data on reactions to complaints (mostly apologies). The subjects of the study
belonged in four different groups: (a) native Italian speakers in Italy, (b) native English
speakers in Canada, (c) Italians residing in Canada, and (d) EnglishCanadian learners of
Italian. The respondents, after being taperecorded in six roleplay interactions, were
asked to listen to all six recordings and to provide retrospective verbal report on:
(a) how close to real life they felt their performance to be;
(b) how dominant they felt their interlocutor was;
(c) their sensitivity to the severity of the offense and to the tone of the complaint; and
(d) their possible linguistic difficulties (for Italians in Canada and Canadian learners of
Italian).
The data were coded according to a taxonomy comprising seven semantic formulas in
two categories: (a) hearersupportive (including formulas providing gratification and
support for the "face" of the complainers), and (b) selfsupportive (including formulas
uttered by the speakers to defend and protect their own "face"). Performance was
measured according to the three dimensions of (1) production (total output of formulas,
including repetitions), (2) selection (types of formulas used, excluding repetitions), and
(3) intensity of formulas produced. The results, after data analysis, revealed that native
speakers of Italian had an overall preference for the selfsupportive category of formulas;
native speakers of English, however, had a preference for the hearersupportive category.
Moreover, Canadian learners of Italian did not indicate any preference; by way of
contrast, ItalianCanadian speakers, though diverging some from the native norm, gave
indication of language maintenance as well. Frescura (1993) had used verbal report which
helped her establish, among other things, that the learners of Italian tended to think in
English first before responding to the role plays.
According to Du (1995), in Chinese culture face is not only sociallyoriented but also
reciprocal. Some method of maintaining 'face balance' is therefore required. Depending
on (a) the relationship between the interlocutors and (b) the nature of the message, the act
of 'giving bad news' may in some cases be facesaving. However, 'complaining' and
'disagreeing' are in most cases, clearly facethreatening. The former indicates that the
person's behavior is not approved or accepted by other social members and the latter
indicates a contradiction or negative evaluation of a person's face. These acts, therefore,
require some strategy for preserving the face of both interlocutors. Du (1995) conducted a
study with thirty students (male and female) ranging from 19 to 30 years old. The study
gave a definition of these three facethreatening acts—complaining, giving bad news, and
disagreeing. Du also discussed the illocutionary verbs which denote these acts and the
semantics of face in Chinese culture. Du used a 19item questionnaire that described
facethreatening situations and asked each subject to contemplate the situation and write
his or her response. The results of Du's study showed that strategy choice varied
according to (a) the referential goal and (b) the nature of the interlocutor relationship. Du
also noticed a general pattern: facethreatening acts in Chinese tend to be performed in a
cooperative rather than confrontational manner. Attention is paid to both participants'
face by emphasizing common ground and constructive problem solutions.
Morrow (1995) studied twenty students enrolled in two spoken English classes in an
intensive ESL program in the United States. Morrow used a threehour intervention using
model dialogues, prescribed speechact formulae, and various types of performance
activities (games and role playing) about refusals and complaints. Oral data were
collected in three phases: (a) prior to the intervention, (b) immediately following the
intervention, and (c) six months after the intervention. Morrow collected the oral data by
means of seven semistructured roleplay tasks which prompted subjects to perform three
direct complaints and four refusals with peer interlocutors. The data were analyzed in two
ways: (a) using holistic ratings of clarity and politeness, and (b) comparing the pretest
and posttest distributions of discourse features with those of native English speaking
controls (N=14). Ttests were conducted to compare the pooled pretest and posttest
holistic scores. The ttests, which were significant at p<.0005, revealed improvements in
subjects' levels of clarity and politeness; however, similar comparisons of the posttest
from phase two of the study, and delayed posttest scores from phase three of the study,
did not attain statistical significance. The refusal analysis of discourse features (semantic
formulae) revealed increases in the use of politeness strategies, especially of negative
politeness strategies. Frequently these developmental changes appeared pragmatically
appropriate even when they failed to converge toward the native speaker frequencies.
Morrow reported that analysis of propositions and modifiers in the complaint data
revealed gains in pragmatic competence. These pragmatic gains were indicated by such
changes as (a) increased indirectness, (b) more complete explanations, and (c) fewer
explicit statements of dissatisfaction. Morrow's results, which corroborated the findings
from the holistic ratings, suggested that speech act instruction helped the subjects to
perform complaints and refusals which were clearer, more polite, and, to a limited extent,
more nativelike. Additional intratask comparisons found that higher levels of pragmatic
competence were achieved when the interlocutor's level of social distance was lower (i.e.,
friends as opposed to acquaintances).
The study conducted by Murphy and Neu (1996) had two objectives: (1) to compare
components of the speech act of complaining produced by American native speakers and
Korean nonnative speakers of English, and (2) to ascertain how this speech act was
judged by native speakers based on a number of factors (such as whether the act was
aggressive, respectful, credible, appropriate, and similar to what a native would use). As
such, the study had two parts: (a) the productive part, and (b) the receptive part. For the
productive part of the study, the subjects were fourteen male American and fourteen male
Korean graduate students from Penn State University. Twentythree undergraduate and
four graduate students (for a total of twenty seven) participated in the receptive part of the
study, who judged the acceptability of the speech acts.
The speech act data were collected by means of an oral discourse completion task
(DCT). A hypothetical situation was presented in which the subject was placed in the
position of a student whose paper had been unfairly marked and the subjects were
directed to "go speak to the professor." Then, the subjects' responses were taperecorded.
The instrument in the acceptability judgment part of the study was a questionnaire with
10 yesno questions and one openended question. Five of the yesno questions were
"distractor items" and the other 5 were designed to measure the native speakers'
perceptions about the speech act acceptability. The openended question asked, "If you
were the student in this situation, would your approach be different from the student
you've just heard? Please explain your answer for both speakerstudent 1 and speaker
student 2." Each subject was alone during the DCT and his or her data were later
transcribed into written form. The speech data elicited for the first part of the study were
examined using Cohen and Olshtain's (1981) definition of speech act set. A .05 alpha
level of significance was set for a Chisquare analysis of the American students'
responses to the five yesno questions (which were not distractors) and the Yate's
Correction for Continuity was used to analyze all differences between responses.
Murphy and Neu (1996) found that, when expressing disapproval about a grade
received on a paper to a professor, most American native speakers of English would
produce a complaint speech act set, while most Korean nonnative speakers (11 out of 14)
would not; both native and nonnative speakers used an "explanation of purpose" to begin
the speech act set in similar ways. The native speakers then produced a complaint only
after the explanation of purpose. This complaint appeared to be what most of these native
speakers felt was the most socially appropriate option for expressing disapproval. The act
involved: acceptance of responsibility, depersonalization of the problem, questioning
techniques that used modals "would" and/or "could," use of mitigators, and use of the
pronoun "we." The 11 nonnative speakers who did not use a complaint form employed
what was perceived by native speakers as a form of criticism which served to abdicate
responsibility, personalized the problem (placed blame), and used the modal "should."
This represented a serious deviation from the native speakers' speech data. Both the
native and nonnative speakers then used similar types of "justifications" in their speech
act sets, referring to amount of time, effort, and/or work put into the paper. Finally all of
the native and most (12 out of 14) of the nonnative speakers included a candidate
solution: a request form in the speech act set in order to propose an option that would
politely remedy the situation (such as reconsidering the grade, discussing the paper, or
editing the paper further for an improved grade). As a result of the "criticism" form used
by the many of the Korean nonnative speakers, native speakers judged the nonnative
speakers' speech act sets to be more aggressive, less respectful, less credible, and less
appropriate than the common "complaint" speech act sets offered by native speakers.
In a crosslinguistic study of the speech act of complaining, Nakabachi (1996)
compared complaints produced by Japanese L1 speakers and Japanese EFL speakers. The
study looked at whether Japanese EFL learners changed their strategies of complaint
when they spoke in English, and if so, what factors caused the change. The subjects of the
study were thirty nine undergraduate students with an intermediate level of proficiency in
English who had no experience of living in English speaking countries. A discourse
completion test (DCT) including eight situations was used for data collection. Nakabachi
(1996) found that almost half of the subjects changed their speech strategies in English;
they used more severe expressions than natives did. This was interpreted as over
accommodation to the target language norms, and seemed to suggest the risk involved
with attempting to adapt to the local sociocultural norms.
The study conducted by Arent (1996) is an exploratory research that compares the
relative frequency of the performance and avoidance of oral complaints by twenty two
Chinese learners and twelve native speakers of American English. The subjects of the
study were asked to respond to three problematic situations that were set in the same
university housing complex. Three sets of data were obtained: (a) audiotaped roleplays,
(b) interview data on perceived situational seriousness, and (c) verbal report data. The
respondents were allowed to opt out; in addition, the effects of social distance, power,
and type of social contract were controlled for. Arent found that sociopragmatic decision
making for Chinese learners and NSs of American English appeared to be associated with
(a) individual perceptions of situational seriousness and (b) with culturallyconditioned
perceptions of the flexibility of explicit social contracts.
Boxer (1996) endorsed ethnographic interviewing as a way of tapping the norms of the
communities (a) in research on speech act usage among native speakers in particular
languages and (b) in research on nonnative speaker pragmatic transfer. She discussed the
results of two sets of interviews (one structured and another openended) which were
designed to evaluate "troublestelling" in a group of native speakers. Troublestelling is
defined as 'indirect complaining' designed for sharing mutual sentiment between speakers
and hearers. Boxer's goal in the studies was to tap not only sociolinguistic knowledge that
was explicit, but knowledge that was tacit in the "naive" respondents. There were ten
informants who were students, staff, faculty members, or alumni at a large university in
the northeastern US. The spontaneous speech data consisted of 533 troublestelling
exchanges that were tape recorded or recorded in field notes. Six major categories of
responses emerged as ways in which these participants responded to indirect complaints:
(1) response or topic switch, (2) contradiction, (3) agreement/commiseration, (4)
joke/teasing, (5) advice/lecture, and (6) questions.
Boxer found that troublestelling was used (a) to further conversation, (b) to establish
solidarity, and (c) to build relationships. She also found that using the same questions
with each of the participants, as was done with the structured interview, was not the best
idea because it inherently limited the depth of the participants' responses. In the second
(openended) interview, Boxer used a more open format, which allowed not only for
expansion of ideas but also for greater flexibility of responses. It was easier to obtain
more information about the assumptions and perceptions, which shaped the respondents'
answers and ideas about troubles sharing. She described the factors that made for a more
ideal ethnographic interview, such as (a) rapport with the participants, (b) having
participants who feel comfortable doing much of the talking, and (c) following the lead of
the participants' narratives. Her findings revealed that in terms of troubles sharing, most
respondents felt that while direct complaints qualified as "complaints," indirect
complaints were not seen so much as complaining but rather a positive way of sharing
mutual information and building relationships. She also found (a) that more females
participated in troublestalk than males and (b) that females were recipients of more
indirect complaints because they were seen as more supportive in general than males.
Boxer claimed that, while the explicit assumption about complaining was that it
constituted negative speech behavior, tacit assumptions proved otherwise.
The subjects of Molloy and Shimura's (2003) study were 304 Japanese university
students aged 1821. They were students at five universities in the Kanto area. To collect
the data, a discourse completion test (DCT) with twelve complaint situations was used.
The DCT was meant to assess EFL complaints. The respondents were allowed to opt out
or to give a nonverbal response as well. The respondents tallied two things: (a) the
strategies used and (b) the combinations of interactions. Molloy and Shimura found that
the two most common strategies were (a) to notify and (b) to seek redress.
Holmes (2003) reports on the Victoria University of Wellington Language in the
Workplace (LWP) Project findings regarding talk in the workplace. The corpus had at the
time over 2,000 interactions recorded. The focus of the study was on what was necessary
for fitting in and becoming an integrated member of the workplace as a community of
practice. Holmes's paper examines the positive discourse strategies of small talk and
humor; it also illustrates how these provide a challenge for workers with an intellectual
disability. Then the analysis turns to the more negatively affective area of workplace
whinges and complaints. Holmes specifically examines how whinges and complaints may
present difficulties to those from nonEnglishspeaking backgrounds. The study provides
a basis for developing useful teaching materials for those entering workplaces for the first
time.
Drawing on Politeness Theory and the Community of Practice model, Holmes, Newton,

and Stubbe (2004) examined the uses and functions of the fourletter expletive 'f***' in
interaction between workers in a New Zealand soap factory work team. They extensively
recorded the factory team in their daily interactions to obtain a corpus of thirty five hours
of authentic workplace talk from which they selected a small number of paradigmatic
interactions for discussion in their paper. Particular attention was given to the way in
which the expletive f*** was used in two face threatening speech acts, (a) direct
complaints and refusals, and (b) its contrasting function in the speech act of whinging.
The analysis focused on the complex sociopragmatic functions of f*** and its role as an
indicator of membership in a specific community of practice. Holmes, Newton, and
Stubbe (2004) demonstrate how the speech act is accomplished over a series of different
turns. They illustrated the slippery nature of the concept of politeness, in that they found
the expletive f*** to serve as a positive politeness or solidarity marker when confined to
members of a particular team within this factory.
Kumagai (2004) defined complaint conversations as conversations that involve two
parties with distinct communicative orientations: (a) the complainer and (b) the
complainee. She distinguished complaint conversations from quarrels in that the former
involves an effort by the complainee to minimize the confrontation while, with the latter,
the two confront each other on a par. She took the two conversations she used for her
study from a corpus she had collected earlier in 1991. In the first conversation the
complainer was a male shopkeeper in downtown Tokyo and the complainee a male
university student attempting to conduct a survey. The complainer's mother and wife also
participated in an effort to keep the peace when the shopkeeper returned to the shop to
find the student there after he had told him he could not do his survey there. In the second
conversation, one teenage girl was accusing the other of being late for their appointment.
Kumagai (2004) focused on these two complaint conversations and discussed how the
repetition of utterances within such conversations could function as a conversational
strategy to:
(1) express emotions (complainer expresses negative feelings and disapproval,

and complainee expresses regret and disagreement);
(2) deal with the complaint situation effectively as a complainer or a complainee
(complainer: intensification of reproach, maintaining stance by adding
utterances, sarcasm using complainee's words; complainee: repeating
apologies, stalling or diverting the complaint);
(3) provide rhetoric for argument (complainer: holding the floor by speaking
fluently and adding utterances, controlling the topic of the complaint;
complainee: reorienting the conversation to a solution, closing the
conversation); and
(4) manipulate the conversational development.
In particular she focused on uses of repetition, both exact repetition as well as modified
repetition or paraphrase, of utterances made earlier in the same conversation. Kumagai's
results supported Tannen's (1990) claim that repetition is a major means for creating
speaker involvement, not merely a matter of redundancy.
Molloy and Shimura (2004) looked at responses to complaints in up to twelve situations
out of a sample of 259 Japanese university students (80% females). They performed a
rigorous statistical analysis and found wide idiosyncratic variation in response patterns.
Some respondents were more finetuned in their selection of speech acts relevant to the
situation in question while others were less so. Molloy and Shimura raised numerous
questions as to why this was the case, but they did not provide any preferred explanation.
To sum up, the review of the literature related to complaints (whether direct (DC) or
indirect (IC), and whether followed by troubles telling or not) revealed three major areas
that had previously been studied: (a) functions of complaints, (b) responses to complaints,
and (c) conversational strategies used by both complainers and complainees for
complaining or troublestelling. According to literature, the functions of complaints are
threefold: (a) to further conversation, (b) to build relationships, and (c) to establish
solidarity (Boxer, 1993; Boxer 1996). Six responses to complaints have been identified in
the literature: (a) no response, nonsubstantive response, or topic switch; (b) questions; (c)
contradiction; (d) joke/teasing; (e) advice/lecture; and (f) agreement/commiseration
(Boxer, 1993; Boxer, 1996). In addition, there were four conversational strategies which
were used by complainers and complainees: (a) expressing emotions, (b) dealing with
complaint situation, (c) providing rhetoric for argument, and (d) manipulating
conversational development (Kumagai, 2004).
3. Aim of the study
The literature reviewed in the previous section clearly shows the importance of the study
of complaints. To date, no study has addressed this speech act in Farsi. As such, the
present study was an attempt at describing the salient conversational strategies that are
used in the speech act of complaining in Farsi (See Appendix A for a summary of
conversational strategies used in complaints). The study specifically focused on the role
of complainers' sex, age, perceived situational seriousness, and social class in relation to
their complaining behavior.
4. METHOD
4.1. PARTICIPANTS
A total of 465 participants (all of them complainers in their spontaneous conversations)
comprised the sample of the study. They belonged to different age, social class, and
gender groups. Table 1 represents the frequency analysis for the participants of the study.
Table 1
Frequency analysis for participants of the study
Frequency Percent Valid Percent Cumulative Percent
Sex Male 233 50.1 50.1 50.1
Female 232 49.9 49.9 100.0
Age Group Teen 110 23.7 23.7 23.7
Young 117 25.2 25.2 48.8
Adult 120 25.8 25.8 74.6
Old 118 25.4 25.4 100.0
Social Class Low 152 32.7 32.7 32.7
Mid 159 34.2 34.2 66.9
High 154 33.1 33.1 100.0
TOTAL 465 100 100
From the participants of the study, 233 were male (50.1%) and 232 female (49.9%). As
for the age groups, 110 participants (23.7%) were teenagers (between 13 and 19), 117
participants (or 25.2%) were young (between 19 and 35), 120 (or 25.8%) were adult
(between 35 and 50), and 118 (or 25.4%) were old (50+). 152 of the participants (32.7%)
belonged in the low social class, 159 (34.2%) came from the mid social class, and 154
(33.1%) were members of the high social class. The social class of participants was
identified by such factors, as total monthly income, neighborhood of residence, brand of
private car, possession of private cellphones, and possession and type of private house (as
these are indicators of social class in Iran).
4.2. Instruments and procedures
The data for the present study were collected by 25 field workers who observed and tape
recorded the subjects in spontaneous conversation. The field workers were all master's
students majoring in Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL) who had already
passed their sociolinguistics and discourse analysis courses. They used hidden tape
recorders to record the spontaneous conversations of the subjects. They were instructed to
tell the truth about the recordings to the subjects after they had been recorded, and to ask
their permission for using the tape scripts in the study. Those subjects who did not permit
the use of their recorded conversations were discarded from the study, and the respective
tape scripts were erased. The field workers assigned each tape script a unique reference
number and filled out a checklist (one for each tape script) that provided the data for the
study (See Appendix B). The field workers also indicated their evaluation of the degree to
which they thought the complainers perceived the situation to be serious, and provided
any comments that could make the coding of the data easier.
The data collected in this way were then submitted to the SPSS 13.0 for Windows
(SPSS, Inc., 2004). Three different statistics were used: (a) Frequency analysis, (b)
MannWhitney U Test, and (c) Kruskal Wallis H Test. Frequency analysis was conducted
to identify the proportion and percentage of subjects in the different subgroups of the
sample (See table 1 above). The MannWhitney U Test (which is the nonparametric
counterpart for independent samples ttest) is suitable for analyzing nominal data (where
the independent variable has only two levels); therefore, it was used to measure the effect
of participants' sex (i.e., male versus female) on their use of conversational strategies in
the speech act of complaining. The Kruskal Wallis H Test (which is the nonparametric
alternative to OneWay BetweenGroups ANOVA) is suitable for analyzing nominal data
(where the independent variable has more than two levels). As such, it was performed to
measure the effects of participants' social class, age, and perceived situational seriousness
on their use of conversational strategies in the speech act of complaining (For more on
these statistics please see Pallant, 2001).
5. Results and discussion
The first question addressed by the study was "Do male and female complainers differ in
terms of their use of conversational strategies in their complaints?" To answer this
question, the data were analyzed by means of the MannWhitney U Test. Table 2
represents the results of this analysis for the four conversational strategies commonly
used in complaints (See Appendixes A and B).
Table 2
MannWhitney U test for Sex as the Grouping Variable
STRATEGY 1 STRATEGY 2 STRATEGY 3 STRATEGY 4
MannWhitney U 24054.500 23267.500 26499.000 24129.000
Wilcoxon W 51082.500 50528.500 53527.000 51390.000
Z 2.400 2.690 .388 2.153
Asymp. Sig. (2tailed) .016(*) .007(*) .698 .031(*)
The four strategies under study were: (1) expressing emotions, (2) dealing with complaint
situation, (3) providing rhetoric for argument, and (4) manipulating development of conversation.
As for strategy 1 (i.e., expressing emotions), male and female complainers were different in their
use of the strategy [Z = 2.4, p = 02 (rounded)]. Male and female complainers were also different
in their use of the second [Z = 2.69, p = .01 (rounded)] and the fourth [Z = 2.15, p = .03
(rounded)] strategies. However, the statistical difference between male and female subjects in
their use of the third strategy was not significant [Z = .388, p = .7 (rounded)].
260
249.21
245.76
245.5
250
235.27
240
230.72
Mean Rank
Female
230
Male
220.56
220.18
216.86
220
210
200
Strategy 1 Strategy 2 Strategy 3 Strategy 4
Conversational Strategy
Figure 1. Comparison of mean ranks for strategy use by males and females.
Mean rank comparisons (figure 1 above) showed that males made use of the first
strategy much more than females did. Females, however, made use of the second and
fourth strategies much more than their male counterparts did. In other words, males
expressed their emotions more openly than females, while females dealt with the complaint
situation and provided rhetoric for argument more easily than males.
The second question addressed by the study was whether there was a significant difference
in the complainers' use of conversational strategies across different social class groups.
To answer this question, the data were analyzed by means of a Kruskal Wallis H Test.
Table 3 displays the results of this analysis.
Table 3: KruskalWallis H test for Social Class as the Grouping Variable

ChiSquare 40.718 100.037 .171 3.074
df 2 2 2 2
Asymp. Sig. (2tailed) .000(*) .000(*) .918 .215
As it can be seen from table 3, complainers' social class related to their use of the first
and the second conversational strategies in a statistically significant way. The most
significant difference, however, related to the second strategy (ChiSquare = 100.037, df
= 2, and p = .000). Subjects' social class also affected their use of the first strategy in a
statistically significant way (ChiSquare = 40.718, df =2, p = .000).
318.46
350
275.41
300
243.32
236.38
235.73
233.48
231.51
229.81
219.01
250
191.67
189.64
191.6
Mean Rank
200 Low
Mid
150 High
100
50
0
Figure 2. Comparison of mean ranks for strategy use by subjects across social classes.
Low class participants expressed their emotions less than their mid class and high class
counterparts. High class subjects, on the other hand, expressed more emotions that both
mid class and low class subjects. Mid class subjects stood in between. As for dealing with
the complaint situation, high class subjects used the strategy much more than both the
mid class and the low class subjects. The difference between the mid class and the low
class subjects, however, was very small.
Still another question addressed by the present study was whether there was any
statistically significant difference between participants' use of conversational strategies
across different age groups. Here again, a Kruskal Wallis H Test was performed. The
results of this analysis are displayed in table 4 below. In this case, age group was a factor
only in relation to the third strategy (i.e., providing rhetoric for the argument). The
difference between subjects across different age groups was significant only in relation to
complainers' attempts at holding the conversational floor [ChiSquare = 9.272, df = 3, and
p = .03 (rounded)]. In connection to the other three strategies, age was not a significant
factor.
Table 4
KruskalWallis H test for Age as the Grouping Variable
ChiSquare .932 .596 9.272 3.128
df 3 3 3 3
Asymp. Sig. (2tailed) .818 .897 .026(*) .372
As is evident from graph 3 below, the only age group that had a mean rank much grater
than the other groups in connection to the third strategy was the age group 'old'. That is,
subjects within the 50+ age group provided rhetoric for the argument by holding the
conversational floor much more than the subjects within the other age groups.
300 Teen
263.27
Young
241.16
240.55
240.08
236.35
235.75
235.49
233.75
233.64
230.24
Adult
227.61
227.24
223.77
221.04
220.18
250
215.39
Old
200
Mean Rank
150
100
50
0
Conve rsational Strategy
Figure 3. Comparison of mean ranks for strategy use by subjects across age groups.
The last question addressed by the present study was whether complainers' perceived
situational seriousness affected their use of conversational strategies in any significant
way. One again, a Kruskal Wallis H Test was performed. The results of this analysis are
displayed in table 5 below.
Table 5
KruskalWallis H test for Perceived Situational Seriousness as the Grouping Variable
ChiSquare .085 4.687 .989 109.387
df 2 2 2 2
Asymp. Sig. (2tailed) .959 .096 .610 .000(*)
The results of data analysis indicated that perceived situational seriousness was a factor
only in relation to the last conversational strategy (i.e., performers' manipulation of the
development of conversation). In fact, when complainers thought that the topic of complaint
was not that serious, they repeatedly talked about it, either by repeating exactly the same
sentences or by paraphrasing their complaints and repeating them (ChiSquare = 109.387,
df = 2, and p = .000). As for topics with a high level of perceived situational seriousness,
the subjects of the study used fewer repetitions. Topics with a medium level of perceived
situational seriousness stood in between. The comparisons of mean ranks for the
conversational strategies are illustrated in figure 4 below.
Low
309.05
350
Mid
High
300
247.07
246.46
240.35
235.06
233.76
232.42
231.27
228.94
227.96
250 216.45
Mean Rank
200
156.14
150
100
50
0
Figure 4. Comparison of mean ranks for strategy use by subjects in relation to perceived
situational seriousness.
This finding is rather odd. We logically expect more complaint when the topic of
complaint is a serious matter, but the subjects of the study behaved in the opposite way.
The reason for this discrepancy can be found in the cultural norms that shape the Iranian
community. We, Iranians, are culturally brought up in such a way as to avoid
conversations that result in clash and conflict. We are repeatedly told by our parents and
teachers, from childhood to adolescence and beyond, that conflict and dispute is to be
avoided. As such, it is not strange to see that when the topic of complaint is serious,
Iranian native speakers of Farsi refrain from continuing their complaints. Serious matters
are disputeprone zones; they readily result in quarrels. Matters with a low level of
perceived situational seriousness, however, take some time to result in quarrels. It is not
very odd, therefore, to observe that Iranian complainers continue repeating their
complaints about nonserious matters, until they realize that the complainee is about to
react aggressively at which time they give in and stop complaining any further.
6. Conclusion
Based on the findings of the study, a cline of significance can be suggested for each of
the independent variables in question.
Independent Variables most important least important

SEX strategy 2(‫)٭‬ strategy 1(‫)٭‬ strategy 3(‫)٭‬ strategy 4
SOCIAL STATUS strategy 2(‫)٭‬ strategy 1(‫)٭‬ strategy 4 strategy 3
AGE strategy 3(‫)٭‬ strategy 4 strategy 1 strategy 2
SITUATIONAL SERIOUSNESS strategy 4(‫)٭‬ strategy 2 strategy 3 strategy 1
Such a cline might look something like the above illustration where the order of
strategies (from left to right) identifies the degree to which they are affected by the
independent variable in question, and where the symbol (‫)٭‬ represents statistical
significance. As it is indicated by the cline, sex is the variable that causes the differential
use of three conversational strategies whereas social class causes the differential use of
only two conversational strategies. Age and perceived situational seriousness cause the
differential use of only one strategy; age significantly affects complainers' use of
'providing rhetoric for argument' while perceived situational seriousness significantly
affects complainers' manipulation of the development of conversation.
The present study only focused on the conversational strategies that were used by
Iranian complainers. Similar studies can be designed to research the use of conversational
strategies by Iranian complainees. Moreover, similar studies may be designed that
address the functions of complaints in Farsi.
References
Allami, H. (2006). A sociopragmatic analysis of griping: The case of Iranian students.
The Linguistics Journal, 1(1), 5976.
Arent, R. (1996). Sociopragmatic decisions regarding complaints by Chinese learners and
NSs of American English. Hong Kong Journal of Applied Linguistics, 1(1), 125147.
Bayraktaroglu, A. (1992). Disagreement in Turkish troublestalk. Text, 12, 317338.
Boxer, D. (1993a). Complaining and commiserating: A speech act view of solidarity in
spoken American English. NY: Peter Lang.
Boxer, D. (1993b). Complaints as positive strategies: What the learner needs to know.
TESOL Quarterly, 27(2), 277299.
Boxer, D. (1996). Ethnographic interviewing as a research tool in speech act analysis:
The case of complaints. In S. M. Gass & J. Neu (Eds.). Speech acts across cultures:
Challenges to communication in a second language (pp. 217239). Berlin: Mouton de
Gruyter.
Brown, R., & Levinson, S. (1978). Universals in language usage: Politeness phenomena.
In E. N. Goody (Ed.), Questions and politeness: Strategies in social interaction (pp.
56289). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Daly, N., Holmes, J., Newton, J., & Stubbe, M. (2004). Expletives as solidarity signals in
FTAs on the factory floor. Journal of Pragmatics, 36(5), 945964.
D’AmicoReisner, L. (1985). An ethnolinguistic study of disapproval exchanges.
Unpublished doctoral dissertation. University of Pennsylvania.
Du, J. S. (1995). Performance of facethreatening acts in Chinese: Complaining, giving
bad news, and disagreeing. In G. Kasper (Ed.), Pragmatics of Chinese as a native and
target language (pp. 165206). Manoa, Hawai'i: University of Hawai'i Press.
Frescura, M. A. (1993). A sociolinguistic comparison of "reactions to complaints": Italian
L1 vs. English L1, Italian L2, and Italian as a community language. Unpublished
doctoral dissertation, University of Toronto, Toronto.
Holmes, J. (2003). Talk at work and “fitting in”: A sociopragmatic perspective on
workplace culture. In G. Wigglesworth (Ed.), Marking our difference: Languages in
Australia and New Zealand universities. Proceedings of Conference on Language
Education in Australian and New Zealand Universities (pp. 95
15). Melbourne: University of Melbourne.
Jefferson, G. (1984a). On stepwise transition from talk about a trouble to inappropriately
nearpositioned matters. In J. Maxwell and J. Heritage (Eds.). Structures of social
action: Studies in conversational analysis (pp. 191 222). Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Jefferson, G. (1984b). Laughter organization in talk about troubles. In J. Maxwell and J.
Heritage (Eds.). Structures of social action: Studies in conversational analysis (pp.
346369). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Jefferson, G., & Lee, J. R. E. (1981). The rejection of advice: Managing the problematic
convergence of a “troublestelling” and a ‘service encounter’. Journal of Pragmatics, 5,
399422.
Katriel, T. (1985). ‘Griping’ as a verbal ritual in some Israeli discourse. Dialogue, 367
381.
Kumagai, T. (2004). The role of repetition in complaint conversations. In P. Szatrowski
(Ed.), Hidden and open conflict in Japanese conversational interaction (pp. 199220).
Tokyo: Kurosio.
Michaud, S., & Warner, R. (1997). Gender differences in self reported response to
troubles talk. Sex Roles, 37(78), pp. 527 540.
SPSS Incorporation (2004). SPSS 13.0 for Windows [Computer Software]. Chicago, IL.:
SPSS Incorporation (1 September 2004).
Molloy, H. P. L., & Shimura, M. (2003). Approaches to a theory of complaint
interactions. Paper presented at the JACET 42nd Annual Convention, Sendai, Japan,
September 5, 2003.
Molloy, H. P. L., & Shimura, M. (2004). An examination of situational sensitivity in
mediumscale interlanguage pragmatics research. Temple University, Tokyo, Japan,
http://www.jalt.org/pansig/2004/HTML/ShimMoll.htm.
Morrow, C. K. (1995). The pragmatic effects of instruction on ESL learners' production
of complaint and refusal speech acts. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of
New York at Buffalo, Amherst, NY. UMI Microform, UMI Number: 9603629.
Murphy, B., &. Neu, J. (1996). My grade's too low: The speech act set of complaining. In
S. M. Gass & J. Neu (Eds.), Speech acts across cultures: Challenges to communication
in second language (pp. 191216). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyer.
Nakabachi, K. (1996). Pragmatic transfer in complaints: Strategies of complaining in
English and Japanese by Japanese EFL speakers. JACET Bulletin, 27, 127142.
Olshtain, E., & Weinbach, L. (1993). Interlanguage features of the speech act of
complaining. In G. Kasper and S. BlumKulka (Eds.). Interlanguage pragmatics (pp.
108122). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Pallant, J. (2001). SPSS survival manual: A step by step guide to data analysis using
SPSS for Windows (version 10). Philadelphia: Open University Press.
Tannen, D. (1990). You just don’t understand: Men and women in conversation. New
York: William Morrow & Company.
Tatsuki, D. H. (2000). If my complaints could passions move: An interlanguage study of
aggression. Journal of Pragmatics, 32, 10031017.
Wierzbicka, A. (1991). Crosscultural pragmatics: The semantics of human interaction,
Trends in linguistics studies and monographs 53. Berlin: Mouton De Gruyter.
APPENDIX A: Summary of Conversational Strategies Used in Complaints
STRATEGIES COMPLAINER COMPLAINEE
1) Expressing a) Expressing negative feelings a) Expressing regret
emotions b) Expressing disapproval b) Expressing disagreement
2) Dealing with a) Intensification of reproach a) Repeating apologies
complaint situation b) Maintaining stance by adding b) Stalling the complaint
utterances c) Diverting the complaint
c) Sarcasm (and insulting)
d) Using complainee's words
humorously
3) Providing rhetoric Holding the floor a) Reorienting the conversation to a
for argument a) by speaking fluently solution
b) by adding utterances b) Closing the conversation
c) by controlling complaint topic
4) Manipulating a) Continuing the complaint a) Minimizing the confrontation
development of 1. by exact repetition b) Confronting the complainer on
conversation 2. by modified repetition or a par
paraphrase
b) Avoiding continuation of
complaint
APPENDIX B: Checklist to be filled out by the observer/interviewee
INTERVIEWEE'S/OBSERVER'S CHECKLIST
TAPE SCRIPT NUMBER: —————————————
COMPLAINER DETAILS: Sex: Male q Femaleq
Social Class: Low q Mid q High q
Age: Teen q Young q Adult q Old q
SITUATIONAL SERIOUSNESS: Low q Mid q High q
COMPLAINING STRATEGIES COMPLAINER'S BEHAVIOUR
Expressing emotions a) Expressing negative feelings q
(Strategy 1) b) Expressing disapproval q
a) Intensification of reproach q
Dealing with complaint situation b) Maintaining stance by adding utterances q
(Strategy 2) c) Sarcasm (and insulting) q
d) Using complainee's words humorously q
Holding the floor q
Providing rhetoric for argument a) by speaking fluently q
(Strategy 3) b) by adding utterances q
c) by controlling complaint topic q
a) Continuing the complaint q
Manipulating development of 3. by exact repetition q
conversation
(Strategy 4) 4. by modified repetition/paraphrase q
b) Avoiding continuation of complaint q
INTERVIEWEE'S/OBSERVER'S
COMMENTS:
The Effect of Explicit Teaching of Concept Mapping in Expository
Writing on EFL Students’ Selfregulation
Mohammad Reza Talebinezhad,
Isfahan University, Iran
Giti Mousapour Negari
Sistan & Baluchestan University, Iran
Bio Data:
Mohammad Reza Talebinezhad is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Foreign
Languages, Isfahan University, Iran. He received his Ph.D. in Applied Linguistics
(Sheffield, 1994, U. K.). His research interests are interlanguage development and second
language acquisition; transfer in second language acquisition; conceptual fluency; and
metaphorical competence.
Giti Mousapour Negari is an Assistant Professor at Sistan & Baluchestan University, Iran.
She received her Ph.D. in Applied Linguistics (Isfahan University, 2006, Iran). Her
research interests are learning strategies; second language acquisition; Cognition and
Second language acquisition; and conceptual competence.
Abstract
This paper has investigated the effectiveness of concept mapping as a learning strategy on
students’ selfregulation (metacognitive selfregulation, time and study environment,
effort regulation, peer learning, and help seeking). Sixty university students, who were
randomly selected, participated in the study and were randomly assigned to one control
group and one experimental group, each including thirty students. They were at the
intermediate level of English proficiency and studying English either as Translation or
Literature. Their language proficiency was determined by the Michigan Test of English
Language Proficiency. The instrument to collect data on students’ selfregulation was
Motivated Strategies for Learning Questionnaire (Printrich et al., 1991), the findings
revealing that students gained higher selfregulation as the result of concept mapping
strategy teaching. These findings have implications for pedagogy as well as for research.
Keywords: concept mapping, selfregulation, learning strategies, strategy teaching
1. Introduction
Writing is a very complex process in which numerous cognitive and metacognitive
activities take place, for instance, brainstorming, planning, outlining, organizing, drafting,
revising, and so on. Cognitive aspects have received particular attention, as investigators
have attempted to understand the thought processes underlying the compositions of
students (Flower & Hayes, 1981). Writing also involves composing, which implies the
ability either to tell or retell pieces of information in the form of narratives or description,
or to transform information into new texts, as in expository or argumentative writing.
Perhaps it is best viewed as a continuum of activities that range from the more
mechanical or formal aspects of writing down on the one end to the more complex act of
composing on the other end (Omaggio Hadley, 1993 p.23).
Learning to write is difficult especially for those writing in a second or foreign
language in academic contexts. As Bereiter and Scardamalia (1987, p.12) stated, by
putting together concepts and solving problems, the writer engages in "a twoway
interaction between continuously developing knowledge and continuously developing
text". Composing is an advanced academic task which may not be developed without
instruction and teacher’s assistance. Instruction in strategy use is an effective means for
promoting writing. There are a number of learning strategies which can help students
become better learners. The strategies include meaningful learning, organizing, note
taking, identifying important information, and summarizing (Pressley, 1982). Strategies
such as concept mapping help students attend to task, focus on important textures,
organize material, and maintain a productive psychological climate for learning
(Weinstein & Mayer, 1986).
The aim of the present study is to investigate the effect of the use of concept mapping
strategy in writing tasks on university students’ selfregulation.
1.1. Concept mapping
A concept map, as a learning strategy, is defined as a visual representation of an
individual's knowledge structure on a particular topic as constructed by the individual
(Zimmaro & Cawley, 1998). Concept maps represent the relationships among concepts
(Novak, 1981). With the visual representation of key words, students can identify main
issues of a text and organize these key issues in a meaningful way. Learning strategies,
according to Stern (1992, p.261), “are based on assumptions that learners consciously
engage in activities to achieve certain goals, that they exercise a choice of procedure, and
that they undertake some form of longterm planning”. It is assumed that concept
mapping may have positive effects on students’ selfregulation, too.
Literature reports on the benefits of concept mapping for organizing information,
assessing in learning, comprehension of particularly complex communications, refining
literacy framework, and successful understanding of the text (Ruddell & Boyle, 1989).
1.2. Selfregulation
Selfregulation refers to the degree to which individuals become metacognitively,
motivationally, and behaviorally active participants in their own learning process
(Zimmerman, 1986). It refers to students’ ability to control their learning. The students
can become better learners if they become more aware of their learning and then choose
to act on that awareness. As Livingston (1997, p.3) stated, “Although most individuals of
normal intelligence engage in metacognitive regulation when confronted with an effortful
cognitive task, some are better than others are. Those with greater metacognitive abilities
tend to be more successful in their cognitive endeavors. The good news is that individuals
can learn how to regulate their cognitive activities”. Selfregulation is neither a measure
of mental intelligence that is unchangeable after a certain point in life nor a personal
characteristic that is genetically based or formed early in life. Students learn self
regulation through experience (Pintrich, 1995). Teachers can teach in ways that help
students become selfregulating learners (Coppola, 1995). Since selfregulation is not a
personality trait, students can control their behaviors and affect in order to improve their
academic learning and performance. In addition, selfregulated learning is particularly
appropriate for college students, as they have great control over their own time schedule,
and how they approach their studying and learning (Pintrich, 1995).
1.3. Strategy Teaching
An examination of the literature reveals a wide range of terminology associated with
learner training, which is also referred to as strategy teaching (Richards et al, 1992) or
strategiesbased instruction (SBI) (Brown, 2000). Since the 1970s, there has been
growing interest in the concept of the ‘good’ language learner and the importance of
learning styles and learner preferences (Oxford, 1990). This has marked a continued
investigation into learning processes and support for the communicative philosophy of
teaching learners how to learn, and thus become independent and autonomous learners
through the use of learning strategies (Wenden, 1991); together with increasing learners’
language awareness through inductive learning approaches and activities, such as
consciousnessraising (Sharwood Smith, 1981).
Wenden (1991, p.163) offers a detailed definition of learner training: “ the learning
activities organized to help language learners improve their skills as learners; includes
learning to use strategies; knowledge about the language learning process; and attitude
and development to support autonomous use of the strategies and knowledge; learner
education”.
Comparably, Richards et al (1992, p. 355) present a specific definition of strategy
training and outline three different approaches: “[It is] training in the use of learning
strategies in order to improve a learner’s effectiveness. A number of approaches to
strategy training are used, including: 1) Explicit or direct training: learners are given
information about the value and purpose of particular strategies, taught how to use them
and how to monitor their own use of the strategies. 2) Embedded strategy training: the
strategies to be taught are not taught explicitly but are embedded in the regular content of
an academic subject area, such as reading, math or science. 3) Combination strategy
training: explicit strategy training is followed by embedded training.”
Brown (2000, p.130) acknowledges work on the effectiveness of learning strategies for
various learners in a variety of contexts. He then states “…we probe its implications for
your teaching methodology in the classroom, specifically, how your language classroom
techniques can encourage, build, and sustain effective languagelearning strategies in
your students”.
Learner training can therefore be summarized as teaching learners how to learn, with a
view to becoming independent and autonomous learners.
1.4. Cognitive aspects of writing skill
Historically, researchers in the field of composition have focused on the processes in
which writers engage as they compose a text (Hairston, 1990). During the past decade,
researchers have attempted to address this complexity by the affective factors that
influence writing. Beach (1989) suggested that students' selfperceptions of their own
writing competence offer a particularly promising avenue of research for informing
writing instruction.
Flower and Hayes (1980, p.40) conceptualized writing as a “strategic action where
writers employ strategies to juggle with the constraints of composing”. They stated that
composing strategies are decisions taken to cope with the problems (both linguistic and
rhetorical) posed by the writing task as perceived by the writers. Hays and Flower (1980)
presented a model of skilled writers. The model comprised three major components. The
first component, task environment, included factors that were external to the writer, but
influenced the writing task. These included both social and physical factors. The second
component, cognitive processes, provided a description of the mental operations involved
in writing. These included three basic processes: planning what to say and how to say it;
translating plans into written text; and reviewing to improve existing text. Planning, in
turn, was composed of three ingredients: setting goals, generating ideas, and organizing
ideas into a writing plan; whereas reviewing included reading and editing text. The
execution of these cognitive processes was thought to be under the writer's direct control,
and it was proposed that virtually any subprocess could interrupt or incorporate any other
subprocess. The third component, writer's longterm memory, included the author's
knowledge about the topic, the intended audience, and general plans or formulas for
accomplishing various writing tasks. Concept mapping could be used as a learning tool.
Smith (1987) found concept mapping a worthwhile heuristic for helping experts make
their own understanding more evident to learners and for helping learners better
understand the structure of knowledge.
Graham and Harris (2000) believed that writing required extensive selfregulation and
attention control. Research showed that adolescents who used different types of self
regulatory processes wrote more effectively; they produced more information in their
papers; they wrote more organized pieces; and they received higher grades in writing
(Zimmerman & Risemberg, 1997).
Many teachers attempted to influence the course of this development in a relatively
straightforward and direct fashion. They might model and explicitly teach the types of
strategies and selfcontrol procedures used by more skilled writers, or might establish
predictable routines where writing processes such as planning and revising were expected
and reinforced (Graham & Harris, 1996).
Strategy instruction is a teaching approach that assists students in developing strategies
for all phases of the writing process and teaches selfregulation of performance of the
strategies. Strategy instruction assists student writers by breaking down writing tasks and
making the subprocesses and skills much more explicit (Sturm & Rankin Erickson,
2002).
2. Methodology
2.1. Restatement of the problem
There has been growing interest in learning processes and support for teaching learners
how to learn, and thus become independent and autonomous learners through the use of
learning strategies. Some researchers as Hacker, Dunlosky, and Graesser (1998)
suggested that instructional strategies that teach students to practice cognitive skills can
increase learners’ performance in academic subjects. The principal aim of this study was
to investigate the effectiveness of the strategy of concept mapping in students’ self
regulation in expository writing at the intermediate level of language proficiency.
2.2. Design
The study had a pretestposttest control group design. Both control group and
experimental group participated in pretest and posttest selfregulation questionnaire, but
only the experimental group received the treatment.
2.3. Participants
Ninety university students volunteered to participate in the study. They were studying
English either as translation or literature. They were mostly from six and seven semesters.
All the students were administered Michigan Test of English Language Proficiency to
determine their level of English proficiency. Sixty students at the intermediate level of
language proficiency were randomly selected. Of the sixty students, thirty students were
randomly assigned to control group and thirty students to experimental group. In the
experimental group, twelve students were male and eighteen students were female. In the
control group, ten students were male and twenty students were female.
2.4. Instructional Material
The treatment for the experimental group was instruction and practice in concept
mapping. Students were provided with handouts that included definition of concept
mapping, different uses and examples of concept maps. Students practiced the application
of concept mapping in writing essays. They were required to draw concept maps of their
own or to complete the incomplete maps. In the experimental group, the students
practiced writing expository essays, using concept mapping strategy. The topics for the
essays sequenced from easy and familiar topics (unnecessary to have specialized
knowledge) to difficult and unfamiliar topics. They included: plants, time, weather, air
pollution, the function of heart, and psychology. Familiarity/unfamiliarity and
simplicity/difficulty of the topics were judged by three university teachers who were
teaching writing courses. The control group wrote essays about the same topics without
the use of concept mapping strategy. (See Appendix B).
2.5. Instruments
The instrument used to determine the level of the students’ English proficiency was
Michigan Test of English Language Proficiency. Motivated Strategies for Learning
Questionnaire (Printrich et al., 1991) was applied to measure the students’ selfregulation.
First, the students were asked to participate in the test of language proficiency. From
among ninety students, sixty students at the intermediate level of English proficiency
were randomly selected. Then the students were asked to fill out the questionnaire. It was
designed to assess college students’ motivational orientations and their use of different
learning strategies in college courses. The learning strategies section had 50 items
regarding students' use of different cognitive and selfregulated learning strategies. Only
five scales in the learning strategies section (metacognitive selfregulation, time and
study environment, effort regulation, peer learning, and help seeking) were relevant to
selfregulation and were used in this study. The scales were adapted to measure students’
selfregulation in writing tasks. Cronbach's alpha for the scale was .76 (See Appendix A).
2.6. Procedure
The period of instruction was about twelve weeks and comprised of three phases:
2.6.1. Pretesting
Before the students in experimental group received any instruction, all the students
in two groups completed the selfregulation questionnaire.
2.6.2. Strategy instruction
Following pretesting the students participated in twelve sixtyminute study sessions .
The students in experimental group received the instruction for concept mapping
strategy. The strategy was taught following Harris and Graham (1996): (1) Strategy
description, (2) Discussion of goals and purposes, (3) Modeling of the strategy, (4)
Student mastery of strategy steps, and (5) Guided practice and feedback.
1. Strategy description. As an introduction to the first lesson, students were told that
they were going to learn about the strategy of concept mapping. Concept mapping was
described as a strategy that could be used to categorize information in a graphic form
through drawing. It was also described as a strategy that could help them with vocabulary
development, reading comprehension, study skills, and prewriting activities. Finally, the
sequence of steps for creating a concept map was described.
2. Discussion of goals and purposes. The teacher discussed the students about the
significance and benefits of using the concept mapping strategy in writing. Students were
asked two questions: (1) How do you think this strategy might help you write? and (2)
How could this strategy help you with different types of writing? To reinforce student
participation as collaborators in the learning process, goals and purposes that students
generated were written on the white board.
3. Modeling the strategy. The teacher modeled use of concept mapping strategy by
creating a map while students were offered several topics to select from for the activity.
Once the group agreed on a topic, the teacher wrote it on the white board. This topic was
labeled as "main idea" of the concept map. Next possible subtopics were generated. The
teacher demonstrated use of arrows to connect main ideas and subtopics. Finally, details
were generated and added to each of the subtopics. Students participated in the process by
brainstorming possible categories and details. Students were taught how to write subtopic
information in telegraphic form. The teacher modeled use of telegraphic language forms
and explained that this involves choosing the most important information. Students
assisted by generating ideas to be placed on the map. Then, the teacher discussed how the
categories and the details could be sequenced into paragraphs, and sentences within
paragraphs, to compose an essay. The teacher explained that each subtopic may represent
different paragraphs in the essay. Upon completion of the map , the teacher modeled the
transfer of subtopic information from the map into written form instruction followed the
sequence of procedures for transferring concept maps into written paragraphs, starting
with toplevel structures i.e., topics and subtopics ) , the teacher reviewed the information
on the map. Each category was reviewed, including the main ideas and supporting details.
The teacher modeled how she would rewrite the information from the map into complete
sentences. For each subtopic, a topic sentence was written, followed by supporting
sentences. Finally, the concluding paragraph was explained and with the help of the
students the teacher wrote a concluding paragraph.
4. Student mastery of strategy steps. During this stage, students rehearsed and
memorized the sequence of activities for concept map construction.
5. Guided practice and Feedback. During these sessions, feedback was provided for
students’ performance. Students chose a topic and created maps. Then, they used the
concept maps to compose essays.
The first three sessions were devoted to training the technique. The other nine
sessions were spent on practicing the strategy for the students to master the fundamental
skills. One essay was composed every two weeks for a total of four essays for each
student. During these sessions, other formal teaching techniques were not employed by
the teacher. The teacher was a nonnative English teacher who taught writing courses for
many years at the university. Before starting the project, the teacher was trained how to
teach concept mapping strategy (following Harris and Graham's strategy teaching, 1996).
During the instructional period the students in the control group wrote as many
expository essays as the experimental group but without the use of concept mapping
strategy.
2.6.3. Posttesting
After the instruction of the strategy of concept mapping (at the conclusion of the
treatment period) all the students in two groups again completed the selfregulation
questionnaire.
2.7. Scoring of the Data
The research applied Motivated Strategies for Learning Questionnaire (MSLQ) to assess
students' self regulation. Responses were scored using a 5 point Likert type scale: 1) Not
at all true of myself 2) Slightly true of myself 3) About halfway true of myself 4) Mostly
true of myself 5) True of myself. Scale scores were determined by summing the items
and taking an average.
3. Results and Discussion
The major question addressed in this study was whether the use of concept mapping
strategy in writing expository essays would improve students’ selfregulation at the
intermediate level of language proficiency. To capture the initial differences between the
two groups, t test was applied to compare the two groups on pretest measures. No
significant difference was found (t = 1.06, df = 58, p>.05). It confirmed that the two
groups were initially equivalent. Means and standard deviations of pretest and posttest
scores on selfregulation are presented in Table 1.
Table1. Means and standard deviations for pretest and posttest scores on selfregulation
M SD N
Pretest
Experimental group 2.51 .56 30
Control group 2.35 .57 30
Posttest
Experimental group 3.79 .58 30
Control group 3.22 .71 30
To investigate the effect of concept mapping strategy on students’ selfregulation, an
ANCOVA on Post selfregulation scores by group (experimental vs. control), using Pre
selfregulation scores as a covariate was conducted. The results indicated there was a
significant difference in posttest scores between groups (F= 10.57, df= 1; P= .002). The
conclusion is that concept mapping strategy significantly influenced students’ self
regulation. In other words, it revealed that the implementation of concept mapping
strategy in writing expository essays would positively affect students’ selfregulation in
writing tasks. Table 2 displays the results.
Table2. ANCOVA on Post Selfregulation Scores by Group (experimental vs. control), using
Pre Selfregulation as a Covariate
Source of variation F Sig.
Group 10.57 .002
Covariate 25.63 .000
Error 1.97
One possible explanation for the improvement of the students’ selfregulation might be a
change in the students’ attitude toward writing skill. As Barnhardt (1997) stated there is a
relationship between strategy use and confidence in language learning. For students who
had not positive attitudes toward writing for a long time, a positive change in attitude due
to their success in the application of the concept mapping strategy could be the initial step
toward improved writing skill. It is also possible that when students were taught the
mapping strategy to use with their writing, their positive attitudes toward writing
increased. It meant that when the students had a better idea of how to go about a writing
task, they were more positive about the task. In other words, concept mapping strategy
helped students attend to writing tasks, and control their learning more effectively. It
helped students facilitate their learning by organizing key concepts into visual
representation. They simply represented visually their understanding of ideas and their
relationships. This created a much more tangible evidence of the quality of both the
learning process and concept understanding.
It seemed that the construction of concept maps might have helped students to build
more complex cognitive structures in regard to information which was vital for writing.
According to Pintrich (2000), the cognitive area of selfregulation begins with goal
setting, prior knowledge activation and planning. Pintrich places the actual use of
cognitive strategies in the phase of cognitive control and regulation. It has been suggested
that strategy instruction should be integrated into a larger framework of selfregulation
involving the helping of students to identify their goals in a learning task (Butler,
2002).Butler states that by strategy intervention it is easier to demonstrate the different
types of knowledge which are essential for fostering students’ selfregulated strategy use.
The positive effect of concept mapping strategy on the students’ selfregulation is
confirmed by McAleese (1998) in that individuals are affected by control mechanisms
that are both external and internal. According to McAleese (1998), there is some
interaction between the external representation (concept mapping) and the internal
understanding (selfregulation). The factors that determine students’ behavior shift
between the internal selfregulation and the external factor of concept mapping.
4. Conclusion and implications
The findings clearly demonstrate that concept mapping can benefit university students at
the intermediate level of English proficiency. In fact, the benefits of concept mapping
might extend beyond achievement gains to some variables such as selfregulation which
is an achievementrelated variable. This is consistent with the finding of Corno and
Mandniach (1983) that instruction in strategy use is an effective means of promoting self
regulation. It seems that the use of concept mapping strategy in our courses of writing in
the university has been personally rewarding as a means of constructing knowledge and
promoting selfregulation. This has important implications for both students and teachers.
Students maximize their learning by using concept mapping in their essay writing; hence
they feel more independent and feel more responsibility for their own learning. Because
concept mapping is easily adopted by the students, it doesn’t rely too much on teacher’s
involvement. Teachers may enhance their students’ selfregulation in writing by
familiarizing them with the concept mapping strategy.
Although the present study suggests that the strategy of concept mapping is beneficial
to university students, there are areas that need to be studied further. In regard to
university students, it needs to be investigated whether the benefits of concept mapping
would be the same for the students at the elementary level of English proficiency.
Furthermore, it needs to be studied whether the concept mapping strategy would have
positive effects on students’ selfregulation in other courses such as reading
comprehension.
References
Barnhardt, S. (1997). Selfefficacy and second language learning. The NCLRC
Language Resource, 1(5).
Beach, R. (1989). Showing students how to assess. Demonstrating techniques for
response in the writing conference, In C. M. Anson (Ed.), Writing and response (pp.
127148). Urbana, IL: NCTE.
Breiter, C., and Scardamalia, M. (1987). The psychology of written composition.
Hillsdale, N.J: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Brown, H. D. (2000). Principles of language learning and teaching. (Fourth Edition)
New York: Longman
Butler, D.L. (2002). Individualizing instruction in selfregulated learning. Theory Into
Practice, 41, 8192.
Coppola, B. P. (1995). Progress in practice: Using concepts from motivational and self
regulated learning research to improve chemistry instruction. In P. R. Pintrich (Ed.),
Understanding selfregulated learning (pp. 878796). San Francisco, CA: JosseyBass.
Corno, L., and Mandinach, E. B. (1983). The role of cognitive engagement in classroom
learning and motivation. Educational Psychologist, 18, 88108.
Flower, L., Hayes, J.R., (1980). The dynamics of composing: making plans and juggling
constraints. In L. Gregg and E. Steinberg (Eds.), Cognitive processes in writing (pp.
3150). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Hillsdale.
Flower, L. and Hayes, J. R. (1981).Plans that guide the composing process. In C. H.
Fredeiksen, M. F. Whiteman, and J. F. Dominic (Eds.), Writing: the nature of
development, and teaching of written communication. (Vol. 2). Hillsdale, N. J:
Erlbaum.
Graham, S. and Harris, K. (1996). Self–regulation and strategy instruction for students
who find writing and learning challenging. In M. Levy and S. Ransdell (Eds.), The
science of writing: Theories, methods, individual differences and applications, (pp.
347360). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence. Erlbaum.
Graham, S. and Harris, K. (2000). The rote of self regulation and transcription skills in
writing and writing development. Educational psychologist, 35, 312.
Hacker, Dunlosky, & Graesser. (1998). Metacognition in educational theory and practice.
Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Hairston, M. (1990).The winds of change: Thomas Kulm the revolution in the teaching of
writing . In R. L. Grares (Ed.) Rhetoric and Composition (pp. 315). Portmouth, NH:
Heinemann.
Harris, K. R., & Graham, S. (1996). Making the writing process work: Strategies for
composition and selfregulation. Cambridge, MA: Brookline Books.
Hayes, J. and Flower, L. (1980). Identifying the organization of writing processes. In L.
Gregg and E. Steinberg (Eds.), Cognitive processes in writing (pp. 330). Hillsdale,
NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Jonassen, D. H., & Grabowski, B. L. (1993). Handbook of individual differences,
learning, and instruction. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Livingston, J. (1997). Metacognitive: An overview. State University of New York at
Buffalo Web site. Retrieved July 24, 2003, from
http://gse.buffalo.edu/FAS/Shuell/CEP564/Metacog.htm
McAleese, R. (1998). The knowledge arena as an extension to the concept map;
reflection in action. Interactive Learning Environments, 6(3), 251272.
Novak, J. D. (1981). Applying learning psychology and philosophy of science to biology
teaching. The American Biology Teacher, 43(1), 1220.
Omaggio Hadley, A. (1993). Teaching language in context. Boston: Heinle & Heinle.
Oxford, R. (1990) Language learning strategies: What every teacher should know. New
York, Newbury House.
Pintrich, P. R. (1995). Understanding selfregulated learning. In P. R. Pintrich (Ed.),
Understanding selfregulated learning (pp. 312). San Francisco, CA: JosseyBass.
Pintrich, P.R. (2000). Multiple goals, multiple pathways: The role of goal orientation in
learning and achievement. Journal of Educational Psychology, 92, 544555.
Pressley, M. (1982). Elaboration and memory development. Child Development, 53, 296
309.
Printrich, P. R., Smith, D. A., Garcia, T., & McKeachie W. J. (1991). A manual for the
use of the Motivated Strategies for Learning Questionnaire (MSLQ). National Center
for Research to Improve Postsecondary Teaching and Learning. Ann Arbor: University
of Michigan.
Richards, J. C., Platt, J., and Platt, H. (1992) Dictionary of language teaching & applied
linguistics. (Second Edition), Harlow, Essex: Longman.
Ruddell, R. B., & Boyle, O. F. (1989). A study of cognitive mapping as a means to
improve comprehension of expository text. Reading Research and Instruction, 29(1),
12–22.
Sharwood Smith, M. (1981), Consciousnessraising and the second language learner.
Applied Linguistics, 2, 159168.
Smith, K. A. (1987). Educational engineering: Heuristics for improving effectiveness and
efficiency. Engineering Education, 71(5), 274279.
Stern, H. H. (1992) Issues and options in language teaching. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Sturm, J. & RankinErickson, J. (2002). Effects of handdrawn and computer generated
concept mapping on the expository writing of middle school students with learning
disabilities. Learning Disabilities Research and Practice, 17(2), 124139.
Wenden, A. (1991) Learning strategies for learner autonomy: planning and
implementing learner training for language learners. Hemel Hemstead, Hertfordshire:
Prentice Hall
Weinstein, C. E. and Mayer, R. E. (1986). The teaching of learning strategies. In M.
wittrock (Ed.), the Handbook of Research on Teaching (pp. 315327), New York.
Macmillan.
Zimmaro, D. M. and Cawley, J. M. (1998). Concept map module. Schreyer institute for
innovation in learning, The Pennsylvania State University.
Zimmerman,B. J. (1986). Development of selfregulated learning: which are the key
subprocesses. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 16, 307313.
Zimerman, B. and Risemberg, R. (1997). Becoming a selfregulated writer: a social
cognitive perspective. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 22, 73101.
Appendix A. Test of Selfregulation
Please answer the following questions by circling the response that best describes how
you feel when you study and practice writing courses.
Not at Slightly About Mostly True of
all true true of halfway true of myself
of myself true of myself
myself myself
1. During class time I often miss 1 2 3 4 5
important points because I’m
thinking of other things.
2. When writing for this course, I make 1 2 3 4 5
up questions to help focus my
writing.
3. When I become confused about 1 2 3 4 5
something I’m writing for this class, I
go back and try to figure it out.
4. If course writing tasks are difficult to 1 2 3 4 5
do, I change the way I am writing.
5. Before I write new course material 1 2 3 4 5
thoroughly, I often try to organize it.
6. I ask myself questions to make sure I 1 2 3 4 5
understand the material I have been
studying in this class.
7. I try to change the way I write in 1 2 3 4 5
order to fit the course requirements
and the instructor’s teaching style.
8. I often find that I have been reading 1 2 3 4 5
for this class but don’t know what it
was all about.
9. I try to think through a topic and 1 2 3 4 5
decide what I am supposed to learn
from it rather than just reading it over
when studying.
10. When writing for this course I try to 1 2 3 4 5
determine which concepts I don’t
understand well.
11. When I write for this class, I set goals 1 2 3 4 5
for myself in order to direct my
thoughts in each period.
12. If I get confused while writing in 1 2 3 4 5
class, I make sure I sort it out
afterwards.
13. I usually write in a place where I can 1 2 3 4 5
concentrate on my course work.
14. I make good use of my writing time 1 2 3 4 5
for this course.
15. I find it hard to stick to a study 1 2 3 4 5
schedule.
16. I have a regular place set aside for 1 2 3 4 5
writing.
17. I make sure that I keep up with the 1 2 3 4 5
weekly readings and assignments for
this course.
18. I attend this class regularly. 1 2 3 4 5
19. I often find that I don’t spend very 1 2 3 4 5
much time on this course because of
other activities.
20. I rarely find time to review my notes 1 2 3 4 5
or readings before an exam.
21. I often feel so lazy or bored when I 1 2 3 4 5
write for this class that I quit before I
finish what I planned to do.
22. I work hard to do well in this class 1 2 3 4 5
even if I don’t like what we are
doing.
23. When course work is difficult, I 1 2 3 4 5
either give up or only study the easy
parts.
24. Even when writing tasks are dull and 1 2 3 4 5
uninteresting, I manage to keep
working until I finish.
25. When studying for this course, I 1 2 3 4 5
often try to explain the material to a
classmate or friend.
26. I try to work with other students from 1 2 3 4 5
this class to complete the course
assignments.
27. When writing for this course, I often 1 2 3 4 5
set aside time to discuss course
material with a group of students
from the class.
28. Even if I have trouble writing the 1 2 3 4 5
material in this class, I try to do the
work on my own, without help from
anyone.
29. I ask the instructor to clarify concepts 1 2 3 4 5
I don’t understand well.
30. When I can’t understand the material 1 2 3 4 5
in this course, I ask another student in
this class for help.
31. I try to identify students in this class 1 2 3 4 5
whom I can ask for help if necessary.
Based on and adapted from Printrich, P. R., Smith, D. A., Garcia, T., & McKeachie, W. J.
(1991).A manual for the use of the Motivated Strategies for Learning Questionnaire
(MSLQ).
Appendix B: Instructional Material
1. What is a concept map?
Concept map is a graphic representation of ideas and concepts. It consists of concepts
or nodes linked by labeled lines to show relationships and interrelationships between
terms. Concepts are arranged hierarchically so that the most inclusive, subsumptive
concepts appear at the top of the map, with less inclusive, subordinate concepts below
(Jonassen & Grabowski, 1993, p.439). Look at following example of concept map:
2. Concept mapping as a learning tool
To summarize reading materials
To organize knowledge domains
To organize ideas for writing and research
To plan your research project and identify the variables in it
To fix learned materials in longterm memory
To revise effectively for examination
3. Uses of concept mapping
Develop an understanding of a body of knowledge
Explore new information and relationships
Access prior knowledge
Gather new knowledge and information
Share knowledge and information generated
4. How to organize our thoughts through concept mapping
A concept map is simply a way to visually display the concepts and relationships
among ideas. This will help you to further organize your ideas and define your
topic. It allows you to quickly write down your ideas and then see the
organization of your topic. As you map, think about what issues you would like to
focus on related to the main idea. Also think about the ways you will collect data
and present the material Later you can return to your concept map as you create
your outline. You can turn each level of bubbles (main topic, subtopics, etc.) into
a level on your outline. This is a way for you to gain exposure to multiple
dimensions of a topic that you might not have considered. To create a concept
map you have to follow steps 1 through 5.
1. Identify the general/broad topic that you are interested in.
Example: You are interested in the general topic of obesity
2. Brainstorm on the general topic and list all the concepts and themes that are
related to the topic on a large piece of paper. Keep the concepts as concise as
possible
3. using unlined paper, write the main theme in the center of the page.
4. Take the other concepts identified in the brainstorming and connect them to the
center concept. You can use other organizational patterns such as branches,
arrows or groups. More important ideas should be put nearer to the center
and less important ones closer to the edge. Identify the relationship between
the concepts
5. After the map has been created, look at the organizational patterns to see if the
pieces fit together and make sense and if there is anything missing. After the
map has been created, look at the organizational patterns to see if the pieces
fit together and make sense and if there is anything missing
5. Critical questions
After you created the map, you may ask yourself the following questions:
· What is the central word, concept, research question or problem around which
to build the map?
· What are the concepts, items, descriptive words or telling questions that you
can associate with the concept, topic, research question or problem?
· What is said about the concepts? Record the quotes or paraphrase.
6. Practice concept mapping
Think about the sport that you most like. Then try to map out the general
and specific ideas on a diagram. Here is an example:
7. Some tips on making concept maps
· Use a top down approach, working from general to specific or use a free
association approach by brainstorming nodes and then develop links and
relationships. Use different colors and shapes for nodes and links to identify
different types of information. Use different colored nodes to identify prior
and new information. Use a cloud node to identify a question.
· Gather information to a question in the question node.
8. Final words
Different students may have different ways to represent what they think.
Your concept map should reflect your information of a topic. It is always
advisable to write down notes describing what you have mapped.
Appendix B.1. Sample Tasks
A. Create concept maps according to the following topics and compare yours with
other students.
travel
recreation
B. Identify the concepts and fill in the concept map boxes.
A Contrastive Analysis of English and Persian Newspaper Headlines
Farzaneh Khodabandeh
Mobarakeh Payame Noor University, Iran
Bio Data:
Farzaneh Khodabadeh has been teaching English for 10 years at schools and 4 years at
university. She has a Master's in Teaching English from Isfahan University in Iran. She is
currently teaching Discourse Analysis, Testing and Research Methods at Mobarakeh
University. Her areas of research include Discourse Analysis. She has written 5 articles
and published two books Preintermediate College English and Intermediate College
English.
Abstract
Considering the absence of contrasting English and Persian newspaper headlines, the
present study was an attempt to conduct a contrastive analysis between the newspaper
headlines of English and Persian languages in order to find the major similarities and
differences between them. The analysis was based on a oneweek corpus of the headlines
of English and Persian languages. Utilizing CA, the researcher analyzed the variability of
syntactic and lexical features across and within the English and Persian newspaper
headlines. It was concluded that the headlines of English and Persian languages were
similar in using dynamic verbs, active voice, short words, declarative sentences, finite
clauses, and simple sentences and different in the use of tense forms, headline types,
modification, and omission of words. This study has pedagogical implications for
teaching journalistic English and translation.
Keywords: Contrastive analysis, headlines, syntactic and lexical features.
1. Introduction
Conventionally, it is believed that newspapers have more readers than any other kind of
written text. According to Van Dijk (1986), "for most citizens, news is perhaps the type
of written discourse with which they are confronted most frequently" (p. 156). In the
newspaper it is the headlines that have the highest readership. It summarizes the content
of a story, and entices an audience into reading the article. According to Ungerer (2000),
"a headline describes the essence of a complicated news story in a few words. It informs
quickly and accurately and arouses the reader's curiosity" (p. 48). News headlines are
particularly important for the way readers comprehend a news text, they are markers that
monitor attention, perception and the reading process (Van Dijk, 1988).
Many students of English find that newspaper headlines are especially difficult to
understand. Obviously, it is not just a matter of vocabulary; even the style of writing is
different from any other text they have met in their studies. The language of headlines is
special and has its own characteristics on the lexical, syntactic, and rhetorical levels for
its brevity, attractiveness, and clarity (Reah, 1998). These language features pose a great
challenge to foreign learners of English when they begin to read English newspapers.
This is hardly surprising for, as Waterhouse (as cited in Sanderson, 1999, p. 29) points
out, "this genre of language is not one that people actually use in normal, everyday
speech." There is, however, a clear pattern in this special genre; once the rules and tactics
are understood a lot of difficulties may disappear.
The key to ease the difficulty of this special genre lies in the comparison between
foreign and native languages (Connor, 1996). Thereby, a systematic contrastive analysis
of English and Persian headlines was conducted to investigate the similarities and
differences between the newspaper headlines of English and Persian languages.
2. Review of the related literature
Headlines are obviously one of the striking features of modern newspapers. Therefore it
is not surprising that they have been studied quite extensively not only by journalists but
also by linguists. Some of the few existing linguistic studies of headlines will be reviewed
below.
Straumann's (1935) study of headline English is undoubtedly pioneer work. His
approach was to treat the language of headlines as an autonomous language. He
classifieds headlines in terms of neutrals, nominals, verbals and particles. The first
section of his classification contains words in their common form. In the following
sections he arranges them in sforms, and in three variables, semivariables and
invariables. Classification is further arranged in dforms, ing forms, ly, er and (e) st
forms.
The complexity of headlines has been investigated by Brisau (1969). He measured
complexity in terms of clauses, which were thus singled out from other units as a gauge
of complexity. In 3000 headlines Brisau found 264 examples of headlines containing two
or more clauses, which was less than 10% of the total number. Brisau concluded that
more complex structures than two very simple clauses linked together rarely occurred in
headlines. He mentioned, however, that the linguistic makeup of the headline could vary
widely from one newspaper to another.
Mårdh (1980) offers an exhaustive study of the characteristic features of the headlines
of a range of English newspapers. She identifies the following linguistic features as
typical of headlines in English newspapers: the omission of articles; the omission of
verbs and of auxiliaries (the verb 'to be' for example); nominalisations; the frequent use
of complex noun phrases in subject position (in theme position); adverbial headlines, with
the omission of both verb and subject; the use of short words ('bid' instead of 'attempt');
the widespread use of puns, word play and alliteration; the importance of word order,
with the most important items placed first, even, in some cases, a verb; and independent
'wh' constructions not linked to a main clause (an example: Why the French don't give a
damn), a form not found in standard English.
Van Dijk (1988) analyzed a fivedecker from the New York Times. He sees the
journalistic process as beginning with a headline and working through lead to body copy.
He analyzed over 400 headlines in the Dutch press reporting the 1985 Tamil panic, an
occasion of racial tensions between the Dutch and immigrant groups. He found that the
authorities dominated first position in the headline, with active verbs. When the
disadvantaged Tamils were mentioned first, the verb tended to be passive.
Kniffka's (as cited in Bell, 1991) detailed comparison of leads and headlines found a
high level of structural correspondence between the two. The subeditor tends to
reproduce the syntactic patterns of the lead in the headline. Kniffka (1980) found that the
presence of active or passive voice in the lead was carried over to the headline.
According to Kniffka, headline structures appear to be very regular across languages. He
confirmed his analysis of both German and American English news texts, finding their
leads and headlines structurally identical. The regularity is so consistent that he concludes
there is a shared international grammar of leadand headlinewriting.
Mouillaud and Tétu (as cited in Develotte & Rechniewski, 2000), analysing Le Monde,
suggest the following features as typical of headlines: the suppression of spatial and
particularly temporal markers; the use of the present tense of verbs (where they are used)
as opposed to or in place of any other tenses; the replacement of verbs by
nominalisations; the suppression of declarative verbs and the disappearance of signs of
speech (quotation marks; personal pronouns).
Scollon (2000), in his study of five days of three editions of the same newspaper in its
Chinese and English editions, argues that the English headlines, following on general
western journalistic practice put the main point right in the headline in what has also been
called a deductive rhetorical mode. The Chinese headline, on the other hand, uses the
headline to establish the setting but do not provide any further information about the
content of the talks, which is the inductive ordering of the topics elsewhere found in
contrast between Chinese and English language news stories. In other words the major
difference lies in whether the headline focuses directly on the central topic found within
the body of the story or the setting.
SulletNylander (2000) described and analysed the textual "genre" of the French
newspaper headlines. According to him, the macrosyntactic configuration of a press
headline can be represented in four types of phrasal constructions, one of which is
considered relatively "unmarked." The three other types namely: parataxis, noun phrase +
prepositional and single nonverbal phrase are considered more specific of headlines.
Compared with similar kinds of utterances such as book titles or captions, the complete
sentence is much more frequent in newspaper headlines. His thesis shows that a headline
can be characterized by regular linguistic/textual features, even though each newspaper
has diverse ways of constructing and staging the news in its headlines, depending on the
communicative functions assigned to them.
As mentioned in the literature review of this study, some contrastive studies of
headlines have raised the question of whether similar features can be found in varying
cultures and languages. Considering the absence of such an analysis related to English
and Persian, this study intended to investigate the application of syntactic and lexical
features in newspaper headlines in order to uncover to what extent the two languages
were compatible in these domains.
3. Method
The information regarding the research method, materials and procedures is presented
below.
3.1. Materials
To carry out the comparison between the headlines, an English and a Persian news site
were randomly selected from among all available online news sources from the Internet,
namely Yahoo news for the English headlines and IRIB news for the Persian ones. The
headlines issued during a sevenday period from November 29 to December 05, 2003.
The number of English and Persian headlines arrived at a total of 792 and 725 from the
two sources respectively.
3.2. Procedure
This research was directed toward studying the syntactic and lexical features of English
and Persian corpora in such a way that by a systematic comparison, the differences and
similarities between the sample headlines of the two languages would be identified. At
the start, the investigation began with the description of the basic units of analysis in the
English headline structures (categories, word classes, constructions) and continued with
the analysis of the Persian headlines. In doing so, for the analysis of the structure of
English headlines, the grammatical framework provided by Quirk, Greenbaum, Leech
and Savartvik (1985) was chosen, and for the analysis of Persian headlines, the grammar
provided by Natel Khanlari (1979) was used to inform the study.
As mentioned before, this study pinpointed the cases of utilization of lexical and
syntactic features in English and Persian headlines in order to see in what ways the two
languages are different. Below is a brief description of syntactic and lexical features.
3.2.1. Syntactic features
Syntax refers to the rules for ordering and connecting words into sentences. More
generally, it refers to the study of the interrelationships between all elements of sentence
structure, and of the rules governing the arrangements of sentences in sequences. It
allows various possibilities to be exploited for effective linguistic communication
(Crystal, 1992; Radford, 1997; Trask, 1999).
A systematic description of syntactic features of headlines includes headline types,
functional types, and complexity in headlines of the two languages.
3.2.1.1. Headline types
In order to get an overall picture of the structure of English and Persian headlines,
Mårdh's model (1980) was chosen. Following Mårdh's model, the corpus was divided
into three basic groups: verbal, nominal and adverbial headlines.
3.2.1.1.1. Verbal headlines
A verbal headline contains a verb phrase or part of a verb phrase that is not dominated by
a noun phrase (Mårdh, 1980). In the sample headlines, the main structural types of verbal
headlines were distinguished according to finite verb phrases, nonfinite verb phrases,
headlines with omitted auxiliary, subject complement (SCs) headlines, and subject
adverbial (SA) headlines.
3.2.1.1.1.1.
Finite verb phrases contain a finite verb form which may be either an operator or a simple
present or past form (Quirk et al., 1985).
Australian Opposition Leader Quits (30.11.2003)
Iran qæhreman koshti asiya shod (10.9.1382)
(Iran became the champion in Asia.)
3.2.1.1.1.2.
Nonfinite verb phrases consist of a participle or infinitive which may be followed by an
object or an adverbial (Spears, 1976).
Getting a Small Audience for Bad News (30.11.2003)
Koshteh shodæn 54 æraqi dær atæsh sozi (12.9.1382)
(54 Iraqi were killed in a fire.)
3.2.1.1.1.3.
Subject adverbial headlines have no verb, but a form of the copula be can be inserted
between the noun phrase and adverb in English sentences (Mårdh, 1980; Schneider,
2000), and æst at the end of the Persian ones.
Bush ø in Baghdad (29.11.2003)
70% zæxayer næft jæhan dær xaværemiyaneh ø (8.9.1382)
(70% of oil supplies ø in Middle East.)
3.2.1.1.1.4.
Subject complement phrases or omissionofcopula type consist of a noun phrase as
subject and a noun phrase as subject complement. In English structures, a form of the
verb be, may be inserted between the subject noun phrase and the noun phrase
functioning as subject complement (Mårdh, 1980; Quirk et al., 1985), and in the Persian,
æst or shod can be inserted at the end of the sentence.
Supreme Court opinions ø Not Private Enough (3.12.2003)
Rezazadeh behtærin værzeshkar jæhan ø (9.9.1382)
(Rezazaded ø the best athlete in the world)
3.2.1.1.1.5.
Verbal headlines with omitted auxiliary are headlines in which the verb is nonfinite and
in which forms of 'be' are left out before the verb (Mårdh, 1980).
Six Spanish Intel Officers ø Killed in Iraq (29.11.2003)
(No example from the Persian corpus)
3.2.1.1.2. Nominal headlines
A nominal phrase is an expression headed by a noun (Radford, 1997). In order to
examine syntactic variation within the noun phrases across the two languages, the
structural types of nominal headlines were analyzed according to unmodification,
premodification, postmodification and pre [+] post modification.
3.2.1.1.2.1. Unmodification:
Structures in which the head of noun phrase is not modified by any other item are
referred to as unmodified structures (Quirk et al., 1985; Spears, 1976).
Chief (30.11.2003)
Felestin (8.9.1382)
(Palestine)
3.2.1.1.2.2. Premodification:
A premodifier is a modifier that precedes the word it modifies (Quirk et al., 1985; Spears,
1976).
Artificial Sweeteners (30.11.2003)
14 koshteh dær hadeseh otobos dær malezi (9.9.1382)
(14 people were killed in a bus accident in Malaysia.)
3.2.1.1.2.3. Postmodification:
A postmodifier is a modifier or quantifier that follows the constituent it modifies (Quirk
et al., 1985; Spears, 1976).
The Future of Data Storage (5.12.2003)
Zob yæxchalhaye tæbie (10.9.1382)
(Glacier melting)
3.2.1.1.2.4. Pre [+] post Modifications:
Structures which have both pre and postmodifiers are referred to as pre [+] post
modified headlines, e.g.
The Solar System that Neptune Built (1.12.2003)
Sevomin hæmayesh meli zæfæran (12.9.1382)
(The 3rd international meeting of Saffron)
3.2.1.1.3. Adverbial headlines
An adverbial clause (headline) is an expression headed by a word, phrase, or clause that
is equivalent in its structural role to an adverb (Fallahi, 1991).
Before You Babysit (4.12.2003)
3.2.1.2. Analyzing headline types by function
Headlines can be divided into four functional types: statements, questions, commands and
exclamations (Mårdh, 1980; McLoughlin, 2000).
A statement headline describes a state of affairs, actions, feelings or belief.
China to Let Foreign Banks Provide Money (1.12.2003)
Rezazadeh behtærin værzeshkar jæhan (9.9.1382)
(Rezazaded the best athlete in the world)
A command headline expresses a request or advice.
Put These Question Marks by the Hardware (30.11.2003)
Be mærdom æraq komæk konid. (10.9.1382)
(Help the Iraqi people.)
An exclamation headline shows the writer's or speakers feelings.
Turkey + Duck + Chicken = Turducken! (29.11.2003)
A question headline is addressed to a reader or listener and asks for an expression of fact,
opinion, belief etc.
Hot Cocoa, the Healthy Drink? (5.12.2003)
This study focused on the cases of functional headline types in the English and Persian
headlines to see whether they are used commonly in the two languages.
3.2.1.3. Complexity in headlines
The classification of headlines was done in terms of simple, compound and complex
sentences.
A simple headline contains only one predicate.
Bush Focuses on Raising Campaign Funds (1.12.2003)
Iran emros barany æst. (10.9.1382)
(Today, it is rainy in Iran.)
A complex headline contains one or more dependent clauses, in addition to its
independent, or main clause.
DNA tests say Lindbergh fathered three children in Germany (29.11.2003)
A compound headline contains two or more independent clauses which are joined by
coordination.
Report: Teen Admits Subway Slay (1.12.2003)
Oropa hoshdar dad, amrica tærefeh ra læqv kærd (13.9.1382)
(Europe ordered, the United States rejected the tariff.)
Following Mårdh's model (1980), headlines which consisted of more than one clause
were divided into two types: edited quotation and unedited quotation.
3.2.1.3.1. Edited quotations:
In edited quotations the items that would occur in direct speech are left out.
Report: Tiger Woods ø Engaged (29.11.2003)
Xærazi: tænha rahe hæle æraq (12.9.1382)
(Kharazi, The only solution of Iraq)
3.2.1.3.2. Unedited quotations:
In contrast to edited quotations, unedited quotations do not differ from what may actually
be heard in speech.
Judge to Babs: You Are Dismissed (4.12.2003)
Ivankovich: razi nistæm (8.9.1382)
(Ivankovich: I am not satisfied.)
3.2.1.4. Structure of verb phrases
In terms of the structure of the verb phrase, the English and Persian headlines were
divided into finite clauses, nonfinite clauses and verbless clauses in order to investigate
their similarities and differences in the two languages.
Finite clauses are clauses in which the first or only word of the verb is a finite form.
Bush Plane Flew Under False Cover on Iraq Trip (5.12.2003)
Zelzeleh mazændran ra lærzand (12.9.1382)
(Earthquake hit Mazandaran.)
Nonfinite clauses are clauses whose phrase is nonfinite, i.e. the verb lacks tense,
number, and mood.
Man Caught with 177 Cigarette packs in Trousers (29.1.2003)
Napædid shodæn 10 mohajer dær espania (10.9.1382)
(10 immigrants disappeared in Spain.)
Verbless clauses are clauses which contain no verb element, e.g.
Factory Growth Fastest in 20 Years (30.11.2003)
Rezazadeh behtærin værzeshkar jæhan (9.9.1382)
(Rezazaded the best athlete in the world)
3.2.1.5. Headline length
In order to examine the equality of length in the headlines of the two languages, the
headlines in the corpora were investigated with respect to the average number of words
per headline.
For example, the longest headlines found in the English and Persian headlines were
consisted of 12 and 15 words in each sample respectively.
Yes, I'll Give You My Cells If You Back Man United (29.11.2003)
Reisjomhor: ma tælash mikonim ke rævabete dostaneh væ hæsæneh ba hæmeyeh
keshværhayeh hæmsayeh dashteh bashim. (8.9.1382)
(President: we try to maintain friendly relations with all of our neighbors.)
3.2.2. Lexical features
Lexicology, in its most general sense, is synonymous with vocabulary; and, in its
technical sense, it deals with the analysis of words (Quirk et al., 1985). Under lexicology,
the individual words such as nouns, verbs, articles, adjectives, adverbs, numerals,
conjunctions, pronouns and prepositions were analyzed in both English and Persian
headlines in order to determine the frequency of their occurrence.
3.2.2.1. Nouns
A noun is a word which (a) can occur as the subject or object of a verb or the object of a
preposition, (b) can be modified by an adjective, and (c) can be used with determiners.
Nouns typically refer to people, animals, places, things, or abstractions (Murphy, 1997,
Natel Khanlari, 1979).
Bush Comments on Surprise Trip to Baghdad (30.11.2003)
Ivanoif: englis beh rosiyeh tohin kærd (9.9.1382)
(Ivanoif: England insulted Russia.)
The distinct features of nouns used in headlines are the frequent appearance of the
proper nouns, the acronyms, and the abbreviations (Baddock, 1988). These features were
investigated in headlines of the two languages to determine the frequency of their
occurrence.
3.2.2.1.1. Proper nouns
Proper nouns are basically names of specific people, places, months, days, festivals,
magazines, and so forth (Quirk et al., 1985).
IOC Member Robbed in Athens (29.11.2003)
Pirozi, saypa ra mæqlob kærd (9.9.1382)
(Pirozi defeated Saypa.)
3.2.2.1.2. Acronyms and abbreviations
Acronyms are words derived from the initials of several words. This process is widely
used in shortening extremely long words or word groups in science, technology and other
special fields (Fromkin & Rodman, 1998).
Palestinian PM Rules Out Immediate Sharon Talks (29.11.2003)
Abbreviation is a reduced version of a word, phrase, or sentence. It is also called clipping
(Crystal, 1992).
Japan Govt. to Nationalize Regional Bank (30.11.2003)
3.2.2.2. Verbs
Verb is an important lexical category, and one which is seemingly universal. In both
English and Persian languages, verb is the part of speech which, carries markers of
grammatical categories such as tense, aspect, person, number and mood and refers to an
action or state (Leech & Svartvik, 1994; Natel Khanlari, 1979; Trask, 1993).
Verb categories were analyzed in both English and Persian headlines to see differences
and similarities across the two languages.
3.2.2.2.1. Tense and aspect forms
"Tense" stands for the relationship between the from of the verb and the time of the
action or state it describes. Every language is capable of expressing limitless distinctions
of time. Traditionally, tense is classified into present, past, and future. (Crystal, 1992;
Nobahar, 1995; Quirk et al., 1985).
One of the idiosyncratic features of the English headlines is the special uses it makes of
tenses, which are different from those of ordinary, nonheadline language. In general,
there is not a one to one correspondence between grammatical senses and the real time of
occurrence of an event. Tenses are used in English headlines as follows (Baddock, 1988;
McLoughlin, 2000; Sanderson, 1999):
The simple present is often used to refer to events which happened in the past.
Bush Ends Steel Tariffs (4.12.2003)
The past tense is sometimes used to refer to events which happened in the past.
Bush Plane Flew Under False Cover on Iraq Trip (3.12.2003)
The infinitive is used to refer to future events.
Books to Brighten the Joyous Season (4.12.2003)
The –ing form of the verb, representing the present progressive, is used to refer to
events that are happening at the moment, and also to events which happen in the future.
Actress Geena Davis Expecting Twins (2.12.2003)
Tense forms are used in Persian headlines as follows:
The simple present is used to refer to events which happened in the present.
Reisjomhor be amrica mirævæd. (13.9.1382)
(The president is going to the United States.)
2. The past tense is used to refer to events which happened in the past.
Zelzeleh mazændran ra lærzand (12.9.1382)
(Earthquake hit Mazandaran.)
3. The future tense is used to refer to events which happened in the future.
Færda Shahed tæzahorat milyoni mærdom khahim bod. (10.9.1382)
(Tomorrow we will see the massive demonstration of thousands of people.)
Aspect is a grammatical category which deals with how the event described by a
verb is viewed, such as whether it is in progress, habitual, repeated, momentary, etc. In
both English and Persian, aspect may be indicated by prefixes, suffixes or other changes
to the verb, or by auxiliary verbs (Natel Khanlari, 1979; Quirk et al., 1985).
Happiness is not chasing the buck. (1.12.2003)
Many headlines are unmarked for tense (Mårdh, 1980). They have no finite form of be in
English and æst in Persian. They have no verb to indicate time.
Japanese Companies ø More Optimistic (4.12.2003)
Særætan dovomin amel mærg o mir dær jæhan ø (11.9.1382)
(Cancer ø the second factor of people's death in the world)
This study focused on the tense and aspect forms which were used in the English and
Persian headlines to examine their similarities and differences in these respects.
3.2.2.2.2. Voice
Voice is the form of the verb which shows the relation between the action and its subject.
In English and Persian there are two voices: the active and the passive. If the subject
performs the action, then the verb form is in the active voice. If the subject receives the
action, then the verb form is in passive voice (Fallahi, 1991; Frank, 1993 Nobahar, 1995).
Solich ø Fired As Nebraska Football Coach (30.11.2003)
7 kargær xareji dær japon robodeh shodænd (8.9.1382)
(7 foreign workers were kidnapped in Japan.)
Voice was considered in this study to examine the frequency of its occurrence in the
headlines of the two languages.
3.2.2.2.3. Dynamic and static verbs
According to their lexical meanings, verbs can be divided into dynamic and static verbs.
A type of verb which typically occurs in the progressive form and in the imperative, and
which expresses such meaning as activity, process, and bodily sensation is referred to as a
dynamic verb (Natel Khanlari, 1979; Quirk et al., 1985).
Motorist Registers During Traffic Stop (5.12. 2003)
Pirozi, saypa ra mæqlob kærd (9.9.1382)
(Pirozi defeated Saypa.)
A contrast is drawn with static verbs (also called stative or state verbs), which do not

usually occur in the progressive nor in the imperative, and which express a state of affairs
rather than an action (Natel Khanlari, 1979; Quirk et al., 1985).
Decision Is Harmful (5.12.2003)
Takestor dær dærman særætan sineh moæser æst (13.9.1382)
(Takestor is effective in the treatment of the breast cancer.)
3.2.2.3. Deletions in the headlines
Omission is one of the major features of newspaper headlines (Baddock, 1988; Bell, 1991;
Reah, 1998; Tahririan, 1995). Turner (1972, p. 72) says: "Determiners and the verb ''to
be'' are almost universally omitted in headlines". For the sake of brevity and saving space,
most closed words and some open words in headlines are often omitted or reduced to a
minimum in headlines.
Grocers, Union Talks ø Set to Resume (30.11.2003)
Yæzd dovomin shæhr jæhan æz næzær baft tarixi ø (8.9.1382)
(Yazd ø the 2nd historical city in the world.)
As can be seen from the above examples, the verb 'are' in the English headline and 'æst'
in the Persian one were omitted.
In the sample headlines an investigation was made in order to find out the frequency of
omission of words across and within the two languages.
3.2.2.4. Word syllables of headlines
In headlines, monosyllabic verbs and nouns are used frequently as substitutes for longer,
more colloquial expressions. For example: win for victory, ex for former, job for
appointment, o.k. for accept. The analysis of nouns and verbs according to their syllables
in the English and Persian corpora was done in order to investigate their similarities and
differences in the two languages in this respect.
Bush Names Baker As Envoy on Iraqi Debt (5.12.2003)
Sun Snub Eclipse (4.12.2003)
Aqaz saxt nirogah bærq xorasan (10.9.1382)
(The building of the Energy department was started in Khorasan.)
Iran nayb qæhreman koshti asiya shod (10.9.1382)
(Iran became the wrestling champion in the world.)
4.1. Data analysis
The analysis of data was conducted in two stages. In both stages, a detailed description of
the headlines at lexical and syntactic levels was done to see the similarities and
differences between the two languages.
4.1.1. First level of analysis
A corpus of 792 English and 725 Persian headlines were analyzed lexically and
syntactically in order to examine the features of the headlines in these domains.
The first level consisted of the analysis of the syntactic features of the headlines across
and within the two languages. In the following sections, the results of the analysis are
presented.
4.1.1.1. Syntactic features
As for the syntactic features, the following three major areas were studied in the
headlines of the two languages: headline types, functional types, and complexity in the
headlines.
4.1.1.1.1. Headline types
In order to get an overall picture of the structures of headlines, the English and Persian
headlines were divided into three basic groups: verbal, nominal, and adverbial headlines.
The frequency of the different types of headlines is shown in Table 4.1.
Table 4.1 Observed frequency of headline types in the English and Persian corpora
English Persian
Type of headline
N % N %
Verbal 752 94.82 176 24.27
Nominal 36 4.67 549 75.73
Adverbial 4 0.51 0 0
Total 792 100 725 100
Table 4.1 shows that the proportion of verbal headlines was considerably higher in the
English headlines (94.82%) than in the Persian ones (24.27%).
As can be noticed in Table 4.1, there were only 4 adverbial headlines in the corpus, all
of which occurred in the English headlines.
4.1.1.1.1.1. Verbal headlines
Five main structural types of verbal headlines were distinguished in the English and
Persian sample headlines which are shown in Table 4.2.
Table 4.2 The frequency of the verbal headline types in the English and Persian corpora
English Persian
Type of verbal headlines
N % N %
Finite 559 74.34 143 81.25
Nonfinite 14 1.87 6 3.41
Omitted auxiliary 148 19.68 0 0
SCs 13 1.72 21 11.93
SA 18 2.39 6 3.41
Total 752 100 176 100
As can be noticed in Table 4.2, the large majority of headlines were finite in the English
headlines (74.34%) and in the Persian ones (81.25%).
4.1.1.1.1.2. Nominal headlines
Considering the information presented in Table 1, the English and Persian headlines were
significantly different in the case of nominal headlines. 75.73% of the headlines in
Persian and 4.67% of those in English were nominal headlines.
Nominal headlines in the English and Persian sample headlines were analyzed in terms
of unmodification, premodification, postmodification and pre [+] post modification.
The frequency of different types of nominal headlines in the sample headlines are
shown in Table 4.3.
N % N %
Unmodified 12 21.42 2 0.11
Premodified 27 48.21 14 0.79
Postmodified
Type of nominal headlines 16
English 28.58 1743
Persian 98.80
Table 4.3 Pre[+]postmodified 1 1.79 5 0.28 Observed
frequency Total 56 100 1764 100 of
different types of nominal headlines in the English and Persian corpora
Table 4.3 shows that most nominal headlines in the English sample were premodified

(48.21%), while postmodification was high in the Persian corpus (98.80%). Unmodified
nominal headlines were comparatively few. They were, however, more found in the
English nominal headlines (21.42%) than in those of Persian (0.11%).
The different types of premodifiers and postmodifiers and their distribution will be
presented in the following sections.
4.1.1.1.1.2.1. Premodified nominal headlines
Two types of items may precede the head in the English premodified nominal headlines:
closed system and open class premodifiers. The closed system premodifiers can not be
extended by the creation of additional members. The set of open class premodifiers is
extendable, i.e. new items may be added to the class (Jucker 1992; Quirk et al., 1985).
Open class premodifiers preceded the head of the noun phrase in the English and
Persian nominal headlines as Table 4.4 shows.
Table Adjective 14 56 14 100 4.4
Total 25 100 14 100
Type of open class premodifier English Persian
N % N %
Common noun 11 44 0 0
Proper noun 0 0 0 0
Noun with genitive s 1 4 0 0
Noun with plural s 1 4 0 0
Observed frequency of premodifiers in the English and Persian nominal headlines
As shown in Table 4.4, adjectives were the most common type of premodifying items

in both English (56%) and Persian (100%) headlines. The other items which were
preceded the noun phrase head of the English headlines were common nouns (44%),
nouns with genitive s (4%) and nouns with plural s (4%).
4.1.1.1.1.2.2. Postmodified nominal headlines
As indicated by Table 4.3, the Persian corpus had a high number of postmodification in
nominal headlines (98.80%) compared with the English ones (28.58%).
Different kinds of postmodifications in the nominal headlines of English are presented in
Table 4.5.
Table 4.5 Observed frequency of postmodification in the English nominal headlines
English
Type of postmodification
N %
Restrictive relative clause 2 12.5
Prepositional phrase 12 75
Adverb 2 12.5
Total 16 100
As appears from Table 4.5, prepositional modification was by far the most frequent
type of postmodification in the English nominal headlines.
In the following Table, the frequency of different kinds of postmodifiers in the Persian
headlines is given.
Table 4.6 Observed frequency of postmodifiers in the Persian nominal headlines
Type of postmodifiers in Persian
the Persian headlines N %
Common noun 847 48.59
Proper noun 124 7.12 63.63
Noun with plurals 138 7.92
Adjective 297 17.03
Prepositional phrase 138 7.92
Adverb 199 11.42
Total 1743 100
Table 4.6 shows the different kinds of postmodifiers that occurred in the Persian nominal
headlines such as adverbial phrases (11.42%), nouns (63.63%), prepositional phrases
(7.92%) and adjectives (17.03%).
4.1.1.1.2. Headline types by function
Headlines can be divided into four functional types: statements, questions, commands and
exclamations. The distribution of the functional headline types is shown in Table 4.7.
Table 4.7 Observed frequency of functional headline types in the English and Persian
corpora
Functional English Persian

headline types N % N %
Statements 780 98.48 722 99.58
Questions 7 0.89 0 0
Commands 4 0.50 3 0.42
Exclamations 1 0.13 0 0
Total 792 100 725 100
As shown in Table 4.7, exclamations, commands and questions were rare in both
samples, where they constituted a part of only 1.5% in the English sample headlines and
0.42% in the Persian ones. As it can be seen from the above Table, statements were the
largest in number of the functional headline types: no less than 98.48% of the headlines
in English sample headlines and 99.58% of those in Persian corpus.
4.1.1.1.3. Complexity in headlines
Headlines can be classified in terms of simple, complex and compound sentences. The
frequency of the headlines in terms of their structure is given in Table 4.8.
Table 4.8 Frequency of sentences classified by structure in English and Persian corpora
Headlines classified by English Persian

structure N % N %
Simple 682 86.11 714 98.48
Complex 33 4.16 0 0
Compound 77 9.72 11 1.5
Total 792 100 725 100
According to Table 4.8, in the English and Persian corpora simple headlines
outnumbered any of the compounds and complex ones.
4.1.1.1.3.1. Headlines with more than one free structure
In headlines with more than one free structure, verbal, nominal, or adverbial structures
may occur together.
The following Table (4.9) shows the occurrence of headlines with more than one free
structure in the English and Persian corpora.
Table 4.9 Observed frequency of free structures in the English and Persian corpora
Headlines with more than English Persian

one free structure N % N %
Verbal + verbal 0 0 0 0
Verbal + nominal 12 20.34 0 0
Nominal + nominal 2 3.39 3 27.28
Nominal + verbal 45 76.27 8 72.72
Total 59 100 11 100
In both samples, a high number of nominal + verbal structures can be seen, 76.27% in
the English headlines and 72.72% in the Persian ones. The results obtained from the
Table 4.27 indicate that the Persian headlines had 27.28% nominal + nominal headlines
and the English ones had 3.39%.
4.1.1.1.3.1.1. Edited and unedited quotations
Headlines with more than one free structure may be divided into two subtypes: edited
quotation and unedited quotation headlines.
The following Table shows the distribution of edited and unedited quotations in the
English and Persian corpora.
Table 4.10 Frequency of edited and 'unedited' quotations
Type of free structure English Persian

headline N % N %
Edited quotation 20 33.89 3 27.28
'Unedited' quotation 39 66.11 8 72.72
Total 59 100 11 100
Table 4.10 reveals that unedited quotation headlines were more frequent in both English
(66.11%) and Persian headlines (72.72%).
4.1.1.1.4. Verb phrases in headline structures
In terms of the structure of the verb phrase, headlines divided into finite clauses, non
finite clauses, and verbless clauses. Table 4.11, shows the percentage of these three
clauses in the English and Persian corpora.
Table 4.11 Frequency of clauses classified by structure of verb phrase in the corpora
Clauses classified by structure of English Persian

verb phrase N % N %
Finite 549 69.31 143 19.73
Nonfinite 172 21.72 6 0.83
Verbless 71 8.97 576 79.44
Total 792 100 725 100
Table 4.11 shows that finite clauses were frequently used in the English headlines,
numbering 549 and occupying 69.32%. Nonfinite clauses and verbless clauses occurred
21.85% and 8.83% respectively in the English corpus. In the Persian headlines, the use of
verbless clauses (79.44%) was favored much more than the other two.
4.1.1.1.5. Headline length
The length of the headlines was calculated in terms of the average number of words per
headlines.
Table 4.12 Average length of a headline in terms of number of words
English Persian
Length of words in headlines
N Mean N Mean
Number of the whole words 5231 4146
Number of headlines 729 7.17 725 5.71
The figures obtained were about 7 and 5 words for the English and Persian headlines
respectively.
4.1.2. Second level of analysis
The second level of the analysis consisted of the lexical features of the headlines across
and within the two languages.
Adverb 41 0.80 4 0.09
Adjective 541 10.59 604 14.34
Article 63 1.25 34 0.80 4.1.2.1. Lexical features
The analysis of lexical features of headlines was carried out in three levels whose results
are presented and tabulated in the following sections.
4.1.2.1.1. Parts of speech in sample headlines
Words are classified into ten parts of speech as follows: noun, verb, article, adjective,
adverb, numeral, article, conjunction, pronoun, and preposition.
In order to have a clear picture of words used in headlines, the researcher made an
investigation of the frequency of different parts of speech in the sample headlines the
results of which are shown in Table 4.13.
Numeral
Conjunction 118 2.30
83 1.64 111
82 2.62
1.93
Modal
Preposition 58
569 1.15 480
11.15 1 0.02
11.40
Noun
Pronoun 2758 0.80
41 53.97 8
2740 65.12
0.19
Verb 840 16.45 143 3.39
Total 5112 100 4207 100
Table 4.13 Frequency of different parts of speech in English and Persian headlines
From among the aforementioned parts of speech used in headlines, nouns and verbs are
dealt with in the following sections.
4.1.2.1.1.1. Nouns
Nouns are one of the most important parts of speech (Lock, 1996). This has been
confirmed by the information given in Table 4.13. As the table indicates, the frequency of
nouns prominently outnumbered that of any other parts of speech, 53.97% in the English
sample headlines and 65.12% in the Persian ones. Because of the importance of nouns in
headlines, an analysis was done to examine such features as common and proper nouns.
In Table 4.14, the frequency of distinct features of nouns in the sample headlines is given.
Table 4.14 Frequency of nouns in the English and Persian corpora
English Persian
Nouns
N % N %
Abbreviation 105 3.82 0 0
Acronym 113 4.09 0 0
Proper noun 441 15.99 647 23.62
Common noun 2099 76.10 2093 76.38
Total 2758 100 2740 100
As can be seen in Table
4.14, English Persian abbreviations
Tense forms
N % N %
and acronyms Present 519 79.61 50 29.42 seem to be
Past 30 4.61 91 53.53
more in the Unmarked (SCs + SAs) 31 4.75 27 15.89 English sample
headlines, about Future 50 7.66 1 0.58 3.82% and
Present progressive 22 3.37 0 0
4.09% Present perfect 0 0 1 0.58 respectively but
Total 652 100 170 100
not in the Persian corpus.
4.1.2.1.1.2. Verbs
Because of the importance of verbs in headlines, an investigation was done on the
frequency of the occurrence of verbs in the English and Persian corpora.
Table 4.16 shows that verbs occurred 16.45% and 3.39% in the English and Persian
sample headlines respectively, which was the second biggest group of words used in the
English headlines. So in this section, the features of the verbs used in headlines will be
analyzed.
4.1.2.1.1.2.1. Dynamic and static verbs
What follows are the observed frequencies (Table 4.15) of these two kinds of verbs in
both sample headlines.
Table 4.15 Frequency of dynamic and static verbs in the English and Persian sample
headlines
From the Table 4.15, it is clear that there are many more dynamic verbs than static verbs
in both English and Persian sample headlines. In the sample headlines 95.35% in the
English and 67.83% in the Persian corpus were dynamic verbs while static verbs occurred
4.65% and 32.17% in the two samples respectively.
4.1.2.1.1.2.2. Tense and aspect forms
Different kinds of tense and aspect forms were investigated in the corpora. What follows
is the output of this analysis.
Table 4.16. The distribution of tense and aspect forms in the English and Persian corpora
Comparing the English and Persian headlines as to the proportion of tense forms, the
English headlines had a higher proportion of present tense (79.61%) than the Persian ones
(29.42%) while past was more frequent in the Persian sample (53.53%) than in the
English (4.61%).
Besides tense, the aspects used in the headlines were analyzed. As can be seen, in both
sample headlines, the non
English Persian
Verbs progressive forms were far
N % N %
Dynamic 801 95.35 97 67.83 more frequent than the
Static 39 4.65 46 32.17
Total 840 100 143 100 progressive forms. Only 22
instances of the progressive form 3.37% of the English verbal headlines were found in
the corpus.
Many headlines are unmarked for tense. As Table 4.16 indicates, unmarked tense forms
occurred in both English (4.75%) and Persian (15.89%) headlines
4.1.2.1.1.2.3. Voice
The distribution of active and passive patterns in the English and Persian headlines is
shown in Table 4.17.
Table 4.17 Frequency of passive and active headlines in both samples
N
English % N
Persian %
Voice
Active 653 86.84 170 96.59
Passive 99 13.16 6 3.41
Total 752 100 176 100
As Table 4.17 shows, 86.84% of the verbal headlines in the English samples and 96.59%
of those in the Persian ones were active constructions and about 13.16% and 3.41% in
passive patterns in the English and Persian samples respectively.
3.1.2.1.4. Word syllables of headlines
What follows is the output of the analysis of nouns (Table 4.18) and verbs (Table 4.19)
according to their syllables in the English and Persian corpora.
Table 4.18. Observed frequency of nouns with different syllables in the English and
Persian corpora
Nouns with different English Persian

syllables N % N %
Mono syllabic noun 1367 49.57 1987 72.51
Bisyllabic noun 1013 36.73 753 27.48
Polysyllabic noun 378 13.70 0 0
Total 2758 100 2740 100
Table 4.19 Observed frequency of verbs with different syllables in the English and
Persian corpora
Verbs with different syllables English Persian

N % N %
Mono syllabic verb 579 68.91 71 49.63
Bisyllabic verb 230 27.39 72 50.37
Polysyllabic verb 31 3.7 0 0
Total 840 100 143 100
4.1.2.1.2.1. Omission of verb ''be''
Table 4.20 demonstrates the observed frequency of ''be'' omission in the sample headlines.
Table 4.20 The frequency of the omission of verb 'be' in the corpora
Information given in Table 4.20 indicates that the verb ''be'' as a linking verb and as an
auxiliary verb was left out about 17.32% and 82.68% respectively in the English
headlines.
English Persian
Omission of verb 'be' The
N % N %
'be' as a linking verb 31 17.32 æst 27 100 linking
'be' as an auxiliary verb 148 82.68 0 0 0
verb which
Total 179 100 27 100
was
omitted in the Persian headlines was the word "æst", which was left out completely of
total omissions of the verb "be."
As a whole, 208 different types of the verb "be" were needed in the English headlines
but there were only 29 cases in which they were used. It shows that about 86.05% of the
verb "be" was omitted. In the Persian headlines, the tendency was to use the verb "æst"
(63.02%).
Table 4.21 The frequency of verb 'be' in the English headlines
English Frequency of
Frequency of
verb 'be' Need the usage of
appear omitted 'be'
ed 'be'
'be' 208 29 86.05 13.95
Table 4.22 The frequency of verb 'æst' in the Persian headlines
Persian Frequency of
Frequency of
verb ' æst ' Need the usage of
appear omitted 'æst'
ed 'æst'
'æst' 73 46 36.98 63.02
4.1.2.1.2.2. Omission of ''say''
The word "say" sometimes is omitted and replaced by colons in headlines (Baddock,
1988).
Table 4.23 displays the occurrence of the word ''say'' and also its omission in both sample
headlines.
Table 4.23 Observed frequency of the usage and omission of 'say' in the corpora
Usage and omission of English Persian

"say" N % N %
Usage of ''say'' 19 24.35 0 0
Use of colon 55 70.52 11 100
Use of dash 4 5.13 0 0
Total 78 100 11 100
Table 4.23 demonstrates that the omission of the word ''say'' was preferred in both
English (75.65%) and Persian (100%) headlines.
5. Conclusion
Based on the results of the study, the most important quantitative similarities and
differences between the English and Persian headlines were deduced as follows:
The headlines of the two languages were similar in the following areas:
Dominant use of nouns: The use of nouns prominently outnumbered that of any other
parts of speech in both English (53.97%) and Persian (65.12%) headlines.
Preference for dynamic verbs: In the sample headlines 95.35% of verbs in the English
and 67.83% of those in the Persian data were dynamic verbs.
Preference for the use of active voice: 86.84% of the verbal headlines in the English
sample and 96.59% of those in the Persian one were active constructions.
Frequent omission of words: The verb 'be' was omitted in both English (86.05%) and
Persian (36.98%) headlines and also the omission of the word 'say' was preferred in the
English (75.65%) and Persian (100%) corpora.
Preference for short words: Mono syllabic nouns were used in both English (49.57%)
and Persian (72.51%) headlines.
Dominance of declarative sentences: The use of statements was the largest in number of
the functional headline types in both English (98.48%) and Persian (99.58%) headlines.
Expansion of simple sentences: 86.11% of the headlines in the English sample and
98.48% of those in the Persian corpus were simple sentences.
Preference for the use of unedited quotations: Unedited quotation headlines were
frequent in both English (66.11%) and Persian headlines (72.72%).
Preference for finite clauses: Finite clauses were frequently used in the English
headlines (74.34%) and the Persian ones (81.25%).
The headlines of the two languages were different in the following areas:
1. Acronyms and abbreviations were highly used in the English headlines but not in the
Persian ones.
2. Tense in Persian headlines did not follow the English verb system. In general, the
Persian headlines were not different from those of ordinary, nonheadline language.
3. There were more present tense forms in the English headlines: 79.61% vs. 29.42% in
the Persian ones, whereas past tense forms were more common in the Persian headlines
(55.48%) than in the English ones (4.41%).
4. Frequent omissions of certain words such as omission of articles, “and”,
“people/person”, “pronoun” and "that" were major features of English headlines.
5. In the English corpus the use of monosyllabic verbs (68.93%) was preferred by the
reporters, whereas in the Persian sample headlines, the use of compound verbs was more
than the simple ones (50.37% and 49.63% respectively).
6. Verbal headlines were more frequently used in the English sample headlines (94.82%)
than in the Persian ones (23.44%). English and Persian headlines were significantly
different in the case of nominal headlines (4.67% and 76.56% respectively). The
placement of verbs by nominalization was characteristic of the Persian headlines.
7. In a comparison between the English and Persian newspaper headlines, it appears that
postmodified nominal headlines were almost four times more frequent in the Persian
headlines (98.79%) than the English ones (28.58%), whereas premodified nominal
headlines were more found in the English (48.21%) than in the Persian headlines (0.80%).
8. There were only 4 (0.51%) adverbial headlines in the English sample headlines but
none in Persian ones.
9. Exclamations and questions (0.13% and 0.89% respectively) occurred in headlines of
English corpus but not in the Persian sample.
To sum up, it was concluded that the headlines of English and Persian languages were
similar in using dynamic verbs, active voice, short words, declarative sentences, finite
clauses, and simple sentences and different in the use of tense forms, headline types,
modification, and omission of words.
5.1. Implications of the English and Persian headlines comparison
The results of contrasting English and Persian headlines have pedagogical implications
for teaching journalistic English and translation.
5.1.1. Implications for teaching journalistic English
Teachers can benefit from the findings of the analysis of headlines in Persian and English.
It can assist the teacher to be aware of the structural conflicts of the headlines of the two
languages and, as a result, help his students get a better understanding of the language of
headlines.
An EFL teacher of reading journalistic English with relevant contrastive information can
be a better language teacher in a shorter period of time than a person without such
information.
Knowledge of the syntactic and lexical features of headlines helps teachers to use them
as a guide to their teaching. The teacher who is familiar with the similarities and
differences between Persian and English headlines will know better what the real learning
problems are and can better provide for teaching them.
5.1.2. Implications for teaching translation
Knowledge of the learners' language and its differences and similarities with the
second/foreign one is of practical teaching use in many ways, one of which is translation.
In order to translate the English headlines, EFL students should have a good command
of headline features of both languages. As Lefevere (1992) says, "the first rule for EFL
translators is to know both languages well" (p. 121).
By recognizing the lexical and syntactical features of the headlines and the differences
of their distributions across Persian and English, the elements that may hinder the
Iranians' headlines comprehension can be determined. For instance, this study illuminated
that the omissions of certain words can create hurdle for comprehending the English
headlines. Knowledge of these difficulties can aid the students in understanding the
language of headlines.
Contrasting English and Persian headlines can help learners become more conscious of
the features of headlines in the two languages and avoid problems in the use of either,
especially when they translate.
References
Baddock, B. (1988). SCOOP: Communicative activities with British and American
newspapers. New York: Prentice Hall.
Bell, A. (1991). The language of news media. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.
Brisau, A. (1969). Complex sentence structure in headlines. English Studies, 50(1),
3138.
Connor, U. (1996). Contrastive rhetoric: cross cultural aspects of second language
writing. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
Crystal, D. (1992). An encyclopedic dictionary of language and languages. Oxford:
Blackwell Publishers.
Develotte, C., & Rechniewski, E. (2000). Discourse analysis of newspaper
headlines: A methodological framework for research into national
representations. Retrieved January 10, 2002, from
http://wgfms.ncl.ac.uk/titles.htm.
Fallahi, M. (1991). Contrastive linguistics and analysis of errors, Vol. 1: The
grammatical structure of English and Persian. Tehran: Iran University Press.
Fromkin, V. & Rodman, R. (1999). An introduction to language. Florida: Holt,
Rinehart and Winston.
IRIB News (Nov.29.2003). Retrieved November 29, 2003, from
http://www.iribnews.com.
IRIB News (Nov.30.2003). Retrieved November 30, 2003, from
IRIB News (Dec.1.2003). Retrieved December 1, 2003, from
Jucker, A. H. (1992). Social stylistics: syntactic variation in British newspapers. New
York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Kleinmann, H.H. (1975). Avoidance behavior in adult second language acquisition.
Michigan: The University of Michigan Press.
Kniffka, H. (1980). Soziolinguistik und empirische Textanalyse: Schlagzeilenund
Leadformulierung in amerikanischen Tageszeitungen, Tubingen: Niemeyer, p. 41.
Cited in Bell, (1991) The Language of news media, Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 1856.
Lado, R. (1957). Linguistics across cultures. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan
Press.
Leech, G. & Svartvik, J. (1994). A communicative grammar of English. London:
Longman.
Lefevere, A. (1992). Translation, history, culture. New York: Routledge.
Mårdh, I. (1980). Headlines. On the grammar of English front page headlines. Lund:
Gleerup.
McLoughlin, L. (2000). The language of magazines. London: Routledge.
Mouillaud, J., & Tétu, F.(1989). Le journal quotidien, Lyon: Presses universitaires
deLyon. Cited in Develotte, C., & Rechniewski, E. (2000). Discourse analysis of
newspaper headlines: A methodological framework for research into national
representations. Retrieved January 10, 2002, from http://wgfms.ncl.ac.uk/titles.htm.
Murphy, R. (1997). Grammar in use. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Natel Khanlari, P. (1979). Persian grammar. Tehran: Book Distribution Center.
Nobahar, M. (1995). Persian applied grammar. Tehran: Rahnama Publication.
Quirk, R., Greenbaum, S., Leech, G., & Svatvik, J. (1985). A comprehensive grammar of
the English language, London: Longman.
Radford, A. (1997). Syntax: a minimalist introduction. N.K.: Cambridge
University Press.
Reah, D. (1998). The language of newspapers. London and New York: Routledge.
Sanderson, P. (1999). Using newspapers in the classroom. New York:
Schneider, K. (2000). The emergence and development of headlines in English
newspapers. In F. Ungerer (Ed.), English media textspast and present language and
textual structure (pp. 4567). Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins.
Sciarone, A. G., (1970). Contrastive analysispossibilities and limitations,
IRAL, 8, 115131.
Scollon, R. (2000). Generic variability in news stories in Chinese and English: A
contrastive discourse study of five days' newspapers. Journal of Pragmatics, 32, 761
791.
Spears, R. (1976). NTC's dictionary of grammar terminology. Illinois: National Test
Book Company.
Straumann, H. (1935). Newspaper headlines. A study in Linguistic method. London.
SulletNylander, F. (2000). Le titre de presse: analyses syntaxique, prgmatique et
rhetorique. Retrieved May 2, 2003, from
http://www.su.se/forskning/dispuationer/spikblad/FrancoiseSulletNylander.htm1.
Tahririan, M.H. (1995). Reading journalistic English. Tehran, Iran: Payame Noor
University.
Trask, R. L. (1993). A dictionary of grammatical terms in linguistics. New York:
Routledge.
Trask, R. L. (1999). Key concepts in language and linguistics. New York: Routledge.
Turner, G.W. (1972). The grammar of newspaper headlines containing the preposition on
in the sense ‘about’. Linguistics, 87, 7186.
Ungerer, F. (Ed.). (2000). English media textspast and present language and textual
structure. Philadelphia PA: John Benjamins.
Van Dijk, T. A. (1986). News schemata. New York: Dans Cooper and Greenbaum.
Van Dijk, T. A. (1988). News as discourse. Hillsdale, NJ.: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Waterhouse, K. (1993). Waterhouse on newspaper style. London: Penguin.
Sanderson, P. (1999). Using newspapers in the classroom. New York: Cambridge
University Press.
Yahoo News (Nov.29.2003). Retrieved November 29, 2003, from
http://www.yahoonews.com.
Yahoo News (Nov.30.2003). Retrieved November 30, 2003, from
Yahoo News (Dec.1.2003). Retrieved December 1, 2003, from
“You will come when?”
The pragmatics of certain questions in Cameroon English 1
Daniel Nkemleke,
Technische Universität Chemnitz, Germany
Bio Data:
Daniel A. Nkemleke, Ph.D., is senior lecturer in English Language and Linguistics in the
Department of English in Ecole Normale Supérieure (ENS) of the University of Yaoundé
I, Cameroon. He has over 12 years of experience in ELT and has published in a number
of refereed journals including World Englishes, English WorldWide, Nordic Journal for
African Studies and Indian Journal of Applied Linguistics etc. He teaches the following
courses in ENS: TEFL, academic writing and functional English syntax. His research
interest includes text (corpus) linguistics and writing and since 1992 he has been involved
in a project to build a written and spoken corpus of Cameroonian English. He is presently
a guest researcher in the Department of English of the Technische Universität Chemnitz
(Germany), having been awarded a 12month research fellowship by the Alexander von
Humboldt Foundation to further develop his Cameroonian corpus.
Abstract
This contribution discusses how some Cameroonians perform the speech act of “asking”
in informal contexts. Data used for the study is derived from transcripts of taped
conversations and recordings from personal encounters. In all, 160 examples of
“questions” (of the type “you will come when?”) that could not fit any of the categories
of questions in native English as outlined in Quirk et al (1985) are analyzed. In a cross
linguistic perspective, I demonstrate that the “you will come whentype” questions reflect
similarities found in Cameroonian home languages of the Bantu origin, spoken by all
interlocutors from whom the data was obtained. Furthermore, the paper contends that
interplay of the syntax of these home languages and English may be responsible for the
questions of the type stated above. The paper concludes that speech act research of this
nature may guide teachers to design teaching materials that specifically address the nature
of spoken interaction in interpersonal communication.
Key Words: Pragmatics, questions, informal contexts, Cameroon English, pedagogic
relevance
1
I am thankful to the anonymous reviewer for useful suggestions made on the first version of this article. I
also wish to acknowledge the encouragement of John Adamson of TLJ. This study was conducted during a
research stay in TU Chemnitz, made possible by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (AvH).
1. Introduction
A lot of research has been done on the contextual coordinates of language organisation
(cf. Levinson, 1983; Leech, 1983) and one such contextual coordinate is speech act
theory (Austin, 1962; Searle, 1969). For example, research has shown that there are
significant crosscultural differences in the way that “similar” speech acts are performed
in different cultures and languages (see Carrell and Konneker, 1981; Cohen and Olshtain,
1981). Scholars such as Sridhar (1986, 1989a, 1991), Kachru (1982, 1983, 1990), Smith
(1983) and D’souza (1987) have in various ways focused on the pragmatic aspects of
variation in English in the Outer Circle. Sridhar (1989a), for example, examined how the
speech act of requesting is performed in Indian English. This current investigation
follows this tradition and examines how some Cameroonians perform one specific type of
speech act, namely asking questions in informal contexts.
2. Background
The semantics and pragmatics of questions has long been the subject of linguistic
exploration. There are several types of questions in English: yesno questions, wh
questions, alternative questions, tag questions, declarative questions, exclamative
questions and rhetorical questions (see Quirk et al, 1985; Lisa LaiShen, 1997). A brief
discussion of these forms of questions is necessary here.
Yesno questions are usually formed by placing the operator before the subject and
giving the sentence a rising intonation. Also the addressee is usually expected to supply a
truth value by specifying “yes” or “no”. Other possible answers indicating various
degrees of certainty do exist (see Biber et al, 1999). The addressee may choose to say
“definitely”, “certainly” etc. as an alternative to a “yes” response, for example. Again,
s/he may supply additional information to a “yes” or “no” response. For example, in
response to a question: Would you come for dinner this evening? a possible answer could
be No; I am too busy this evening. It is also important to note, however, that yesno
questions are often used for purposes other than asking information (see Biber et al,
1999) 2 . Yesno questions often use assertive or nonassertive forms. Questions which
2
Biber et al (1999) explain that the interrogative structures in the following examples express an
exclamation: Isn’t that lovely! Isn’t that, that terrible! (p. 207).
have positive orientations are said to be assertive and those that employ “any” and “ever”
are nonassertive. The difference between the two can be illustrated with the examples
below.
a. Did someone call yesterday?
b. Has the train left already?
c. Did anyone call last night?
d. Have you taken your visa yet?
The first two questions (ab) have a positive orientation and are therefore assertive.
According to Biber et al (1999), assertive questions have a bias towards an underlying
positive proposition in which an assertive form such as “somebody”, “someone” or
“already” would appear. The use of the assertive words (italicized) in ab above (rather
than the nonassertive form “yet” as in d, for example), suggests that the speaker is
already inclined to assume that the truth of the assertion is positive (i.e. anticipating a
yesresponse). The last two questions (cd) on the other hand, are nonassertive because
they leave open whether the answer is positive or negative. In fact, Quirk et al (1985:808)
observe that questions with ‘nonassertive forms point to common ground between
questions and negative statements’.
The whquestions are usually marked by the presence of one or more of the
interrogative words who, whom, which, whose, what, where, when, why, how, or their
compounds in –ever: whoever, whatever etc (see Huddleston, 1988, p. 366). Quirk et al
(1985, p. 817ff) state two rules that govern the realisation of this type of questions. Firstly,
the Qelement (i.e. clause element containing the Qwords) generally comes first in the
sentences. Secondly, the Qword itself takes first position in the Qelement. For example,
On what did you base your forecast? What did you base your forecast on?
Another type of question in native English is the alternative question. An alternative
question is one whose reply includes one of two or more options (alternatives) present in
the question, as the example below illustrates.
e. Would you like ↑oranges, ↑mangoes, or ↓bananas?
A possible reply here could be: I prefer some oranges. This type of alternative question is
structurally similar to a yesno question (because it opens with an operator which is
followed by the subject), although it also differs from it in two ways. First, the response
in an alternative question cannot be “yes” or “no” (as in a yesno question), but rather one
of the choices provided in the question. Second, instead of the final rising tone (as it is the
case with a yesno question), the alternative question may contain a separate nucleus for
each alternative: a rise (represented by ‘↑’) occurs on each item in the list, except the last,
on which there is a fall (represented by ‘↓’), indicating that the list is complete.
According to Quirk et al (1985, p. 823), this difference of intonation between the
alternative question and a yesno question is important, in that ignoring it can lead to
misunderstanding as the contrast between the replies below indicates (examples from
Quirk et al p.823, with intonation signs modified):
f. alternative: A: Shall we go by ↑bus or ↓train? B: By ↓Bus.
g. yesno: A: Shall we go by bus or ↑train? B: No, let’s take the ↓car.
Biber et al (1999, p. 208) explain that some alternative questions are related in function
to whquestions in that they both have interrogative clauses which ask for specification of
an unknown element. However, in the case of the alternative question this specification of
the unknown is represented by listed alternatives and in the case of the whquestion it is
represented by a whword. The example below (taken from Biber et al, p. 208) is used to
illustrate both contexts 3 .
h. Which one should I use, the blue or the pink?
Since an alternative question by definition presupposes the truth of only one of the
propositions, the whquestion (or component) of the example above is followed by
elliptical alternative questions (...the blue? or ... the pink?), from which the addressee
may choose one.
Declarative questions (DQ), exclamatory questions (EQ), rhetorical questions (RQ) and
tag questions (TQ) constitute a relatively less perceptible category of questions in English.
In fact, Quirk et al (1985, p. 825) refer to them as ‘minor questions’. Their status is not
easily defined in terms of an auxiliary or whword as in the other categories just
discussed above. The DQ is identical in form to a statement, except for the final rising
question intonation: You’ve got the telephone ↑card? The EQ is a question in form, but is
functionally like an exclamation. The most characteristic type is a negative yesno
3
Biber et al (1999, p. 208) observe that an alternative question and a whquestion may combine in the same
context. Note, however, that the examples for alternative questions provided by Biber et al are not marked
for intonation (cf. compare f and g above from Quirk et al).
question with a falling instead of a rising tone: Hasn’t she ↓grown! The RQ is one which
functions as a forceful statement. More precisely, a positive rhetorical question is like a
strong negative assertion, while a negative question is like a strong positive one: Is that
the reason for ↑hopelessness? (Surely that is not the reason), Is no one going to ↑assist
me? (Surely someone is going to assist me). TQ consists of an operator plus a pronoun
with or without a negative particle. The choice and tense of the operator are determined
by the verb phrase in the superordinate clause (e.g. The plane hasn’t left, has it? Peter
recognized you, didn’t he?).
In the article, I concentrate on one peculiar type of question in Cameroon colloquial
speech, which for lack of a better expression I would call “youarecomingwhentype”
(“youwh”) question. The “youwh” questions are similar to the yesno questions and wh
questions in that the type of responses that are expected for yesno and whquestions in
English are also expected in the “youwh” type. However, the “youwh” type questions
are different in that the whword is usually placed at the final position and the auxiliary is
somewhere in the medial position. In Standard English (SE) the ‘locus of interrogation’
(Hedberg and Sosa 2001) of a yesno question is rather the fronted auxiliary. For example:
Q: “Mama is in the house”? (Cameroon English colloquial speech (= auxiliary at the
clause medial position)
Q: “You are coming when”? (Cameroon English colloquial speech (= whword at the
clause final position)
Standard English would phrase these questions as:
Q: Is mama in the house? (Fronted auxiliary)
Q: When are you coming? (Fronted whword)
3. Data
The data used in this current investigation is derived from two sources. The first major
source is a transcript of taped conversations from where the “youwh” type questions
(comprising 123 examples) were taken. These conversations were recorded
surreptitiously in the city of Yaoundé over a period of 18 months (September 2002 to
March 2004) by a group of three graduate students in the Department of English of the
University of Yaoundé I. The group was equipped with a pocket taperecorder, and had to
tape the conversations of fellow students and other adults in and out of the university
campus on topics either initiated by them or in which they were witnesses or participants.
These informants were of different educational and social background (students, teachers,
businessmen, administrators), but all of them can roughly be described as having attained
at least high school education. More than 50 per cent of them were university students.
All the informants spoke at least one home language of the Bantu family plus Pidgin
English. The majority of them could speak French also since most of the data was
collected in the capital city Yaoundé, where French (one of Cameroon’s official
languages) is the dominant language. The following places were targeted: the university
restaurants, students’ residential quarters and other social gatherings such as students’
cultural meetings, community gatherings, etc. These taped conversations were later on
transcribed. The other (minor) source of data was my own personal recordings based on
personal daily encounters with students and nonstudents in and out of campus. I have
marked these recordings as “personal observation” in the discussion. Up to 37 examples
were obtained in this way. In all, this study is based on a database of 160 “youwh”
question types.
4. Analysis
The discussion here is in two parts. Firstly, I will discuss the “youwh” questions, with
focus on two response types, namely (i) where the simple affirmative/negative answer is
required, and (ii) where some kind of information is required. These two response types
correspond to those of the yesno questions and whquestions (already mentioned above:
cf. Quirk et al 1985) respectively. Secondly, I will show how the “youwh” pattern of
“asking” is analogous to a similar pattern of asking questions in four Cameroonian home
languages of the Bantu origin.
“You are coming whentype” questions
As already mentioned, the “youwh” types of questions do not have the same structure as
yesno and whquestions in English. To evaluate them as questions requires pragmatic
knowledge of the context within which they are used. The examples (111) below
illustrate these types of questions. (Note that SE stands for Standard English.)
(1) A: My red pen I cannot see. “Please you have my pen?”
B: Yes! This is the pen (TPE1.02).
Context: in a classroom sitting on the same desk.
SE: ‘Please do you have my pen?’
(2) Alóo! Who’s speaking? OK! “You are coming to Yaoundé when?” (TPE1.03)
Context: a telephone conversation.
SE: ‘When are you coming to Yaoundé?’
(3) A: You wait until you see me before you start pretending to WORK!
B: NO MADAM (in a chorus).
A: “You have finished the work?” (TPE2.02)
Context: an exchange between a teacher and her pupils in a local school down town.
SE: ‘Have you finished the work?’
(4) A (Teacher): Ok please put up the chart on the board Essam.
B (Student): (Essam moves towards the blackboard and as he fixes the chart).
A: Now! See the food items on the chart. “You eat in the morning before coming to
class?”
B: I ate bread and cheese this morning before coming.
A: That’s right, next (pointing at the dormant section of the classroom).
(Personal observation)
Context: a student teacher on practice teaching in a classroom in Yaoundé.
SE: ‘Do you eat in the morning before coming to class?’
(5) A: Please give me Martin’s paper.
B: What? I will keep it! “He is your brother?” (TPE2.04)
Context: in a classroom when a teacher was giving back scripts of a previous
assignment.
SE: ‘Is he your brother?’
(6) A: Tuesday afternoon is a good day you can come to our house…because I don’t want
Pa to be in you see. He will be in church…..
B: “The members of your family are going to church everyday?” (TPE4.04)
Context: a conversation between two friends. One is extending an invitation to the
other on a certain Tuesday he knows his father is supposed to be in church.
SE: ‘Do members of your family go to church everyday?’
(7) “The name of our literature teacher is what?” (TPE3.03)
Context: a new student inquiring to know the name of a new teacher he has not met
before.
SE: ‘What is the name of our literature teacher?’
(8) “Mary’s situation was how when you took her to the hospital?” (TPE5.04)
Context: a conversation among students in a residential area.
SE: ‘How was Mary’s situation when you took her to the hospital?’
(9) “The night watchman was where when the thief came?” (TPE4:04)
Context: a group of onlookers watch how a thief broke into a local provision store and
took away valuable things.
SE: ‘Where was the night watchman when the thief came?’
(10) A: “Yesterday you were where?”
B: I was in throughout.
A: But I came to your place and didn’t see you! (TPE4.04)
Context: a conversation between two students.
SE: ‘Where were you yesterday?’
(11) A: “The food is too salty?”
B: No! Mama it is OK.
Context: A mother at lunch table with her husband and children.
(Personal observation)
SE: ‘Is the food too salty?’
These examples exemplify a typical questioning pattern that one finds in most informal
settings in Cameroon. The interrogative utterances marked by a question sign (?) all
perform the same discoursepragmatic function that of asking for a simple response in
either affirmative/negative or providing some kind of information. This interpretation is
reached because of one basic consideration without which such a reading would be
untenable. This consideration seems to relate to the structure of the utterances themselves.
That is, they all reflect the interrogative structure of home languages (Bantu in this case)
as I will show in the next section.
To further assess the degree of recognition of these interrogative forms, I decided to
crosscheck some of the transcribed utterances with a selected group of 23 people (8
secondary school teachers, 5 university teachers, 5 graduate students, 5 workers in
government offices). They were required to use an adverb of frequency to respond to the
question: How often do you hear people ask questions of the type “You are coming when”?
The results of this assessment are presented in Table1 below.
Table 1: Recognition rating of “youwh” type questions in Cameroon
Range of “youwh” type questions Assessment of regularity by informants
Often Sometimes Rarely Never
(%) (%) (%) (%)
“He said that what?”, “That is what?” 23 (100)
“Is what?”, “Is who?” 23 (100)
“You will eat?” 23 (100)
“You want what?” 20 (87) 3 (13)
“You are going to where?” 17 (74) 6 (26)
“You are calling for me?” 15 (65) 6 (26) 2 (9)
“The students are where?” 14 (51) 9 (39)
“You are where?” 13 (57) 7 (30) 3 (13)
“You prefer which one?” 12 (53) 7 (30) 4 (17)
“There is electricity in your village?” 11 (48) 4 (17) 8 (35)
“The book is where?” 10 (43) 12 (52) 1 (5)
“The children have taken supper?” 9 (39) 8 (35) 4 (17) 2 (9)
“The man is suffering from AIDS?” 9 (39) 7 (30) 4 (17) 3 (13)
“You are coming to my house?” 8 (35) 8(35) 5 (21) 2 (9)
“There are people in the hall?” 8 (35) 5 (21) 2 (9) 8 (35)
As Table 1 above shows, there is a high degree of acceptance rating of the “youwh” type
questions by my informants. Most of them selected the adverb with the highest frequency
rating in the list (“often”) for their responses. We can therefore conclude that this
approval rating is indicative of the general picture of what happens in most informal
contexts in Cameroon.
We can easily situate the prevalence of the type of questions discussed above within the
context of the spread of English into new territories and cultures, which have
linguistically dependent communicative norms. Innovation and/or nativization of the
native English whquestions and yesno questions formulation as evident above (111)
may therefore be seen as a consequence of this expansion of English. One of the felicity
conditions for interpreting utterances of this nature as question denotation in discourse
situations is the fact that the interlocutors share a common linguistic or verbal repertoire.
According to Kachru (1990, p. 57) the terms ‘linguistic repertoire’, ‘code repertoire’ and
‘verbal repertoire’ are used more or less identically to refer to the same range of codes
which members of a speech community have available for their linguistic interaction.
Because each code repertoire has what Scherer and Giles (1979, p. xxxiv) refer to as
‘markers’ or ‘clues’ (cf. Trudgill, 1984, p. 14), the concept of linguistic repertoire may
also refer to the repertoire of styles from substrate languages 4 . Understandably, therefore,
4
Substrate (substratum) refers to a linguistic variety or set of forms which has influenced the structure or use of a more
dominant variety or language within a community (see Trudgill 1984 Ch. 3). In the context of this study, the home
languages and to a certain extent Pidgin English and French are substrates.
one would assume the interplay between Cameroonian home languages and, to a certain
extent, other languages of wider communication (e.g. Pidgin English and French) 5 in
Cameroon as having influenced the realization of “youwh” type questions. The next
section presents some examples of how interrogative questions are realized in four
Cameroonian home languages of Bantu origin, spoken by my informants 6 . The examples
were selected from a short text I asked these informants to translate from English into
their home languages.
Interrogative utterances in some Cameroonian home languages
As the examples (1224) below illustrate, the four Cameroonian home languages are
similar in the way they form interrogative questions. First, the translated question in the
home language is given, followed by a literal translation of it into English (in square
brackets) and the Standard English version (in parentheses), respectively.
Kenyang
(12) Wә rәŋ fǎ?
[“You going where?”]
(Where are you going to?)
(13) Bǎ bέŋә wә nà?
[“You are called what?”]
(What is your name?)
(14) Mә ǎ di yirέ?
[“Child is crying what?”]
(Why is the child crying?)
(15) Mә mna yǎ àtchi àŋyәbέ?
[“My mother’s child is in the house?”]
(Is my mother’s child in the house?)
5
A Pidgin English rendition of the SE question When are you coming to Yaoundé? (ex. 2 above) would be: “You de
come Yaoundé when”? Equally, most Cameroonians would use the French version: “Tu viens à Yaoundé quand”?
rather than “Quand venezvous à Yaoundé”?
6
These informants were my 4 th year students of the 2003/2004 academic year in the School of Education of the
University of Yaounde I.
Itάŋkom
(16) Wà ndu wó?
[“You go where?”]
(17) Ìjin i zέ nt ‫ﻻ‬à ndà?
[“Name you is who?”]
(18) Wàjn nt ndzt ‫ﻻ‬à?
(Why is the child crying?]
nŋwέ
(19) Nnwa tse ndèy kõ?
(20) Lelen lo là kõ?
[“Your name is what?”]
(21) Ndõ gè à ndia?
[“Brother you is in the house?”]
(Is your brother in the house?)
Mbetta
(22) Ò kéh là?
[“You going where?”]
(23) Di loňg lè bèh zéh?
[“You name is what?”]
(24) Múeh à shi zéh?
As the examples above show, the realization of interrogative questions in Cameroonian
home languages is quite different from their realization in Standard English. Whereas in
English the “locus of interrogation” of a whquestion is the fronted whword (e.g. 1213),
and the “locus of interrogation” of a yesno question is the fronted auxiliary (as in 15 and
21), in Cameroonian languages it is not the case. It is obvious that home language
interrogative structure is responsible for the realization of the “youwh” questions
presented above. These influences have been frequently found in students’ writing in
Cameroon 7 .
5. Concluding remarks
This current contribution is an interesting discovery of the subtle innovative ways in
which the speech act of “asking” is performed by some people in informal situations in
Cameroon. The investigation is relevant in two respects. Firstly, it adds to the existing
body of literature on creative usage in Cameroon English (see also Nkemleke, 2004,
2006a). Secondly, it further reemphasises the point (already made in several other
studies, e.g. Sridhar, 1989b;1991) that speech act research in L2 contexts may provide
useful insights into the bilingual’s speech patterns and the range and depth of the
contextualization of English in these areas. This may have implications for other
disciplines, namely literacy planning, issues of intelligibility and intercultural
communication and more importantly, formal language instruction.
Language is not necessarily a collection of correct sentences (good as that is), but rather
it is a form of practice and of doing things. While we probably insist on students speaking
and writing in a certain manner (“Standard”) for purposes of crosscultural
communication, it is also important that practising teachers in bilingual /multilingual
settings should try to enrich the English language teaching and learning game by
incorporating pragmatic questions into their curricula. The questions are, for example,
7
Nkemleke (2006b:35) cites exmples such as big book, big school (literally ‘studying in the university’)
and when I came university etc., from students’ essays, which are direct translation from home languages.
why do people speak/write the way they do? What do they imply when they speak/write
in certain ways? What is it that they have not mastered? These questions may address
topics related to performance phenomena in conversational English and the
constructional principle of conversational grammar (see Biber et al, 1999, Ch. 14).
Hence, the view of language as action and interaction, and on this basis other issues such
as formality and informality of context, semantic and pragmatic correctness could be
introduced into the classroom.
References
Austin, J.L. (1962). How to do things with words. London: Oxford University Press.
Biber, D., S. Johansson, G. Leech, S. Conrad, & E. Finegan (1999). The Longman
grammar of spoken and written English. London: Longman
Carrell, P. L., & B. H. Konneker (1981). Politeness: Comparing native and nonnative
judgements. Language Learning 31(1), 1730.
Cohen, A. D., & E. Olshtain (1981). Developing a meaning of sociocultural competence:
The case of apology. Language Learning, 31(1), 11334
D’souza, J. (1987). South Asia as a sociolinguistic area. PhD Dissertation, Department of
Linguistics, University of Illinois, Urbana.
Hedberg, N. & Sosa, J. (2001). The prosodic structure of topic and focus in spontaneous
English dialogue. Paper presented at the Linguistic Society of America Workshop on
Topic and Focus, University of California at Santa Barbara, July 2001.
Huddleston, R. (1988). Introduction to the grammar of English. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Kachru, B. B. (1982). The other tongue: English across cultures. Urbana: University of
Illinois Press.
Kachru, B. B. (1983). The Indianization of English: The English language in India. Delhi:
Oxford University Press.
Kachru, B. B. (1990). The alchemy of English: The spread, functions, and models of non
native Englishes. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press.
LaiShen, L. (1997). On the typology of WHquestions. New York: Garland Press.
Leech, G. N. (1983). Principles of pragmatics. London: Longman.
Levinson, S. C. (1983). Pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Nkemleke, D. (2006a). Nativization of dissertation acknowledgements and private letters
in Cameroon. Nordic Journal for African Studies, 15(2), 166184.
Nkemleke, D. (2006b). Some characteristics of expository writing in Cameroon English.
English WorldWide: A Journal of Varieties of English, 27(1), 2544.
Nkemleke, D. (2004). Job applications and students’ complaint letters in Cameroon.
World Englishes, 23(4), 60111.
Quirk, R., Greenbaum S., G. Leech and J. Svartvik (1985). A comprehensive grammar of
the English language. London: Longman.
Scherer, K. & H. Giles (eds.). (1979). Social markers in speech. London: Cambridge
University Press.
Searle, J. R. (1969). Speech act: An essay in the philosophy of language. Cambridge:
Smith, L. E., (ed.). (1983). Readings in English as an international language. Oxford:
Pergamon.
Sridhar, K. K. (1991). Speech acts in the indigenized variety: Sociocultural values and
language variation. In Jenny Cheshire (Ed.), English around the world: Sociolinguistic
perspectives (pp. 30818). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,.
Sridhar, K. K. (1989a). Pragmatic differences between native and indigenized varieties:
Requesting in Indian English. In J. Walsh (Ed.), Synchronic and diachronic
approaches to linguistic variation and change (pp. 32641). Georgetown University
Round Table on Language and Linguistics 1988. Washington D.C: Georgetown
University Press.
Sridhar, K. K. (1989b). English in Indian bilingualism. Delhi: Manohar.
Sridhar, K. K. (1986). The pragmatics of South Asian English. In R. Baumgardner (Ed.),
South Asian English: Structure, Use, and Usage, (pp. 141157). Urbana and Chicago:
University of Illinois Press.
Trudgill, P. (1984). Sociolinguistics: An Introduction: 2 nd ed. London:
Penguin.
Does Exposure to Second Spoken Language
Facilitate Word Reading Ability?
Raphiq Ibrahim
University of Haifa and Cognitive Neurology Unit
Rambam Medical Center, Haifa
Bio Data:
Dr. Raphiq Ibrahim is a cognitive and neuropsychologist interested in visual and auditory
word perception, language and bilingualism and hemispheric specialization for higher
cognitive function. He lives in the Galilee region in Israel and works in research and
teaching. He is a lecturer at the Learning Disabilities Department of Haifa University
and, in addition, works as a Neuropsychologist in the Cognitive Neurology Unit at
Ramba Medical Center in Haifa. Among the courses he teaches are: Integrative
Introduction to Language Acquisition, Spoken Language, an Introduction to
Developmental Neuropsychology, Psychological and Neuropsychological Assessment,
and Verbal Information processing in Arabic: Processes and Disabilities.
Abstract
This study examines the relationship of reading skills to previous exposure to a second
language. Its purpose is to provide direct evidence of a causal role for bilingualism in
reading acquisition. Single word reading, connected text measures, and vocabulary
measures are compared among three groups of first graders of monolingual Hebrew
speakers, bilingual RussianHebrew speakers and monolingual Arab speakers. Oneway
ANOVA and correlations between the measure of reading speed and errors of text and
measures of vocabulary are compared in Hebrew and Arabic groups. The results reveal
that language experience affects reading, as RussianHebrew bilinguals are faster and
more accurate in reading text than monolingual Hebrew children, and both are better than
Arabic children. It was concluded that exposure to a second language in early childhood
positively affects reading skills at the firstgrade level. This finding concurs with other
reports showing that bilingualism is a powerful predictor of the speed and effieciency of
reading acquisition (Da Fontoura and Siegel, 1995).
Key words: Single word reading, connected text measures, vocabulary measure,
RussianHebrew bilinguals, Hebrew monolinguals, Arab speakers
Introduction
Focusing on reading performance and the variables that influence it have revealed strong
correlative relations with language experience. The majority of previous investigations of
the relationship between bilingualism and reading ability were conducted in English and
other IndoEuropean languages. The general pattern of the effects of bilingualism is that
bilinguals achieve higher scores than monolinguals on tests of arbitrariness (BenZev,
1977; Edwards & Christofersen, 1988) and phonological awareness (Dash & Mishra,
1992), and lower scores than monolinguals on tests of vocabulary size (Doyle,
Champagne & Segalowitz, 1978). Concerning phonological awareness, many studies
have demonstrated that children’s performances in various phonological awareness tasks
are strongly related to the acquisition of reading skills in English (Bradly & Bryant, 1985;
Tunmer & Nesdale, 1986), Italian (Cossu, Shankweiler, Liberman, Katz, & Tola, 1988),
French (Bertlson, Morais, Alegria, & Content, 1985), Spanish (de Manrique & Gramigna,
1984) and Hebrew (Share, Jorm, Maclean, & Matthews, 1984). As for the focus of this
study, that is the vocabulary size, a number of researchers have found that monolingual
children have a larger vocabulary than bilingual children in the dominant language (e.g.
Abudarham, 1997; Doyle et al., 1978). The fact that bilinguals achieve lower scores in
vocabulary when compared to monolinguals is due to the fact that they use their
languages in different contexts and therefore develop only the necessary vocabulary in
these contexts. With the necessity of sharing their language experiences between two
languages, bilinguals have fewer opportunities to experience the vocabulary of either, and
consequently achieve lower scores in comparison to monolinguals in both their first and
second languages. This is compatible with Grosjean’s (1989) claim that a bilingual is not
two monolinguals in one person and the two language systems–in terms of linguistic
processing as well as linguistic representations– cannot be identical in all respects (see
also Grosjean, 1998). This interpretation, however, does not mean that bilinguals always
are lacking vocabulary knowledge. Grosjean explained that in a bilingual mode, once a
base language has been chosen, bilinguals can bring in the other language (the "guest" or
"embedded" language) by shifting completely to the other language for a word, a phrase
or a sentence. The other way is to borrow a word or short expression from that language
and to adapt it morphologically (and often phonologically) into the base language. Thus,
unlike codeswitching, borrowing is the integration of one language into another. In this
type of processing, the bilingual extends the meaning of a word to correspond to that of a
word in the other language and thus creates a new meaning. This become part of a new
language and different vocabulary. What I do suggest is that these comparisons between
bilinguals and monolinguals are important but of limited usefulness for the purposes of
this study.
In a former study, Eviatar and Ibrahim (Eviatar & Ibrahim, 2001) examined the effects
of the relationship between a bilingual's languages and the emergence of metalinguistic
skills in childhood. They used the following logic: given that bilingual children reveal
heightened metalinguistic abilities as a result of acquiring two rather than one linguistic
systems, do preliterate and newly literate Arab children evince this effect before they
have been exposed to any other language? They tested samples of monolinguals
(Hebrew), bilinguals (Hebrew and Russian) and Arabic speaking kindergarten and first
grade children. The Arabic speakers’ first language was spoken Arabic and they were
exposed to Literary Arabic via children’s books, television, and formal instruction in
kindergarten and first grade. The RussianHebrew bilingual children came from Russian
speaking homes and studied in Hebrew at school. They showed higher performance
levels in metalinguistic tests compared to monolinguals, and it was concluded that
Arabic speaking children who are exposed to Literary Arabic behave as bilinguals.
Characteristics of Arabic and Hebrew
In Hebrew and Arabic, both of which are Semitic languages, all verbs and most nouns are
written primarily as consonantal roots that are differently affixed and voweled to form the
words of the lexicon (Berman, 1978). Despite this similarity, there are interesting
differences between Arabic and Hebrew. Formally, Arabic has two forms: Literary
Arabic and Spoken Arabic, but there is a need for clarity in describing these different
varieties of Arabic, especially when discussing skills. Literary Arabic is universally used
in the Arab world for formal communication and is known as “written Arabic”. Since this
phrase adds the element of culture (literature) to the picture and is not relevant to this
psycholinguistic study, the wellknown phrase "Modern Standard Arabic" (MSA) is more
appropriate. The predominant form of Spoken Arabic, on the other hand, is one of a
number of local colloquial dialects but also includes, in certain contexts which vary from
one Arabicspeaking region to another, spoken MSA. The statement “Arabic has two
forms” is controversial. Many modern linguists (Badawi, 1996) have pointed out that
absolute categories do not describe the languagesituation in Arabic with sufficient
accuracy. While there may be two “poles” at either end of a linguistic spectrum, Arabs
use a multitude of different levels of Arabic; Badawi himself identifies six major “levels”
of language in common use in the Arab world, very contextually determined (and very
different from one region to another). He also argued the case that “spoken Arabic has no
written form” claiming that there are large numbers of plays (and a few novels) written
partly or entirely in colloquial dialect. However, he admitted that the dialects are
languages of daytoday communication and are not generally used in written form.
Furthermore, popular preachers and political leaders regularly use colloquial dialect in
their speeches, while such languageuse is considered totally inappropriate in other parts
of the Arabicspeaking region. Although sharing a limited subgroup of words, the two
forms of Arabic are phonologically, morphologically, and syntactically somewhat
different. For example, certain vowels (such as ‘e’ and ‘o’) exist in Spoken Arabic, but
not in Literary Arabic; in Spoken Arabic, words may begin with two consecutive
consonants or with a consonant and a ‘schwa’, while this is not permitted in Literary
Arabic; the two forms utilize different inflections (such as plural markings) and different
insertion rules for function words; also, the two forms have different word order
constraints in sentence structure. As Spoken Arabic has no written form, Literary Arabic
becomes part of everyday life. It is the language in which news is reported (both written
and orally) and the language of prayer and of public occasions. This added complexity is
found in several characteristics that occur in both orthographies, but to a much larger
extent in Arabic than in Hebrew. The first has to do with diacritics and dots. In Hebrew,
dots occur only as diacritics to mark vowels and as a stressmarking device (dagesh). In
the case of three letters, this stressmarking device (which does not appear in
unvowelized scripts) changes the phonemic representation of the letters from fricatives
(v, x, f) to stops (b, k, p for the letters ‫ב‬ ‫ק‬ ‫פ‬ respectively). In the unvowelized form of the
script, these letters can be disambiguated by their place in the word, as only word or
syllable initial placement indicates the consonant stop. In Arabic, the use of dots is more
extensive: many letters have a similar or even identical structure and are distinguished
only on the basis of the existence, location and number of dots (e.g., the Arabic letters
representing /t/ and /n ( ) become the graphemes representing /th/ and /b/ (
) by adding or changing the number or location of dots.
The second characteristic of the two orthographies is that some letters are represented
by different shapes, depending on their placement in the word. Again, this is much less
extensive in Hebrew than in Arabic. In Hebrew there are five letters that change shape
when they are word final: ( ‫ם‬ ‫מ‬ , ‫ן‬ ‫נ‬ , ‫ץ‬ ‫צ‬ , ‫ף‬ ‫פ‬ , ‫ך‬ ‫כ‬ ). In Arabic, 22 of the 28 letters in the
alphabet have four shapes each (for example, the phoneme /h/ is represented
as: ). Thus, the graphemephoneme relations are quite complex
in Arabic, with similar graphemes representing quite different phonemes, and different
graphemes representing the same phoneme. Ibrahim, Eviatar, & AharonPerez (2002)
have shown that adolescent native ArabicHebrew bilinguals process Hebrew letters
faster and more accurately than Arabic letters.
The other important issue is written vowel materials. In Arabic and Hebrew, there are
four letters which also specify long vowels, in addition to their role in signifying specific
consonants. However, in some cases it is difficult for the reader to determine whether
these dualfunction letters represent a vowel or a consonant. When vowels do appear (in
poetry, children's books and liturgical texts), they are signified by diacritical marks
above, below or within the body of the word. Inclusion of these marks specifies the
phonological form of the orthographic string, making it completely transparent in terms
of orthography/phonology relations. As the majority of written materials do not include
the diacritical marks, a single printed word is often not only ambiguous between different
lexical items (this ambiguity is normally solved by semantic and syntactic processes in
text comprehension), but also does not specify the phonological form of the letter string.
Thus in their unpointed form, Hebrew and Arabic orthographies contain a limited amount
of vowel information and include a large number of homographs. In their unpointed form,
Hebrew and Arabic orthographies contain a limited amount of vowel information and
include a large number of homographs. As the homograph phenomenon is very common,
several studies have tested the role of vowels and their influence on reading. Frost (1994)
showed that presentation of voweled words facilitates naming of even nonhomographic
words in Hebrew in skilled readers. AbuRabia and Siegel (1995) found that poor readers
in Arabic rely on context for word recognition more than skilled readers (as in English).
One of the questions that was discussed in recent studies is what good readers do to
distinguish themselves from poor readers. Kintsch (1998) claimed that readers apply
prior knowledge when they read, in order to build an overall meaning structure of the text.
In doing so, each text element is processed and the new proposition is added to the text
and integrated. Kintsch asserts that the integration that takes place at sentence boundaries
is likely to fill the working memory and in the next sentence it must be cleared to make
place for it. What has been constructed is transferred later to long term memory except to
those propositions that are retained due to their relevance for further processing.
Anderson (1995), claimed that both skilled and poor readers seemed to use the same kind
of strategies during reading. This seems to indicate that strategic reading is not a matter
of knowing what strategy to use, but of how to use the strategy successfully and
orchestrate its use with other strategies. According to Anderson, poorer readers are aware
of the right kinds of strategies to use but may not know how to determine if they are
successful in applying the strategies. Also, beginner learners may know what strategies to
use but, due to a lack of vocabulary, may not have a strong enough language foundation
to build on.
The Present Study
The present study focuses on first grade children from the Jewish (Hebrew monolinguals
and RussianHebrew bilinguals) and Arab populations in Israel, presenting them with two
types of reading tasks: text reading measured by reading rate and accuracy, and single
word and nonword reading measured by errors because of the difficulty of measuring
reading time. It is important to note that the monolingual groups were tested in their
native languages. The RussianHebrew bilinguals did the reading tests in their second
language. This came about because the RussianHebrew bilinguals do not learn how to
read Russian. I hypothesize that the relative weight of language experience may affect
both groups differently.
All the participants completed a test of vocabulary size. Given that bilinguals tend to
have smaller vocabularies than monolinguals (in both their languages) (Abudarham,
1997; Doyle, Champagne & Segalowitz, 1978), I tested whether the relationship between
vocabulary and reading skills would be affected by language experience. The second
group of Arabic speakers were members of the Druze minority and called Arabic
speakers. Although socioeconomic data on our participants were not collected
specifically, the overall socioeconomic status of the Jewish and Druze villages from
which our samples were taken was similar (according to the Central Statistical Office in
Israel).
Method
Participants
The participants were 59 children sampled from three population groups in the northern
region of Israel. These populations differ in native language and in their language
experience: 20 monolingual native Hebrew speakers (10 males), 19 children of Russian
immigrants (9 males), where the language spoken at home is Russian and the children are
bilingual in Russian and Hebrew, and 20 native Arabic Druze speakers (10 males). All
the children from each population were in the first grade. Only children aged between 6
years 10 months and 7 years 3 months were included in the study. All the participants live
in villages. The Hebrewspeakers and RussianHebrew bilinguals live in the same large
village (population=10,000), and attend the village state schools. The lifestyle, language,
and social norms of Israeli Hebrewspeakers are similar to those of RussianHebrew
bilinguals who were born in Israel. In that regard, the proficiency of RussianHebrew
speakers in Hebrew is the same as that of monolingual Hebrew speakers since they have
undergone the same time period of exposure to Hebrew. The fact that the parents of
Russian children are immigrants has no effect on their attitudes toward Hebrew or on
their alliance with native Jews since they have a similar ideology of being Israeli citizens,
having been successfully integrated into Israeli society. Russian immigrants have close
contact to each other and to Israeli Jewish society. Despite some normal adjustment
problems, the overall socioeconomic status of the RussianJewish children is similar to
native Jewish children and they attend a mixed Hebrew school. Both the monolingual and
bilingual Hebrew speakers are taught in Hebrew and were tested in Hebrew. The Arab
children attended Arab and are taught in Arabic; they are not exposed to Hebrew. For this
reason they were tested in Arabic. None of the children suffer from known neurological,
emotional or attention disorders. Only children without a known reading disability were
tested.
Materials
Vocabulary Test
The vocabulary subtest from the translated versions of the Wechsler Intelligence Scale
for ChildrenRevised (WISCR) (Wechsler, 1974) to Hebrew and to Arabic was used (see
Appendices a, b). The vocabulary subtest is considered the best single verbal measure of
vocabulary tests appeared in the literature and of general intelligence on the WISCR
(Searls, 1985). The vocabulary was assessed with openended questions where the child
was presented with a word and asked to explain what it means in his/her own words. Raw
scores were used, where easy items receive scores of either 0 or 1, and more difficult
items receive scores between 0 and 2. The maximum score is 36. There are 22 items in
the test.
Reading Tests
Text Reading
The texts were constructed in collaboration with the teachers of the first grade classes in
the respective schools and were designed to reflect the expected level of reading at each
testing time. The text was unknown but taken from the reading book. The text in both
Arabic and Hebrew consisted of 47 pointed words. The text did not contain any unlearned
letters or vowel marks. The child was told, “You are going to see a new text that you
have not seen before, but it is no more difficult than what you are used to reading. You
should read it as quickly as possible but try not to make errors”. The reading session for
each subject was recorded for later coding of reading time and errors.
Single Word and Nonword Reading
Separate word and nonword reading tests were compiled. For both words and nonwords,
two subtests were created, one including 12 single syllable stimuli and one with 12 two
syllable stimuli. The children were presented with each list and asked to read the words.
The words were presented in unpointed form, and all forms of the homographs were
accepted as correct readings. The children were told that some of the stimuli would not be
real words. All the sessions were recorded for later coding.
Procedure
All the children were tested individually in a relatively quiet room at school. Each session
was 40 minutes long and the tests were given in a fixed order in each session: final
phoneme identification, initial phoneme identification, phoneme/syllable deletion,
vocabulary test and reading tests.
Each test was preceded by practice trials to verify that the child understood the task.
During the practice trials, the children were given feedback and, when necessary, the task
was explained again and further examples were given. No feedback was given during the
experimental trials. All the sessions were recorded for later transcription and coding. The
RussianHebrew bilinguals performed the reading tests in their second language while the
monolinguals read in their first language.
Results
Text reading times and number of errors are illustrated in the middle panels of Figure 1.
The analysis for reading time (RT) of the text revealed a significant effect of language
experience, F (2,56)=7.65, p<0.005, with RussianHebrew bilinguals showing the faster
RT (M=112 sec.), Arab children having the slowest RT (M=191 sec.), and monolingual
Hebrew children between (M=127 sec). Planned comparisons revealed that the reading
times of the Hebrew monolinguals and RussianHebrew bilinguals did not differ from
each other (p>0.48) and that the reading times of both differ significantly from those of
Arabic readers (Arabic readers vs. Hebrew monolinguals: F (1,56)=9.0, p<0.005; Arabic
readers vs. RussianHebrew bilinguals, F (1,56)=13.41, p<0.001).
The same statistical analysis for the number of errors in text reading revealed a similar
pattern. The language experience effect was found to be significant, F (2,56)=5.29,
p<0.01, with the RussianHebrew bilinguals making the smallest mean number of errors
(M=3), Arabic readers making the highest mean number of errors (M=8.6), and
monolingual Hebrew speakers between (M=5.6). Planned comparison revealed that the
Hebrew monolinguals and RussianHebrew bilinguals did not differ from each other
(p>0.14) and that both differ from the Arabic readers (RussianHebrew bilinguals vs.
Arabic readers: F (1,56)=10.52, p<0.005; Hebrew monolinguals vs. Arabic readers:
F(1,56)=3.22, p=0.08).
Figure 1: Top panels: Score of the three groups in the tests of vocabulary. Error bars are
standard deviations. Middle panels: Reading text measures. Error bars are standard
deviations. Bottom Panel: Number of errors in single item reading. Error bars are
standard deviations.
Vocabulary
35
30
25
# correct
20
15
10
5
0
Hebrew Russian Arabic
monolinguals Hebrew speakers
bilinguals
language group
Text Reading Speed Errors in Text Reading
16
300 14
250 12
# errors
10
200
8
150 6
RT
100 4
50 2
0
0
monolinguals Hebrew speakers monolinguals Hebrew speakers
bilinguals bilinguals
Hebrew monolinguals RussianHebrew bilinguals

Arabic speakers
8
7
6
5
# errors
4
3
2
1
0
1syllable 2syllable 1syllable
Linguistics Journal Volume 2 Issue 1 2syllable
152
nonw ords w ords
The measure of Vocabulary Test for the sample in this study is illustrated in the top
panel of Figure 1. The Vocabulary Test revealed a significant main effect of language
experience, F(2,56)=10.97, p<0.0001. Here the Hebrew monolingual group achieved
significantly higher scores than both the RussianHebrew bilinguals (F(1,56)=16.78,
p<0.0001) and the Arabic speakers (F(1,56)=15.98, p<0.0001), while these groups did
not differ from each other (p>0.8). This result shows that exposure to the Russian
language in early childhood negatively affects Hebrew vocabulary skills.
Correlation between the measure of reading speed and errors in the text and the
measure of vocabulary were computed. As can be seen in Table 1, vocabulary extent is
not related to text reading speed accuracy for RussianHebrew bilinguals, but is
significantly related to both speed and accuracy for monolinguals and to text reading
speed for Arabicreaders.
Table 1: Correlations between measure of vocabulary and mean text reading time (RT)
and errors (ER). Only significant correlations are shown (p<0.05).
Hebrew monolinguals RussianHebrew bilinguals Arabic readers

N=20 N19 N=20
Text reading RT ERR RT ERR RT ERR
Mean 127 sec 5.6 112 sec 3.1 190 sec 8.6
SD 69.2 6.4 55.7 4.1 74.1 5.0
Vocabulary 0.55 0.52 NS NS 0.54 NS
Separate oneway analyses of variance for each of the single one and two syllable word
and nonword lists were computed, with number of errors as the dependent variable and
language experience as the independent variable. These means are illustrated in the
bottom panel of Figure 1. Language experience approached significance only for the list
of two syllable words, F (2,56)=2.91, p=0.06, where the Arabic readers made the smallest
mean number of errors while RussianHebrew bilinguals and monolingual Hebrew
speakers made more mean errors. In general, the trend was that children reading Arabic
made fewer errors than children reading Hebrew. Correlations between vocabulary and
single word and nonword reading are listed in Table 2. It can be seen that vocabulary
extent is related to single word and nonword reading only for the monolingual Hebrew
readers.
Table 2: Correlations between measure of vocabulary and number of errors in single
word and nonword reading. Only significant correlations are shown (p<0.05).
RussianHebrew
Hebrew monolinguals Bilinguals Arabic readers
N=20 N=19 N=20
Single items words nonwords words nonwords words nonwords
Vocabulary NS 0.44 NS NS NS NS

1syllable items
2syllable items 0.45 NS NS NS NS NS
In order to examine more closely the contribution of vocabulary to reading, regression
analyses for each of the reading measures were computed. The most salient aspect of
these data is that the vocabulary measure predictive of text reading ability and the
regression model of vocabulary measure showing the percentage of variance explained
the situation to a greater degree for the monolinguals, to a significantly smaller degree for
the Arabic speakers, and not at all for the RussianHebrew bilinguals. The results of the
same type of regression analyses for single word and nonword reading are shown in the
right section of Table 3. Here it can be seen that vocabulary measures predict the variance
in word reading for all the groups, and in nonwords to a lesser extent.
The results suggest that there may be a dissociation between the type of reading task,
text or single stimuli, and language experience. Therefore, correlations between the
performance of the children on the text reading tasks and on the single stimuli reading
tasks were computed. These are presented in Table 3. Here it can be seen that there are
large positive correlations between the two types of reading tasks for the monolingual and
bilingual Hebrew readers, and only one, much smaller correlation between the two types
of tasks for the Arabic readers.
Table 3: Correlation coefficients between measures of text reading (RT and errors) and
number of errors in single word and nonword reading. Only significant correlations are
shown (p<0.05).
Text RT Text errors
Single
Items
Monoling Bilingu Arabic Monoling Bilingu Arabic
ual al ual al
Hebrew Hebrew readers Hebrew Hebrew readers
readers readers readers readers
words 1
syllable 0.72 0.53 NS 0.86 0.58 0.49
2
syllable 0.82 0.68 NS 0.89 0.67 NS
nonwords 1
syllable Ns 0.53 NS 0.44 0.56 NS
2
syllable 0.76 0.62 NS 0.77 0.77 NS
Discussion
The present study explores the relationship between language experience and reading
skills in first grade. To elaborate on this issue, I asked if there is an advantage in
bilinguals over monolinguals that carries over to reading performance. As expected, I
found that there are large positive relationships between language experience as measured
by our tests and reading performance. This finding joins the list of studies mentioned in
the Introduction that have observed such relationships.
I looked for specific effects of language characteristics and the linguistic history of our
participants on the reading measures themselves and on the relations between these
measures and the vocabulary measure. For text reading, I found that the groups that were
reading Hebrew performed significantly better than the group that was reading Arabic,
while a trend in the opposite direction was found for reading single words and nonwords.
Most importantly, these two types of tasks also gave rise to an interesting dissociation in
their relationship to vocabulary measure. Further analysis showed that the Russian
Hebrew bilinguals achieved higher scores on the syllable deletion test than the
monolinguals, while their reading scores were equivalent to those of the monolinguals. In
addition, the data in Table 3 reveal that vocabulary size accounts for almost 30% of the
variance in text reading for monolinguals, but not at all for bilinguals. Thus, it may be
that there are other variables that allow the RussianHebrew bilingual children to
compensate for their smaller vocabularies. These finding are consistent with the
observation of Da Fontoura and Siegel (1995) in PortugueseEnglish bilingual children
and Chiappe and Siegel (1999) in PunjabiCanadian bilingual children.
An interesting result concerning language group results was that the Arab children had
lower scores than Hebrew monolinguals on the tests of vocabulary, and their performance
on the text reading measures was significantly poorer. In addition, there were strong
correlations between single item reading measures and text reading measures for the
children reading in Hebrew, but not for the children reading in Arabic. Although this was
not measured directly, I interpret both findings as reflecting differential attentional
requirements in the two languages. Thus, in addition to the children’s linguistic history
variable, the charactersitics of the language that the children learned to read constitute an
important variable; however, this falls beyond the scope of this study and a further study
is needed to explore this issue. This supports the hypothesis that the bilingual children
reading Hebrew were paying more attention to the task, as they made fewer errors than
the monolingual children reading Hebrew. However, when the children were reading the
text, a large attentional demand made by a RussianHebrew speaker in the letter and word
identification stage resulted in less attentional resources available for the higher
processing of syntax and comprehension. This hypothesis is further supported by
examination of the types of errors made by the bilingual children reading the text in
Hebew, which were mostly inaccuracies related to using false affixes (diacritics or letters)
that generally represent the syntactic roles in the sentence and not false identification of
the word itself.
In conclusion, this study provides additional evidence that exposure to a second
language in early childhood affects reading skills in children in the first grade (Da
Fontoura and Siegel, 1995; Chiappe and Siegel, 1999) and that bilingualism is a powerful
predictor of the speed and effieciency of reading acquisition. In that regard, this study
adds an important contribution to our understanding of the relation between bilingualism
and literacy development in languages that have some unique features and have not been
extensively investigated.
1
The lifestyle, language, and social norms of the Druze are similar to the Arab natives.
Although both groups are characterized by strong native language cohesion, they differ in
their identification with the majority (Jewish) group. Based on a historical alliance with
the Jewish people, Israeli Druze have close contact with Israeli society on the one hand,
and close ties and identification with Arab culture and language on the other hand (Abu
Rabia, 1996; Seginer & HalabiKheir, 1998)
References
Abudarham, S. (1997). The tenability of comparing the receptive lexical proficiency of
dual language children with standardized monoglot norms. Educational Studies, 23(1),
127143.
AbuRabia, S. (1996). Druze minority students learning Hebrew in Israel: The
relationship of attitudes, cultural background, and interestingness of material with
reading comprehension in a second language. The Journal of Multilingual and
Multicultural Development, 17(6), 415426.
AbuRabia, S., & Siegel, L.S. (1995). Different orthographies, different context effects:
The effects of Arabic sentence context on skilled and poor readers, Reading
Psychology, 16, 119.
Anderson, D. K. (1995). Hypertext/Hypermedia: Donald H. Jonassen. Englewood Cliffs,
NJ: Educational Technology Publications. Computers in Human Behavior, 11(34),
667668.
Badawi, E. (1996). Essays in Contemporary Arabic Linguistics: The American
University in Cairo Press (1991) s. 4967.
Ben Zeev, S. (1977). The influence of bilingualism on cognitive strategy and cognitive
development. Child Development, 48, 10091018.
Berman, R.A. (1978). Modern Hebrew structure. Tel Aviv, Israel: University Publishing.
Bertelson, P., Morais, J., Alegria, J., & Content, A. (1985). Phonetic analysis capacity
and learning to read. Nature, 313, 7374.
Bradley, L., & Bryant, P.E. (1985). Rhyme and reason in reading and spelling. Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Chiappe, P., & Siegel, L.S. (1999). Phonological awareness and reading acquisition in
English and Punjabispeaking Canadian children. Journal of Educational
Psychology, 91, 2028.
Cossu, G., Shankweiler, D., Liberman, I.Y., Katz, L., & Tola, G. (1988). Awareness of
phonological segments and reading ability in Italian Children. Applied
Psycolinguistics, 9, 116.
Da Fontoura, H.L., & Siegel L.S. (1995). Reading, syntactic, and working memory skills
of bilingual PortugueseEnglish Canadian children. Reading and Writing : An
Interdisciplinary Journal, 7, 139153.
Dash, U.N., & Mishra, H.C. (1992). Bilingualism and metalinguistic development:
Evidence from Kond tribal culture. Psychological Studies, 37(2/3), 8187.
de Manrique, A.M.B., & Gramigna, S. (1984). La segmentación fonológica y silábica
en niños de preescolar y primer grado. Lectura y Vida, 5(1), 414.
Doyle, A., Champagne, M., & Segalowitz, N. (1978). Some issues on the assessment
of linguistic consequences of early bilingualism. In M. Paradis (Ed.) Aspects of
bilingualism (pp. 1320). Colombia, SC: Hornbeam Press.
Edwards, D., & Christophersen, H. (1988). Bilingualism, literacy and meta linguistic
awareness in preschool children. British Journal of Developmental Psychology,
6(3), 235244.
Eviatar, Z., & Ibrahim, R. (2001). Bilingual is as bilingual does: Metalinguistic abilities
of Arabicspeaking children. Applied Psycholinguistics, 21(4), 451471.
Eviatar, Z., & Zaidel, E. (1992). Letter matching in the hemispheres: Speedaccuracy
tradeoffs. Neuropsychologia, 30, 699710.
Frost, R. (1994). Prelexical and postlexical strategies in reading: Evidence from a deep
and a shallow orthography. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning,
Memory, and Cognition, 20, 116129.
Grosjean, François (1989). Neurolinguists, beware! The bilingual is not two
monolinguals in one person. Brain and Language, 36, 315.
Grosjean, François (1998). Studying bilinguals: Methodological and conceptualissues.
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 1, 131–149.
Ibrahim, R., Eviatar, Z., & AharonPerez, J. (2002). Do the characteristics of Arabic
orthography slow its cognitive processing? Neuropsychology, 16(3), 322326.
Kintsch, W. (1998). Comprehension: A Paradigm for Cognition. New York: Cambridge
University Press.
Searls, E. F. (1985). How to use WISCR scores in reading/learning disability diagnosis.
Newark, Delaware: International Reading Association.
Seginer, R., & HalabiKheir, H. (1998). Adolescent passage to adulthood: Future
orientation in the context of culture, age, and gender. International Journal of
Intercultural Relations, 22, 309328.
Share, D., Jorm, A., Maclean, R., & Matthews, R. (1984). Sources of individual
differences in reading acquisition. Journal of Educational Psychology, 76, 13091324.
Wechsler Intelligence Scale for ChildrenRevised (WISCR). David Wechsler
(1974).
Tunmer, W.E., & Nesdale. A.R. (1986). Phonemic segmentations kill and beginning
reading. Journal of Educational Psychology, 77, 417427.
‫‪Appendix A: ‬‬
‫‪ ‬אוצר‪ ‬מלים‬
‫‪ ‬הוראות‪ : ‬אמור ‪ " ‬אני‪ ‬רוצה‪ ‬לראות‪ ‬כמה‪ ‬מלים‪ ‬אתה‪ ‬יוד‪ ‬ע‪ , ‬שים‪ ‬לב‪ , ‬אמור‪ ‬לי‪ ‬מה‪ ‬פירוש‪ ‬המילה‬
‫‪ ‬הזאת‪ ‬נעל‪ ? ... ‬מהי‪ ‬נעל‪ " ? ‬המשך‪ ‬עם‪ ‬שאר‪ ‬המלים‪ ‬בסדר‪ ‬המובא‪ , ‬כשאתה‪ ‬חוזר‪ ‬בכל‪ ‬שאלה‪: ‬‬
‫‪ " ‬מה‪ ‬זה‪ " " ? ‬מהו‪ " ? ‬או‪ ‬מה‪ ‬פירוש‪ ? ... ‬עם‪ ‬ילדים‪ ‬אינטליגנטיים‪ ‬יותר‪ ‬אפשר‪ ‬לוותר‪ ‬על‪ ‬השאלה‬
‫‪ ‬אחרי‪ ‬המלה‪ ‬השלישית‪ ‬ואז‪ ‬הצג‪ ‬רק‪ ‬את‪ ‬המלה‪ . ‬אם‪ ‬תשובתו‪ ‬של‪ ‬הילד‪ ‬אינה‪ ‬ברורה‪ , ‬אמור‪" : ‬‬
‫‪ ‬ספר‪ ‬לי‪ ‬קצת‪ ‬יותר‪ " " ‬פרט‪ ‬עוד‪ " ‬או‪ ‬חזור‪ ‬על‪ ‬השאלה‪ ‬בהדגשת‪ ‬המלה‪ . ‬תשובה‪ ‬שאינ‪ ‬ה‪ ‬מצוי‪ ‬ה‬
‫‪ ‬במילונים‪ ‬לא‪ ‬מזכה‪ ‬בנקודות‪ ‬ו‪ ‬אם‪ ‬יש‪ ‬היסוסים‪ ‬לגבי‪ ‬קבילותה‪ ‬של‪ ‬המלה‪ ‬יבקש‪ ‬מהנבדק‪ ‬לתת‬
‫‪ ‬הסבר‪ ‬נוסף‪. ‬‬
‫‪ ‬אם‪ ‬מילת‪ ‬ההסבר‪ ‬הניתנת‪ ‬דומה‪ ‬בצלילה‪ ‬אך‪ ‬לא‪ ‬במשמעותה‪ ‬למילה‪ ‬המוצגת‪ , ‬יבקש‪ ‬הבוחן‪ ‬הסבר‬
‫‪ ‬נוסף‪ ‬באמורו‪ " : ‬איזה‪ ‬עוד‪ ‬פירוש‪ ‬יש‪ ‬ל‪" .... ‬‬
‫‪ ‬הפסק‪ : ‬לאחר‪ 8 ‬כ‪ ‬י‪ ‬שלונות‪ ‬רצופים‪. ‬‬
‫‪ ‬מילה‪ ‬דוגמא‪ : ‬נעל‬
‫‪ ‬המלים‪: ‬‬
‫‪ . 17 ‬פרווה‬ ‫‪ . 9 ‬מסמר‬ ‫‪ . 1 ‬כובע‬
‫‪ . 18 ‬ארמון‬ ‫‪ . 10 ‬מטרייה‬ ‫‪ . 2 ‬סכין‬
‫‪ . 19 ‬גיבור‬ ‫‪ . 11 ‬מכתב‬ ‫‪ . 3 ‬אופניים‬
‫‪ . 20 ‬לחבר‬ ‫‪ . 12 ‬התחרות‪. ‬‬ ‫‪ . 4 ‬קוביה‬
‫‪ . 21 ‬יהלום‬ ‫‪ . 13 ‬בנזין‬ ‫‪ . 5 ‬חמור‬
‫‪ . 22 ‬אדיב‬ ‫‪ . 14 ‬רימון‬ ‫‪ . 6 ‬עשן‬
‫‪ . 15 ‬ליבש‬ ‫‪ . 7 ‬משור‬
‫‪ . 16 ‬לטבוע‬ ‫‪ . 8 ‬מטרייה‬
‫‪Linguistics Journal Volume 2 Issue 1 ‬‬ ‫‪160 ‬‬
‫‪Appendix B: ‬‬
‫‪ ‬ﺍﻟﺜﺮﻭﺓ‪ ‬ﺍﻟﻠﻐﻮﻳﺔ‬
‫‪ ‬ﺍﻟﺘﻌﻠﻴﻤﺎﺕ‪ : ‬ﻗﻞ‪ " ‬ﺍﻧﺎ‪ ‬ﺍﺳﺎ‪ ‬ﺑﺪﻱ‪ ‬ﺍﻗﻮﺍﻙ‪ ‬ﻛﻠﻤﺔ‪ . ‬ﺍﺳﻤﻌﻨﻲ‪ ‬ﺍﻣﻨﻴﺢ‪ ‬ﻭﻗﻮﻝ‪ ‬ﻟﻲ‪ ‬ﺷﻮ‪ ‬ﻣﻌﻨﻰ‪ ‬ﻛﻞ‪ ‬ﻛﻠﻤﺔ‬
‫‪ ‬ﺷﻮ‪ ‬ﻫﺬﺍ‪ ..... ‬؟‪ ‬ﺷﻮ‪ ‬ﻣﻌﻨﻰ‪ .... ‬؟‪ ." ‬ﺗﻘﺪﻡ‪ ‬ﻓﻲ‪ ‬ﺍﻟﻜﻠﻤﺎﺕ‪ ‬ﺣﺴﺐ‪ ‬ﺗﺮﺗﻴﺒﻬﺎ‪ , ‬ﻭﺍﺭﺟﻊ‪ ‬ﻓﻲ‪ ‬ﻛﻞ‪ ‬ﻛﻠﻤﺔ‪ ‬ﻋﻠﻰ‪ ‬ﺳﺆﺍﻝ‪ : ‬ﺷﻮ‪ ‬ﻫﺬﺍ‪ ..... ‬؟‪ ‬ﺷﻮ‬
‫‪ ‬ﻣﻌﻨﻰ‪ .... ‬؟‪ . ‬ﻋﻨﺪﻣﺎ‪ ‬ﻳﻜﻮﻥ‪ ‬ﺍﻟﻤﻔﺤﻮﺹ‪ ‬ﻋﻠﻰ‪ ‬ﻗﺪﺭ‪ ‬ﻣﻦ‪ ‬ﺍﻟﺬﻛﺎء‪ ‬ﻳﻤﻜﻦ‪ ‬ﺍﻻﺳﺘﻐﻨﺎء‪ ‬ﻋﻦ‪ ‬ﻫﺬﺍ‪ ‬ﺍﻟﻨﺺ‪ ‬ﺑﻌﺪ‪ ‬ﺍﻟﻜﻠﻤﺔ‪ ‬ﺍﻟﺜﺎﻟﺜﺔ‪ ‬ﻭﻋﻠﻰ‬
‫‪ ‬ﺍﻟﻔﺎﺣﺺ‪ ‬ﻟﻔﻆ‪ ‬ﺍﻟﻜ‪ ‬ﻠﻤﺔ‪ ‬ﻛﻤﺎ‪ ‬ﻳﻌﺮﻓﻬﺎ‪ ‬ﺍﻟﻄﻔﻞ‪ . ‬ﺃﺫﺍ‪ ‬ﻛﺎﻥ‪ ‬ﺍﻟﺠﻮﺍﺏ‪ ‬ﻏﻴﺮ‪ ‬ﻭﺍﺿﺢ‪ ‬ﺃﻭ‪ ‬ﺑﺪﻝ‪ ‬ﺗﻌﺮﻳﻒ‪ ‬ﺍﻟﻜﻠﻤﺔ‪ ‬ﻗﺪ‪ ‬ﻳﻌﺮﻑ‪ ‬ﺍﻟﻄﻔﻞ‪ ‬ﻛﻠﻤﺔ‪ ‬ﺍﺧﺮﻯ‬
‫‪ ‬ﺗﺸﺒﻬﻬﺎ‪ ‬ﻓﻲ‪ ‬ﺍﻟﻠﻔﻆ‪ , ‬ﻣﺜﻼ‪ " ‬ﺟﺰﺭ‪ " ‬ﺑﺪﻝ‪ " ‬ﺟﺬﺭ‪ " ‬ﻻ‪ ‬ﻳﺰﻛﻰ‪ ‬ﺍﻟﻄﻔﻞ‪ ‬ﺑﻨﻘﺎﻁ‪ . ‬ﻋﻠﻰ‪ ‬ﺍﻟﻔﺎﺣﺺ‪ ‬ﺍﻥ‪ ‬ﻳﻘﻮﻝ‪ , ‬ﺍﺳﻤﻊ‪ ‬ﻣﻨﻴﺢ‪ . ‬ﺷﻮ‪ ‬ﻣﻌﻨﻰ‪ .... ‬؟‬
‫‪ ‬ﻳﺠﺐ‪ ‬ﺍﻻ‪ ‬ﺗﻬﺠﻰْ‪ ‬ﺍﻟﻜﻠﻤﺔ‪. ‬‬
‫‪ ‬ﺍﻟﺘﻮﻗﻒ‪ : ‬ﺑﻌﺪ‪ 8 ‬ﻣﺮﺍﺕ‪ ‬ﻣﻦ‪ ‬ﺍﻟﻔﺸﻞ‪ ‬ﺍﻟﻤﺘﺘﺎﻟﻲ‪. ‬‬
‫‪ ‬ﻛﻠﻤﺔ‪ ‬ﻧﻤﻮﺩﺝ‪ : ‬ﺣﺬﺍء‬
‫‪ ‬ﺃﻟﻜﻠﻤﺎﺕ‪: ‬‬
‫‪ . 17 ‬ﻗﺼﺮ‬ ‫‪ . 9 ‬ﻣﺴﻤﺎﺭ‬ ‫‪ . 1 ‬ﻗﺒﻌﺔ‬
‫‪ . 18 ‬ﺑﻄﻞ‬ ‫‪ . 10 ‬ﻣﻜﺘﻮﺏ‬ ‫‪ . 2 ‬ﺳﻜﻴﻦ‬
‫‪ . 19 ‬ﻳﻮﺻﻞ‬ ‫‪ . 11 ‬ﻣﺴﺎﺑﻘﺔ‬ ‫‪ . 3 ‬ﺩﺭﺍﺟﺔ‪ ‬ﻫﻮﺍﺋﻴﺔ‬
‫‪ . 20 ‬ﺍﺣﺠﺎﺭ‪ ‬ﻛﺮﻳﻤﺔ‬ ‫‪ . 12 ‬ﺑﻨﺰﻳﻦ‬ ‫‪ . 4 ‬ﻣﻜﻌﺐ‬
‫‪ . 21 ‬ﻳﻤﻨﻊ‬ ‫‪ . 13 ‬ﻗﻨﺒﻠﺔ‬ ‫‪ . 5 ‬ﺣﻤﺎﺭ‬
‫‪ . 22 ‬ﻣﺆﺩﺏ‬ ‫‪ . 14 ‬ﺗﻨﺸﻴﻒ‬ ‫‪ . 6 ‬ﺩﺧﺎﻥ‬
‫‪ . 15 ‬ﻳﻐﺮﻕ‬ ‫‪ . 7 ‬ﻣﻨﺸﺎﺭ‬
‫‪ . 16 ‬ﻓﺮﻭﺓ‬ ‫‪ . 8 ‬ﺷﻤﺴﻴﺔ‬
‫‪Linguistics Journal Volume 2 Issue 1 ‬‬ ‫‪161 ‬‬
A Functional Study of the Final Particle mono in
Japanese Conversational Discourse
Yan Wang
Bio Data:
In 2004, after obtaining her MA degree in Japanese linguistics, Yan Wang embarked
upon her Ph.D degree at the department of East Asian Languages and Literature in
University of WisconsinMadison, USA. The major foci of her research are on discourse
analysis and pragmatics, and she has presented papers on Japanese sentencefinal
particles and “fillers” on several linguistic conferences in the United States. The present
study on the sentencefinal particle “mono” is based on her MA thesis. She is currently
working on her Ph.D. dissertation, which is a comparative study of Japanese and Chinese
question forms.
Abstract
This study aims at investigating the discourse and pragmatic functions of the sentence
final particle (FP) mono in Japanese conversations. By employing discourse analysis as
methodology, and upon analyzing the structure patterns of monoutterances in natural
conversations, I examined how the FP mono contributes to the cohesion of ongoing talks
by organizing the sequences, and how it shows speakers’ attitudes towards both
propositions and addressees. In particular, the FP mono is divided into two types: 1) The
“selfjustification mono,” which serves to justify the speaker’s position that has been
explicitly or implicitly challenged; and 2) The “otherjustification mono,” which supports
the position of others, primarily of the prior speaker, who tends to challenge a “third
party” outside the conversation. By marking the logic as an inevitable and natural
consequence, mono qualifies speakers’ reasoning as generally accepted knowledge
located within common grounds. Hence, rather than neutrally providing supplementary
information, mono conveys speakers’ subjectivity and thereby functions as a modality
marker in conversational discourse.
Key words: sentencefinal particle, causal logic, common ground, justification, challenge
1. Introduction
Mono, a regular noun in Japanese (e.g. Example (1)), has experienced a process of
grammaticalization and is frequently used as a sentencefinal particle (FP) (e.g. Example
(2)) in daily conversations (cf. Tanabe, 1998).
(1) Konna mono ga aru.
thiskind thing NOM thereis
‘There is this kind of thing.’
(2) M: Mendoo miru no taihen na n da yo:: Ore moo sonna hima nai mon:: 4
trouble see NML hard COP NML COP SFP I already such leisure NEG
‘It is hard to take care (of her). I don’t have such free time any more mono.’
Yet, the previous studies of mono have been focused on its usage as a connective particle
(e.g. mono no, mono o) or an auxiliary very (e.g. mono da) (e.g. Teramura, 1978; Sadake,
1984; Shinozaki, 1984), while the FP mono has received little attention.
According to Maynard (1991:382), FPs in Japanese typically convey "the speaker's
subjective, emotional and psychological attitude toward the speech act itself or toward the
interlocutor". Traditionally, the FP mono is seen as a selfjustification marker occurring
in conversations between participants with an intimate relationship in an informal
situation (cf. Sakuma, 1952). Recent studies (Takashi, 1994; Hashimoto, 1998, 2000)
have identified mono as a “modality” indicator.
In the present study, I investigated the usages/functions of the FP mono in actual
interactions with the methodology of discourse analysis and argue that 1) in different
contexts, the FP mono can be used not only for justifying the speaker’s own position, but
also for supporting the addressee’s opinion or assertion; 2) it not only serves as an
“expressive” marker showing the speaker’s emotions or attitudes, but also functions in
discourse for the speaker to organize the sequence of speech acts such as demonstrating
support or justification. I further propose that the various functions of the FP mono in
discourse and interaction are rooted in its semantic source; that is, a causal logic, which is
a natural and inevitable antecedentconsequence relationship located within the “common
ground” of the conversationalists.
The database of this study draws from two sources. The first source includes 12 two
party facetoface conversations arranged between young native Japanese speakers. 5 The
participants include 8 males and 16 females with ages ranging between 20s and 30s.
Most of the speakers were intimate friends except for one pair who were young couples.
All the speakers speak socalled hyoojungo “standard language” or kyootsuugo
“common language” most of the time. The conversations were arranged in
informal/casual settings where the participants were asked to make “free conversations”
without specific topics or tasks assigned. Each of the conversation lasts about 1030
minutes and all the conversations were video taped. Among each conversation, about 5
10 minutes of segments were transcribed for investigation. The second source is the
conversational data book Shufu No Isshuukan No Danwa Shiryoo “Oneweek
Conversational Materials of Housewives” (Ide, 1984), which provides rough transcripts
of conversations among the members of one Japanese family and between housewives
whose ages were 30s to 50s. Both sources involve natural interactions. In total, 72 cases
of FP mono were obtained and investigated. 6
2. Previous studies
Most of the dictionaries (e.g. Gendaigo no joshi/jodooshi –yoohoo to jitsurei, Daijirin)
state that the FP mono is used for the speaker to explain the reason with emotions such as
fuman “dissatisfaction”, fuhei “discontent”, urami “hatred”, amae “dependency”.
Sakuma (1952) emphasizes the function of uttae “appealing” in the usages of the FP
mono, that is, mono is used to express the speaker’s attitude or emotion toward the
addressee. Later on, the function of “appealing” was interpreted in terms of “modality”
by Takashi (1994) and Hashimoto (1998). The question is: why does mono can carry the
speaker’s such emotion or attitude toward the addressee?
Tsubone (1996) attempts to give a coherent interpretation of the usage of mono by
employing the concepts of ippansee “normality” and seitooka “properness.”
(3) Watashi wa sugu ayamaru wa. Kenka nanka shitakunai mono.
I TOP immediately apologize FP quarrel FI dowantNEG
‘I apologize immediately. I don’t want to do things like quarrel mono.’
According to Tusbone (1996), Example (3) can be interpreted as “it is normal or proper
to apologize if (you) don’t want to quarrel.” It implies that there is a commonly accepted
logic indicated by the FP mono. Unfortunately, Tsubone overlooks the logic and fails to
figure out how it works for the various usages of the FP mono. Also, as Hashimoto (1998)
criticizes that the concepts of “normality” and “properness” are unable to account for all
the cases of the FP mono.
In contrast, Takashi (1994) claims that there exists a “causal relationship” between S1
and S2 — S1 is the condition and S2 is the natural consequence of what is described in
S1, which is syntactically embedded in all the uses of grammaticalized mono (1994, p. 6).
Using Takashi’s notion of “causal relationship,” Example (3) can be analyzed as
“Because I don’t want to do things like quarrel, I apologize immediately.” Furthermore,
Takashi points out that the causal relationship is the “core meaning” (contextfree
meaning) of mono, from which the diverse extended meanings (contextbound meanings)
are derived. Regarding the extended meanings, the FP mono is identified as a “discourse
modality indicator,” conveying the subjective attitudes of the speaker such as inevitability
and amae “dependency (Takashi 1994, p. 6).” 7
Similarly, Hashimoto (1998) also proposes a socalled hanashite no ronri “the
speaker’s logic” to explain the function of the FP mono. She hypothesizes that the causal
logic used by the speaker of the FP mono for explanation is the speaker’s personal or
subjective logic, in that the speaker believes that his/her reasoning or explanation is
natural and rightful, even though it might be contrary to the facts or common knowledge.
Both Takashi (1994) and Hashimoto (1998, 2000) suggest that the modality marker FP
mono shows the speaker’s emotions or attitude such as dependence, and helplessness,
which are based on the presumption of the addressee’s kindness and willingness to accept
the speaker’s explanation or logic. However, neither Takahashi nor Hashimoto attempts a
systematic analysis to answer the questions such as: Why can the FP mono carry such
positive as well as negative emotions? How are those emotions expressed by mono
related to the causal relationship in different contexts? In addition, it seems that none of
the previous studies provides a systematic classification of different types of FP mono,
and none of them has given a close examination of their actual textual structures as well
as the interactional functions in various contexts. In this sense, the questions concerning
in what texts and contexts the FP mono occurs and how it contributes to organize the
sequence of the speaker’s argument still remain unclear.
Another problem with those previous studies is their data source. All the previous
studies collect their data from either dictionaries or conversations in fiction texts, which
tend to choose the most typical and normal usage of certain linguistic forms or structures.
Only through examining authentic data can we fully understand how people actually use
language. By doing so, the present study intends to provide a more complete and detailed
discussion of the uses and functions of the FP mono.
3. The semantic meanings of mono
This section clarifies the basic semantic meanings and implications of the FP mono,
which underlie its various usages and pragmatic functions.
As the previous studies have demonstrated, the FP mono marks a causal logic indicating
an antecedentconsequence relationship between S1 and S2. To avoid confusion, in this
study the logical symbols [p] and [q] are employed to signal the logical relationship. [p]
signals the antecedent, and [q] refers to the consequence. As mentioned previously, the
FP mono is attached to [p] rather than [q].
First, let us reconsider Example (2), which shows a typical case of the causal logic.
(2) M: Mendoo miru no taihen na n da yo:: Ore moo sonna hima nai mon::
trouble see NML hard COP NML COP SFP I already such leisure NEG
‘It is hard to take care (of her). I don’t have such free time any more mono.’
In this example, the speaker M is complaining to F about his own girlfriend, who is
hard to please. Here both [p] and [q] appear in M’s single turn as the structure
[q. p mono]. In M’s assumption, [p]: Ore moo sonna hima nai “I don’t have such free
time any more” provides a reasonable reason/cause for [q]: Mendoo miru no taihen na n
da “It is hard to take care of her” and [q] is a natural consequence of [p]. In other words,
M believes that if a person does not have enough time (to please a spoiled girlfriend),
certainly he will have a hard time taking care of her.
However, in most cases, [p] and [q] occur across turns rather than in single turns. For
instance, in the following example, M told A that in Japanese private school English is
treated as one of the yonkyooka “Four subjects” which are the subjects that are less
stressed in the collegeentrance exams. Facing A’s passive response, M further explains
why English is not taken seriously.
(4)
1 M: De, watashi no itteita shiritsu kookoo no eego tteiu no wa(.)
So I NML was saying private high school NOM English QM NML TOP
2 sono yonkyooka atsukai=
that foursubject treatment
‘In the private school that I had mentioned, English was treated as yonkyooka.’
3 A: =E::? Yonkyooka ni haitchau no? USOO::::?(Laugh)
foursubject to enter Q lie
‘Eh? It is counted as “yonkyooka”? That’s a lie!’
4 M: Datte kankee nai mon (.) syuusyoku ni
But relation NEG jobhunting to
‘But it has nothing to do with jobhunting mono.’
5 A: A, sokka.
That Q
‘Oh, I see.’
Here, [p]: Datte kankee nai mon (.) syuusyoku ni (Line 4) appearing in M’s extended

turn is separated from her prior turn [q]: watashi no itteita shiritsu kookoo no eigo tte iu
no wa, so no yonkyooka atsukai (Line 1,2) by A’s turn. The causal relationship between
[p] and [q] is explicit: because English is not related to jobhunting, it is put into the
account of “yonkyooka.” [p] provides a reasonexplanation for the given assertion [q].
Also, [p] and [q] can appear in different speakers’ turns, in which [q] is usually not
overtly stated by the speaker of the monoutterance, but is embedded in the prior
speaker’s talk. Example (5) is such an example, in which the husband H blames the wife
W for failing to keep the house clean and W makes an excuse.
(5) H: Sugoku kitanai ne
Extremely dirty FP
‘It is very dirty, isn’t it?’
W: Datte isogashii n da mon.
But busy NML COP
‘But I am busy mono.’
In this case, the consequence or result [q]: Sugoku kitanai “It is very dirty” is contained
in the prior speaker H’s turn instead of W’s own turn. W provides a causal explanation
toward the situation criticized by her husband, that is, “Because I am busy, the room is
dirty (since I don’t have time to clean up).” The logic underlying the FP mono implies
that it is a natural and inevitable consequence for the room to become dirty under the
condition that a person is busy with other things.
Despite [p] and [q] appearing in one speaker’s single turn or across turns, in one
speaker’s turn or across two speakers’ turns, the logic is embedded in the text or implied
in the context. The general structure involving the occurrence of the FP mono can be
illustrated in the following diagram, in which the antecedent [p], marked by the FP mono,
provides explanation or elaboration for the consequence [q], which can be identified in
the prior text or context.
Figure 2 The general structure of the FP mono usage
q (…) p mono
However, in some cases, the logic marked by the FP mono seems “illogical” or
“unreasonable” to normal way of thinking. Example (6) provides such an example
involving “illogical” logic. Prior to this sequence, G told Y that one of her male
classmates has invited her to dinner and she hoped that they would not become a couple.
Y gives her own opinion on this issue and provides her own personal experience to justify
her prediction about the development of G and her classmate’s relationship.
(6)
1 Y: A:: demo, koibito ni naru to omou [yo?
But boyfriend to become QM think FP
‘But, I think he will become your boyfriend.
2 G: [Ma:ne::: shiyoo ga nai yone.
Well FP method NOM NEG FP
‘Well, there is nothing I can do.’
3 Y: Un:::
4 G: Nat temo ne:=
Become evenif FP
‘Even if we become couples’
5 Y: =Watashi datte (.) sore ni natta mon (.) Atashi
I even that to became I
‘I have become so mono. I have.’
By claiming things like “since my experience was so, the same thing will happen to
you,” the speaker Y tries to show her belief that the supplementary information she
provides definitely will lead to the consequence described in her previous assertion.
Although the logic sounds subjective or unreasonable, Y assumes that it is a “natural” and
“inevitable” consequence because of the similarity between G’s and her own situations.
Overall, the crucial point about the FP mono is that, no matter how subjective or
emotional the logic is, the speaker seems to imply that the consequence is “normal,”
“natural” and “inevitable,” and the logic is commonly accepted by everyone in the world.
In other words, the antecedentconsequence relationship between [p] and [q] underlying
the usage of the FP mono displays strong nuances of “inevitability,” “regularity” (Takashi,
1994, p. 10), or ippansee “normality”(Tusbone, 1996). Here I argue that such “normality”
or “inevitability” is closely related to the concept of “common ground.”
Typically, “common ground” is defined as “a set of propositions representing what the
participants take to be mutually believed or at least mutually assumed for the purpose of
discourse” (Gunlogson, 2003, p. 27). Agreeing with such a traditional interpretation,
Hashimoto (2000) suggests that the FP mono indexes the socalled “common ground” for
the reason that it marks shared information or common knowledge.
As a matter of fact, in a considerable number of cases (e.g. (4) and (5)) in the present
database, the FP mono can be interpreted as a device marking information that is
obviously or reasonably shared between the conversationalists. Nevertheless, in many
other cases such as (2) and (6), the FP mono also marks information that clearly is not
known or believed to be known by the partner. Let us consider another typical example,
in which the monoutterance involves unshared information. In the context preceding
example (7), W told M about her recent change in sleeping habits; that is, she now sleeps
a lot, and gets up very late. In this sequence, W defends herself since she was criticized
by her parents for leading an undisciplined life.
(7)
1 W: Kedo ne::: okorarechatta (0.2)kono mae. Anta:: saikin hiru to yoru ga
But FP wasgotangry this before you recently day and night NOM
gyakuten shitenru no yo::
reversed doing FP FP
‘ But, I got angry with my parents, last time. (They said,) “Your day and night are
reversed recently!”
2 M: Gyakuten shiteru no?=
reversed doing Q?
‘Are you reversed?’
3 W: =Sonna koto nai yo nee:: Datte(.) jyuuni ji da mon:: Jyuuni ji ni neru
Such thing NEG FP FP Because 12 o’clock COP 12 o’clock at sleep
Nanteiu (.) sugoku futsuu da yone:::
QM very normal COP FP
‘There is no such thing. I sleep at 12am mono. Sleeping at 12 am is very normal,
right?!’
4 M: Futsuu dewanai no kamo. Shinnai kedo saa::
normal COPNEG NML maybe knowNEG but FP
‘Maybe it is not normal. I don’t know.’
Notice that the speaker W uses [p]: she sleeps at twelve o’clock to support her own
preceding claim [q]: “There is no such thing.”(i.e., Her day and night are not reversed).
Obviously, the specific personal information about W’s new sleeping schedule is beyond
M’s “territory of information” (Kamio, 1997); that is, the piece of information falls into
W rather than M’s territory. However, by using mono, W shows her strong belief or
assumption that M must share the same obvious and normal logic and thereby must be
able to infer the consequent from the antecedent. In other words, W expects M to draw
the inference that it is certainly not an undisciplined life style at all if a person goes to bed
at twelve o’clock at night.
Therefore, I suggest that even in cases not involving shared knowledge or information
between the conversationalists, the “common ground” between the speaker and the
addressee is still indexed by the FP mono. In such contexts, instead of marking shared
information, mono marks the implication of the causal logic as a “common ground.” In
fact, even in the examples where the information contained in the monoutterance is
actually or possibly shared, the FP mono is not meant so much to signal that the speaker
believes the recipient knows the fact, but rather that the speaker believes the recipient
knows the implication of the logic. Through the employment of the FP mono, the speaker
signals to the recipient his/her assumption or belief that “you certainly share the same
logic with me, because it is so obvious and inevitable.”
The “normality” or “inevitability” indexed in the causal logic, which marks the
speaker’s reasoning as a kind of “common ground knowledge” shared by the addressee,
qualifies the FP mono as a “selfjustification” marker as well as an “otherjustification”
marker and forms the basis of its multiple pragmatic functions.
4. The discourse functions of the FP mono
We have discussed that on the semantic level, the FP mono expresses the speaker’s view
of a kind of natural causal relationship existing in a course of events in a possible world.
This section investigates how the FP mono contributes to the organization of the
sequences where the speakers manage to justify their own or another’s opinion, action or
situation in interaction.
Based on the analysis of the 72 cases in the database, the usages of FP mono are divided
into two types: the first type is “selfjustification” which serves to support the position of
the speaker him/herself; and the second type is “otherjustification” which functions to
support the position of others, primarily the prior speaker or the addressee. While the
selfjustification type occurs in the context where the given or implied position is actually
or potentially challenged, the otherjustification type does not necessarily involve
challenge or disagreement except that it often occurs in the context where the prior
speaker challenges a “third party” outside the conversation or the circumstance 8 .
In the 72 tokens of data, the selfjustification type dominates the data occupying 48
tokens (67 %), while the otherjustification type occupies 24 tokens (33%).
4.1 Selfjustification
According to the data analysis, the “selfjustification mono” tends to occur in two kinds
of sequential structures in conversations.
First, the FP mono provides support or justification for the speaker’s own prior
statement, as shown in the following model.
Model <1> of Selfjustification
Speaker A: STATEMENT [q]
Speaker B: CHALLENGE
(disagreement /clarification questions etc. )
Speaker A: ELABORATION / ACCOUNT [p] mono
When a speaker presents an opinion or assertion, he/she expects the recipient to show
agreement, which is one kind of “preferred response.” However, in the contexts where
the recipient shows disagreement, raises clarification questions such as “what do you
mean?” or partially repeats the prior talk with a rising intonation, the initial speaker’s
statement is challenged. All these practices indicate the recipient’s lack of agreement to
the prior statement and may foreshadow an upcoming disagreement later in the sequence
(cf. Mori, 1999). If we call explicit disagreement “actual challenge,” those clarification
questions and repetitive questions can be called “suggested challenge” or “potential
challenge” (Maynard: 1992, 1993). In the contexts where the speaker’s position is
challenged, the speaker is capable of being aware of the explicit or potential problems
with the uptake of his/her prior statement and thus tends to add elaborations,
clarifications or justification to support the prior statement.
The previously discussed example (4) provides a typical case of Model <1>.
(4)
1 M: De, watashi no itteita shiritsu kookoo no eego tteiu no wa(.)
So I NML was saying private high school NOM English QM NML TOP
sono yonkyooka atsukai=
that foursubject treatment
‘In the private school that I had mentioned, English was treated as yonkyooka.’
2 A: =E::? Yonkyooka ni haitchau no? USOO::::?(Laugh)
foursubject to enter Q lie
‘Eh? It is counted as “yonkyooka”? That’s a lie!’
3 M: Datte kankee nai mon (.) syuusyoku ni
But relation NEG jobhunting with
‘But it has nothing to do with jobhunting mono.’
4 A: A sokka.
That Q
‘Oh, I see.’
In the dispreferred response to M’s initial statement, A initiates her disagreement by a
clarification backchannel “Ee?(eh),” which is followed by repetition of the problematic
point with a rising tone and a strong disagreement expression uso “lie.” Facing A’s
challenge, in the extended turn, M qualifies her prior assertion by explaining the
reason/cause why English receives less attention. Furthermore, as discussed in the prior
section, the attachment of mono grants the speaker’s reasoning a sense of “normality”;
that is, if a subject does not play a role in jobhunting, it is normal and natural to treat it
as a minor subject, socalled “yonkyooka.” The FP mono conveys the speaker’s internal
voices such as “The reason is so obvious, isn’t it?!”
However, explicit disagreement is relatively limited in the communications of Japanese
people. The cases like (8) are more common, in which the recipient S shows attitude of
doubt toward the prior speaker K’s information with a series of questions.
(8)
1 K: Kyoo sakki sa::, [nanka tomodachi ni, (0.3) keetai denwa no mo=
Today rightnow FP FI friend to cell phone NML too
‘Today I just called my friend’s cell phone right now.’
2 S: [un
3 K:=Nihon no [tomodachi? Denwa shita no.
Japan NML friend phone doPST FP
‘I called my friend in Japan.’
4 S: [un un.
5 Keetai denwa kakeraren no?
Cell phone callcan Q
‘Can you call cell phone?’
6 K: Kakerareru, kakerareru.
Callcan callcan
‘I can. I can.’
7 S: E? Amerika kara keetaidenwa ni kakerare[ru no?
America from cell phone to callcan Q
‘Eh? Can you call to cell phone from America?”
8 K: [Kakerareru kakerareru
callcan callcan
‘I can. I can.’
9 Kaketeru mon date tama: ni (.) hotondo kakenai kedo.
Calling because sometimes almost callNEG but
‘Because I calls sometimes mono. I rarely call, though.’
10 S: Uso:::
Lie
‘That is a lie.’
S’s continuous conformational questions in Line 3, 5, 7 indicate that she does not fully
believe that K’s information about calling cell phone in Japan is true. Given the lack of a
straightforward uptake of his statement, K further justifies himself by providing a piece
of evidence in Line 9— he does call cell phones in Japan occasionally. The FP mono
occurs in such an extensional turn serving for selfjustification.
In addition to justify the speaker’s prior statement which has been challenged by the
recipient, the utterances ending with mono can also serve to defend the speaker’s
personal action or situation, which is implicitly embedded in the context. In such cases,
the FP mono appears in the “second pair part” of “an adjacency pair,” (c.f. Schegloff,
1984) while the challenge from the conversationalist occurs in the “first pair part,” taking
the form of a negative comment/evaluation of the monospeaker’s action/situation or as a
command. In addition, a questionanswer adjacency pair is frequently observed, in
which the inquiree takes the question from the inquirer as a kind of criticism or challenge
and thereby uses a monoutterance to defend his/her own position in the response.
The structure of those adjacency pairs can be illustrated in Model <2>.
Model <2> of selfjustification
Speaker B: CHALLENGE
(Negative evaluation/critical interrogation/command)
Speaker A: (DISPREFERRED RESPONSE) + ACCOUNT mono
The following is one of the examples 9 matching Model <2>, which presents an
illustration of the adjacency pair where the mother M criticizes the daughter for always
making the same mistake in piano practice and the daughter D selfjustifies her position.
(9)
M: Anata soko ittsumo yureru kireru kara, soko dake kiotsuke nasai yo.
You there always shake break because there only be careful IMP FP
‘You always shake and break there, so just pay attention there.’
D: Iya. Moo kiotsuke temo moo dame na n da mon
No already pay attention evenif already useless COP NML COP
‘No. Because even if I have already paid attention, it is useless at all mono.
In the second part of this adjacency pair, D responds to M’s criticism and command
with a strong emotional refusal expression iya “no,” which is immediately followed by an
account. Since refusal is a type of “dispreferred response,” the monoutterance in D’s turn
tends to be seen as a case of “accounts for dispreferred responses.” Although apparently
the monoutterance accounts for D’s decline of M’s demand, essentially, it functions to
justify or defend D’s challenged situation/action. For the purpose of selfjustification, D
prefaces a piece of causal explanation: “Even if I pay attention, I still cannot do it well.
So I do not want to try any more.” Despite the emotionality embedded in the reasoning,
by using mono, D implies that it is natural for people to stop further effort under the
condition that no matter how careful they are, they still cannot avoid making the same
mistakes. Therefore, the FP mono shows D’s attitude of lack of responsibility for the
uncontrollable mistake, and indicates her assumption that M would understand her
helpless situation and forgive her refusal.
So far I have examined the two typical models observed in the cases of selfjustification
mono, in which the FP mono is characterized as a device for justifying or accounting for
the speaker’s own position in the context of being “explicitly” or “implicitly” challenged
by another conversationalist. The data analysis further suggests that the speaker’s
emotional attitude such as helplessness or “dependency” is generally indexed in most of
the cases of selfjustification. Also, in some cases, both positive and negative attitudes
can be simultaneously conveyed by mono. The FP mono, on one hand, carries positive
nuances such as “I know you will accept my excuse;” on the other hand, it may sound
like blaming the recipient that “You should have known that it is not my fault!” or “Why
don’t you understand me?!” The present study hypothesizes that the various complex
emotions and attitudes indicated by the FP mono are all derived from the “normality” and
“inevitability” of the causal logic and the implication of the “common ground,” which are
embedded in the semantic meanings of the FP mono.
4.2 Otherjustification
Both traditional views and previous studies treat the FP mono merely as a device for
managing selfjustification. 10 However, in the present database, many cases of mono are
found in nonchallenging contexts where the recipient delivers agreement with the prior
speaker. On such occasions, the sentence ended by mono serves to justify or to support
the opinions or evaluations proffered by the prior speaker.
Consider one of the examples which do not have any involvement of challenges: the
conversation participants cooperate with each other by providing supportive assertions or
information. In (10), S, Y and C are housewives in a cooking class, who are talking about
the dish that one of their friends, Nakagawasan might be fond of.
(10)
1 S: Nakagawasan suki soo ne. Koo iu mono.
like likely FP this say stuff
‘Nakagawasan might like,this kind of stuff (food).’
2 Y: koo iu no ga dai sukina n desu, karashi no.
This say NML NOM very like NML COP spicy NML
‘He likes this kind very much, the spicy one.’
3 C：Datte, osake suki da mon.
because alcohol like COP
‘He likes alcohol mono.’
4 Y: Soo desu ne.
right COP FP
‘That is right.’
5 S：Osake sukina kata wa koo iu mono suki ne
alcohol like person TOP this say stuff like FP.
‘The people who like alcohol like this kind of thing.’
Initially, Y shows support of S’s assertion by claiming that Nakagawasan may like this
dish since he likes spicy food (Line 2). In order to justify Y’s statement, the speaker C
further provides a piece of additional information that Nakagawasan likes alcohol with
an ending of the FP mono (Line 3). As the speaker S summarizes at the end of this
sequence (Line 5), the causal logic underlying C’s monoutterance is that everyone who
likes alcohol certainly likes spicy food, and thereby likes this kind of dish. It is interesting
to see how the interlocutors cooperate with and support each other in this data. The FP
mono helps to establish such a cooperative rapport conversation. Meanwhile, by using
mono, the speaker attempts to show an attitude of “solidarity” with the other
conversational participants by indicating the sharedness of both the information (e.g.
Nakagawasan likes alcohol) and the causal logic among them.
Similarly, in the following example, no sign of actual or potential challenge among the
participants of the conversation is observed. W is complaining about the topic of the final
paper suggested by their professor. The classmate T agrees with W and provides
supplementary information about the difficulty in data collection to justify W’s opinion.
(11)
W: Sore chotto muri janai?
that a little unreasonable TAG
‘That is like unreasonable, isn't it?’
T: So::. Datte (.) zenzen tsukawanai mon::
right because completely useNEG
‘Right. Because (we) don't use it at all mono.’
In this case, the FP mono serves to demonstrate recipient T’s agreement with W. T’s

response is a typical structure of “Agreementpluselaboration” (Mori, 1999), in which
she first claims her agreement with W and then qualifies W’s statement by a piece of
supplemental evidence displayed in the monoutterance. Note that in the monoutterance,
T joins W’s critique of the professor’s suggestion. Specifically, by using mono, T
prefaces her assumption that W not only shares the knowledge about the logic (i.e., it is
impossible to write a paper if native speakers do not use the expression frequently), but
also shares the feeling of dissatisfaction with the professor’s suggestion. In this sense, the
FP mono serves as a solidarity creator or “positive politeness strategy” (Brown &
Levinson, 1987) to show T’s alignment with W against the professor, who is a “third
party” outside of the conversation, and thereby to elicit W’s feeling as a peer.
In short, as discussed above, in the cases of “otherjustification,” [q] is not embedded in
the speaker of the monoutterance's own prior turn; rather, it must be sought in the other
conversationalist's utterance. In such contexts, the FP mono functions to show the present
speaker’s agreement with or support to the prior speaker’s position. In addition, the other
justification mono often occurs in the contexts where the speaker intends to show miuchi
ishiki “solidarity” by reinforcing the shared stance of challenging someone or something
else.
5. Conclusions
This study has examined the various uses of the FP mono and has attempted to
demonstrate that the underlying causal logic forms the basis of its multiple discoursal and
interactional functions. It suggests that the logic between [p] and [q] is marked by the FP
mono as an “inevitable” and “natural” consequence, which is presented as normal
knowledge located in the “common ground” between conversational participants.
Therefore, the FP mono implies that the consequence is beyond the speaker’s control and
the speaker’s reasoning should be obviously acceptable and understandable to everyone
including the addressee. With the contribution of this implication, the speaker intends to
justify his/her own position or support the prior speaker’s assertion.
As summarized in Table 1, two types of mono are discussed in terms of the discourse
structure in which the FP mono occurs. First, as a “selfjustification” marker, mono is
employed to justify the speaker’s own position, which has been explicitly or implicitly
challenged. Second, as an “otherjustification” marker, the monoutterance serves to
support the prior speaker’s position, which, in many cases, tends to challenge a “third
party” or the given social/physical circumstance. In the cases of either selfjustification or
otherjustification, rather than neutrally providing supplementary or elaboration
information, the FP mono displays the speaker’s subjectivity and shows his/her complex
attitude/emotion, which vary in different contexts. In general, selfjustification mono can
reveal the speaker’s internal voices such as “The reasoning is so obvious and natural,
isn’t it?!” “You certainly will accept my explanation” or “Why do you blame me for such
an issue beyond my control?!” Other justification, on the other hand, tends to convey the
speaker’s attitude of alignment or solidarity with the addressee in a stronger affective
tone and thereby to elicit the addressee’s feeling of being a peer.
Table 1 The summary of the differences between “selfjustification mono” and

“otherjustification mono”
selfjustification mono Otherjustification mono

48 token s 67 % 24 tokens 33 %
Functions: supporting the speaker’s own position supporting the prior speaker’s position
Contexts: being challenged by the addressee challenging a third party
Attitudes: dependence, helplessness, faultlessness solidarity, alignment
In the present database, selfjustification predominates, occupying twothirds of the
total cases. The predominance of this type explains why traditional views exclusively
treat the FP mono merely as a selfjustification marker, while ignoring its usage in
collaboration with others.
From the case study of the FP mono, we can see the speaker’s attempt and effort to
regulate communication with others; that is, to organize the sequence of his/her talk for
the purpose of conducting certain speech acts, and to show his/her subjective
attitude/emotion so as to elicit the addressee’s understanding/empathy or feeling of
solidarity. Therefore, rather than examining grammatical structures or forms as entities
independent of their actual production in real conversations, the study of grammar in
contextualized interaction should be considered as one of the biggest tasks that linguists
face. Also, the study of the FP mono has valuable implications for those acquiring
Japanese as a second language. The richness of sentencefinal elements of Japanese is an
important and difficult part for learners. Learning how to manipulate FPs to express
feelings or to show attitudes in conversation advances Japanese learners’ comprehension
as well as communication skills.
Notes:
(1) The FP mono often takes reduced phonological form of mon in colloquial
conversations. The process of this derivation remains unclear in the current relevant
studies.
(2) The 12 transcripts were shared at a seminar called “Studies of Japanese linguistics” at
the University of XXXX.
(3) Among the 72 tokens, 14 tokens are combined with the other sentencefinal particle
ne, taking the form of mono ne. The subtle difference between mono and mono ne is
one of the topics that I will explore in the future.
(4) The concept amae “dependency” is regarded as the base of Japanese prototypical
social relationships and communicative style. It has complex meanings and
implications. As Clancy (1986) defines it, to amaeru is to depend upon or presume
upon another’s benevolence.
(5) The labels of position, support and challenge are borrowed from Schiffrin (1987) In
particular, position is defined broadly to include assertions or opinions, situations and
actions of the given individuals; support is realized by explanation, justification, and
defense of a position that can be disputed; and challenge is defined as the existence of
problems with the acceptance of the given position by other people. In other words,
when one’s statement, action or situation has difficulties in being understood or
agreed upon by others, who show doubts, confusion, disagreement or criticism in the
interaction, the given position is challenged.
(6) Since (9), (10) are examples taken from Syufu no issyuukan no danwa shiryoo “One
week Conversational Materials of Housewives” (Ide, 1984), the detailed
transcriptions including prosodic features are not available.
(7) Hashimoto (1998) mentions the usage of mono to justify the addressee’s prior
statement, and names it katagawari benmee “peerjustification.” Nevertheless, she
fails to provide further analysis on this issue.
References
Brown, P. & Levinson, S. (1987). Politeness: Some universals in language
usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Clancy, P. (1986). The acquisition of communicative style in Japanese. In B. Schieffelin
and E. Ochs (Eds.), Language socialization across cultures (pp. 21350). Cambridge:
Gendaigo no joshi/jodooshi –yoohoo to jitsurei (Contemporary Postpositional
Particle/Auxiliary verb—Usages and Examples) Kokuritsu kokugo kenkyuujo
(National Japanese Research Institute)
Hashimoto, Y. (1998). Syuujoshi “mono”—“hanashite no ronri” ni yoru setsumee
(The sentencefinal particle mono—the explanation based on “the logic of the speaker”)
Collected Articles on the Japanese Language, 35(2), 124129.
Hashimoto, Y. (2000). “Shuujoshi “mono” no positive politeness” Presented in Shakai
Gengo Kagakukai Dairokkai Kenkyuu Happiao Daikai (the Six Social Linguistic
Conference). Retrieved Dec. 2005 from
http://homepage1.nifty.com/jiamei/nihongo/monoshagengo.htm
Ide, S. (1984). Syufu no issyuukan no danwa shiryoo (Oneweek Conversational
Materials of Housewives). The Japanese Women’s University
Kamio, A.(1997). Territory of Information. Amsterdam: John Benjamins
Maynard, S. K. (1991). Pragmatics of discourse modality: A case of the Japanese
emotional adverb doose. Pragmatics, 1(3), 37192
Maynard, S. K. (1992). Speech act declaration in conversation: functions of the
Japanese connective datte. Studies in Language, 16(1), 6389
Mori, J. (1999). Negotiating Agreement in Japanese: Connective Expressions and Turn
Construction. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Sadake, K. (1984). –mono de/mono no/ mono o, in Nihongogaku, 3(10). Meiji Syoin
Shinozaki, I. (1984). mono no imi (The meaning of mono), in Sophia linguistica, No. 17.
Teramura, H. (1978). ‘mono’ to ‘koto’ (‘mono’ and ‘koto’ ). In Kokugogaku ronsyuu,
Daisyuukan Syoten
Sakuma, A. (1952). Gendai nihongohou no kenkyuu (The Study of Contemporary
Japanese Grammar). Kouseisya Kousei Kaku
Schegloff, E. A. (1984). On questions and ambiguities in conversation. In J.M. Atkinson,
& John Heritage (Eds.), Structures of social action. (pp. 28101) Cambridge:
Shriffrin, D. (1987). Discourse markers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Takashi, K. (1994). A study of the speaker's individualistic spirit reflected in Japanese: A
case of the Japanese discourse modal mono, Journal of Asian Pacific Communication,
5(1&2), 518
Tanabe, K. (1998). Keeshiki meeshi “mono” ni okeru bunpoo toshite no bunmyakuka to
syukanka (The textual and subjective aspects of grammaticalization of the pseudo noun
‘mono’). Collected Articles on the Japanese Language, 35(2), 507513.
Tsubone Y. (1996). Syuujoshi, setsuzokujoshi toshite no “mono” no imi —“mono”
“mono nara” “mono no” “mono o” (The meaning of mono as sentencefinal particles
and connective particles) Japanese Education 91.

April 2007 Vol2 Issue1

Загружено:

Сведения о документе

Исходное описание:

Авторское право

Доступные форматы

Поделиться этим документом

Поделиться или встроить документ

Параметры публикации

Этот документ был вам полезен?

Это неприемлемый материал?

Авторское право:

Доступные форматы

April 2007 Vol2 Issue1

Загружено:

Авторское право:

Доступные форматы

The Linguistics Journal

Editors: Paul Robertson and John Adamson

Item 1 2 3 4 5 Mean Standard

6. If someone spent one hour a day

10. Learning a foreign language is

11. Learning a foreign language

12. Learning the Russian language is

Item 1 2 3 4 5 Mean Standard

14. You should not say anything in the

15. If I heard someone speaking the

16. It is OK to guess a Russian word if

Item 1 2 3 4 5 Mean Standard

18. I think knowing a foreign language

19. I think everybody should have an

Drawing on Politeness Theory and the Community of Practice model, Holmes, Newton,

(1) express emotions (complainer expresses negative feelings and disapproval,

Table 3: Kruskal­Wallis H test for Social Class as the Grouping Variable

Independent Variables most important least important

'providing rhetoric for argument' while perceived situational seriousness significantly

A contrast is drawn with static verbs (also called stative or state verbs), which do not

Table 4.3 shows that most nominal headlines in the English sample were premodified

As shown in Table 4.4, adjectives were the most common type of premodifying items

Functional English Persian

Headlines classified by English Persian

Headlines with more than English Persian

Type of free structure English Persian

Clauses classified by structure of English Persian

Nouns with different English Persian

Verbs with different syllables English Persian

Usage and omission of English Persian

Hebrew monolinguals Russian­Hebrew bilinguals

Hebrew monolinguals Russian­Hebrew bilinguals Arabic readers

Vocabulary NS ­0.44 NS NS NS NS

Here, [p]: Datte kankee nai mon (.) syuusyoku ni (Line 4) appearing in M’s extended

In this case, the FP mono serves to demonstrate recipient T’s agreement with W. T’s

Table 1 The summary of the differences between “self­justification mono” and

self­justification mono Other­justification mono

Вам также может понравиться

Table 3: KruskalWallis H test for Social Class as the Grouping Variable

Hebrew monolinguals RussianHebrew bilinguals

Hebrew monolinguals RussianHebrew bilinguals Arabic readers

Vocabulary NS 0.44 NS NS NS NS

Table 1 The summary of the differences between “selfjustification mono” and

selfjustification mono Otherjustification mono