How do people listen in a conversation, especially in an intercultural setting, and how do they shift from listener to speaker in the particular context? This book investigates listenership behaviours of a tutor and a student in the context of academic supervision sessions at a university in the UK, comparing British tutor - British student conversations with British tutor - Japanese student conversations in English. A new research methodology, a time-aligned multimodal corpus analysis, is introduced for analysing listenership and turn-taking structure, synthesising visual data with verbal data in timeline. The method also integrates discourse-pragmatic and conversation analytic approaches with the corpus-based analysis. This work reports strategies in use of response tokens for framework shifts and multi-functional nature of hand gestures observed in the conversations. Therefore, this book is highly relevant for researchers and postgraduate students, who study pragmatic and discursive practice in intercultural settings using multimodal corpora.

Drawing on the concept of resilient healthcare, this book explores multimodally embedded everyday practices of healthcare professionals in the UK and Japan, utilising novel technology, such as eye-tracking glasses, to inform what constitutes good practice. Providing an interdisciplinary examination of the theories and rationales of resilient healthcare, the book engages with a range of case studies from a variety of healthcare settings in the UK and Japan and considers the application of advanced technologies for visualising healthcare interactions and implementing virtual healthcare simulation. In doing so, it showcases a number of multimodal approaches and highlights the potential benefits of multimodal and multidisciplinary approaches to healthcare communication research for enhancing resilience in their local contexts.

This edited book examines the phenomenon of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) in the Japanese context, using multilingualism as a lens through which to explore language practices and attitudes in what is traditionally viewed as a monolingual, monocultural setting. The authors cover a broad spectrum of topics within this theme, including language education policies, the nature of ELF communication in both academic and business settings, users’ and learners’ perceptions of ELF, and the pedagogy to foster ELF-oriented attitudes. Teaching and learning practices are reconsidered from ELF and multilingual perspectives, shifting the focus from the conformity to native-speaker norms to ELF users’ creative use of multilingual resources. This book is a key resource for advancing ELF study and research in Japan, and it will also be of interest to students and scholars studying multilingualism and World Englishes in other global contexts.

This book challenges the view that digital communication in Africa is limited and relatively unsophisticated and questions the assumption that digital communication has a damaging effect on indigenous African languages. The book applies the principles of Digital African Multilingualism (DAM) in which there are no rigid boundaries between languages. The book charts a way forward for African languages where greater attention is paid to what speakers do with the languages rather than what the languages look like, and offers several models for language policy and planning based on horizontal and user-based multilingualism. The chapters demonstrate how digital communication is being used to form and sustain communication in many kinds of online groups, including for political activism and creating poetry, and offer a paradigm of language merging online that provides a practical blueprint for the decolonization of African languages through digital platforms.

Language is a complex system that transfers ideas, feelings, experiences, beliefs, and cultures to others. One of the interactional resources that are utilised to make this transmission more coherent and effective is Discourse Markers (DMs). This monograph analyses these markers in doctoral supervisions but uses a multimodal approach to provide a deeper understanding of these DMs and uncovers potential hidden meanings that would escape a purely verbal analysis. Using a dataset consisting of a corpus of video-recorded doctoral supervision meetings, this book provides an innovative and cutting-edge approach to the analysis of DMs and sheds new light on the complexity and dynamicity of naturally occurring discourse where meaning-making rests on a close coordination of both verbal and embodied conducts. The book makes very useful reading for scholars in the fields of discourse markers, conversation analysis, corpus linguistics and multimodality. It could collaterally be appealing to anyone simply interested in the study of human communication.

Corpus Linguistics, Context and Culture demonstrates the potential of corpus linguistic methods for investigating language patterns across a range of contexts. Organised in three sections, the chapters range from detailed case studies on lexico-grammatical patterns to fundamental discussions of meaning as part of the ‘discourse, contexts and cultures’ theme. The final part on ‘learner contexts’ specifically emphasises the need for mixed-method approaches and the consideration of pedagogical implications for real world contexts. Beyond its contribution to current debates in the field, this edited volume indicates new directions in cross-disciplinary work.

This book investigates the theoretical, empirical and pedagogical issues to help us better understand what is happening with English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) communication and to activate this knowledge in respective communicative contexts. It focuses specifically on Japanese contexts and also includes theoretical and practical sections pertinent to all ELF researchers, practitioners and students, irrespective of their national or regional differences. It further attempts to connect this new field of research to established fields of linguistics and applied linguistics such as communication, assessment and multilingualism by exploring them from an ELF perspective, which is challenging but essential for the development of the field. Exploring ELF in Japanese Academic and Business Contexts: Conceptualisation, research and pedagogic implications includes chapters about: English in a Global Context Own-language use in academic discourse English as a lingua franca in international business contexts A linguistic soundscape/landscape analysis of ELF information provision in public transport in Tokyo Using pragmatic strategies for effective ELF communication: Relevance to classroom practice This book will be of interest to scholars and post-graduate students working in the fields of Applied Linguistics/TESOL. It will also engage researchers studying the growing influence of English around the world.

This edited book brings together studies on different aspects of marginalization in Japanese, creating a framework for studying marginalization which can also be applied in other linguistic and international contexts. The chapters in this book look at both marginalization of others and self-marginalization, examining the pragmatic strategies used to achieve marginalization, and investigating situations where it acts as an agentive tactic of speakers, in addition to a strategy of broader social structures. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of sociolinguistics, pragmatics, linguistic anthropology, and East Asian languages and cultures.

A Conversational Analysis of Acholi elucidates various interaction strategies for the Nilotic language Acholi. Based on detailed examples, Maren Rüsch links the structural organization of Acholi conversations to cultural features such as politeness, language socialization and narrations. Despite common claims of universality regarding the structuring of human languages by previous authors, the study shows that some Acholi strategies differ from other languages. The verbal and non-verbal practices displayed give an in-depth insight into speakers’ cognitive participation during interaction. On the basis of in-situ research in Uganda, including the collection of rich audio- and video-material, this volume provides an innovative approach to language documentation and description and constitutes a thorough conversation analytic study of an African language.

Input a Word, Analyze the World represents current perspectives on Corpus Linguistics (CL) from a variety of linguistic subdisciplines. Corpus Linguistics has proven itself an excellent methodology for the study of language variation and change, and is well-suited for interdisciplinary collaboration, as shown by the studies in this volume. Its title is inspired by the use of CL to assess language in different registers and with a variety of purposes. This collection contains thirty contributions by scholars in the field from across the globe, dealing with current topics on corpus production and corpus tools; lexical analysis, phraseology and grammar; translation and contrastive linguistics; and language learning. Language specialists will find these papers inspiring, as they present new insights on aspects related to research and teaching.