Hesitaton Phenomena in COnversational Interaction Among Speaking EFL Learners

Hesitation is the phenomenon when people have speech disfluency in structuring sentences. English Conversation Club is one of the domains where hesitation phenomena occur among EFL learners that practicing their conversation. This study examines the hesitation phenomena and why the members are being hesitated during the interaction. Rose’s theory of taxonomy of hesitation phenomena (2012) is adopted. The approach used is the qualitative approach. Besides, the writer is also the participant observation to collect the data by recording and taking notes. This study resulted that most of the hesitation phenomena are found in the conversation conducted by the learners. The reason for being hesitant is unable to express the language and poor communication skills. Those occur spontaneously and naturally due to the reason that the processing of language in the brain is not as easy as it is produced directly.

Fantastic hesitation, phenomena and the male character in Marie NDiaye’s Three Strong Women

The aim of this article is to demonstrate that the male protagonist of the second story of Marie NDiaye’s Three Strong Women (Trois femmes puissantes) can be viewed as a fantastic character. The protagonist’s hesitation in the face of unsettling phenomena – both the external world and the traumatic events from his past – constitutes the central pivot of his construction. The fantastic characteristics of Rudy Descas, whose voice is predominant in the text, reveal the multidimensionality of the supernatural in NDiaye’s work, as the boundaries between the notion of the “character” and the “phenomenon” are not clearly defined. The analysis is based on literary theories concerning the nineteenth century fantastic, the new fantastic and the African fantastic.

ON THE PRINCIPLES OF CREATING PHONETIC CORPORA OF TURKIC LANGUAGES ON THE BASIS OF DIALECTS OF BASHKIR LANGUAGE

The article deals with the principles of transcription of audio materials of field expeditions to create a phonetic corpus of Turkic languages, including dialects and subdialects. Transcription is developed on the basis of audio corpus data on the subdialects of the Eastern dialect of the Bashkir language. It is close to phonemic and as close as possible to the spelling of the modern language. Free access of linguists of different specialization to the primary corpus is provided, which will serve as an invaluable source for the study of territorial dialects, the establishment of areas of distribution of a language phenomenon, will be the basis for the study of the historical development and formation of the literary language, sociolinguistic analysis, comparative studies of languages. The proposed guidelines for the transcription of the audio field expeditions, multi-level layout, including paralinguistics elements hesitation phenomena will be useful when creating similar corpora phonetic speech for all related Turkic languages.

A corpus-driven analysis of uncertainty and uncertainty management in Chinese premier press conference interpreting

This paper examines uncertainty encountered by expert interpreters at Chinese Premier Press Conferences by marking interpreters’ five types of hesitation phenomena and analyzes uncertainty management strategies. Results show (1) self-corrections, repetitions, and reformulations occur less frequently than pauses, indicating expert interpreter’s better control of interpreting fluency; (2) speakers may impact interpreters’ hesitation with segment length positively correlated with interpreters’ pauses, self-correction, and reformulation, and speaking rate explains the variance in the occurrence of filled pauses; (3) pauses occur for retrieving lexical and morphological information, eliminating logical doubt, and explicating cultural connotation; (4) expert interpreters adopt addition and rank shift more than ellipsis, simplification, splitting, and repetition as uncertainty management strategies, showing an emphasis on adequacy, comprehensibility, and acceptability in their output.

Young learners’ response processes when taking computerized tasks for speaking assessment

We investigated how young language learners process their responses on and perceive a computer-mediated, timed speaking test. Twenty 8-, 9-, and 10-year-old non-native English-speaking children (NNSs) and eight same-aged, native English-speaking children (NSs) completed seven computerized sample TOEFL® Primary™ speaking test tasks. We investigated the children’s attentional foci on different test components (e.g., prompts, pictures, and a countdown timer) by means of their eye movements. We associated the children’s eye-movement indices (visit counts and fixation durations) with spoken performance. The children provided qualitative data (interviews; picture-drawings) on their test experiences as well. Results indicated a clear contrast between NNSs and NSs in terms of speech production (large score differences) as expected. More interestingly, the groups’ eye-movement patterns differed. NNSs tended to fixate longer on and looked more frequently at the countdown timer than their NS peers, who were more likely to look at content features, that is, onscreen pictures meant to help with building up speech. Specifically, the NNSs’ fixations on timers were likely to co-occur with hesitation phenomena (e.g., hemming; pausing; silence). We discuss (a) the potential effects of test-specific features on children’s performance and (b) child-appropriate test accommodations and practices.

Language attrition, language contact and the concept of relic variety: the case of Barossa German

This article theorizes on the relation between individual and societal language loss. In this context, the notion of relic variety will be introduced, describing a setting where a language is spoken by a very small number of speakers who live isolated from the main speech community and have not acquired literacy in their L1. The article focuses on attrition phenomena in a specific relic variety, i.e. Barossa German, a German-speaking enclave in South Australia. It analyses phenomena caused by lack of usage (hesitation phenomena, code-switching, semantic restructuring) as well as reduction processes, namely of the German case system. The results of the analysis demonstrate that in contrast to canonical attrition settings, in a relic variety morphological markers are only retained in constructions that had been either entrenched early in the acquisition processes or are very frequently used. It will be argued that the main factors influencing the reduction process are the variety of input, a decrease of normativity and the absence of a written variety.