In this field study report, the author investigates behaviour associated with inviting in order to see if there is any effect on the language used across cultures due to factors such as status, age, gender in actual social interactions. Chapter one gives a brief introduction to the important role of the English Language in the world in general, and in Vietnam nowadays in particular, and a review of Teaching Methods which have been used in Vietnam so far. Chapter two will deal with the theoretical background, language competences including linguistic competence, sociolinguistic competence and communicative competence. In addition, speech act theory , face work, distance, power in relation to status, age and gender as well as reviews research on the differences between spoken and written are also discussed. Chapter three defines the structure of an invite with its social and cultural characteristics focussing on the natural structure of a spoken invitation. Chapter four describes research and data analysis of the issuing, accepting and declining of spoken invitations used by Vietnamese speakers of Vietnamese (VSV). Chapter five contains the data analysis of the issuing, accepting and declining of spoken invitations used by Australian speakers of English (ASE). Chapter six discusses the comparison of Vietnamese and Australian spoken invitations, the main difference being found in the use of much more direct forms used in VSV as opposed to more tentative forms preferred by ASEs. Directness of form, however, does not reflect a lack of politeness, which is conveyed to a much larger extent by other prosodic and paralinguistic features. Chapter seven is a brief cross-cultural investigation of the spoken invitations of Vietnamese learners speaking English. This shows up a degree of cross-cultural interference and offers some implications for the classroom. Chapter eight contains a summary and conclusion. The results of the study may suggest that Vietnamese learners of English need to be taught not only linguistic competence but also communicative competence with an emphasis on cultural and social factors. Spoken invitations which really have some function in actual interactions need to be incorporated in the program for teaching spoken English.

This study examines the problems of constructing and administering a test of spoken English for Vietnamese EFL teacher-trainees. In an attempt to standardize the assessment, a planned oral interview was pilottested with a group of ten Vietnamese EFL teachers currently enrolled in a Graduate Diploma Course in TESOL at the Canberra College of Advanced Education, Australia. Results of the study indicate that the validity and reliability of such measurement can be achieved if certain carefully outlined procedures in planning the test and training the testers are carefully followed. Given the close relationship between testing and teaching, it is suggested in this study that there could be an improvement in the teaching of spoken English to Vietnamese EFL teacher-trainees if (i) the amount of time allocated to testing oral proficiency in the curriculum was increased, (ii) Vietnamese EFL teachers were provided with formal training in language test construction, and (iii) research on EFL oral testing was encouraged. Further, this study recommends co-operation between TEFL institutions in Vietnam to develop standard instruments for the assessment of spoken English of EFL teacher-trainees on a national level.

Personal assistants need to allow the user to interact with the system in a flexible and adaptive way such as through spoken language dialogue. This research is aimed at achieving robust and effective dialogue management in such applications. We focus on an application, the Smart Personal Assistant (SPA), in which the user can use a variety of devices to interact with a collection of personal assistants, each specializing in a task domain. The current implementation of the SPA contains an e-mail management agent and a calendar agent that the user can interact with through a spoken dialogue and a graphical interface on PDAs. The user-system interaction is handled by a Dialogue Manager agent. We propose an agent-based approach that makes use of a BDI agent architecture for dialogue modelling and control. The Dialogue Manager agent of the SPA acts as the central point for maintaining coherent user-system interaction and coordinating the activities of the assistants. The dialogue model consists of a set of complex but modular plans for handling communicative goals. The dialogue control flow emerges automatically as the result of the agent???s plan selection by the BDI interpreter. In addition the Dialogue Manager maintains the conversational context, the domainspecific knowledge and the user model in its internal beliefs. We also consider the problem of dialogue adaptation in such agent-based dialogue systems. We present a novel way of integrating learning into a BDI architecture so that the agent can learn to select the most suitable plan among those applicable in the current context. This enables the Dialogue Manager agent to tailor its responses according to the conversational context and the user???s physical context, devices and preferences. Finally, we report the evaluation results, which indicate the robustness and effectiveness of the dialogue model in handling a range of users.

<p>The purpose of this essay is to investigate pupils’ attitudes towards spoken English and towards speaking in front of their friends, and how these attitudes appear to be related to their oral communication and communicative behaviour in the classroom. The material was collected by video taping two classes, a questionnaire in these two classes and by interviewing their teacher.</p><p>The results show that motivation and anxiety are psychological factors that play a significant role in the learning process. Attitudes, both towards the target language and towards their own production affect pupils’ willingness to communicate, and consequently their oral production in different tasks. The larger the group is, the more anxious they become. In order to motivate pupils, a variety of exercises is needed, where the topic is of great importance to awaken their interest for communication. The teacher also needs to circulate in the classroom to avoid a situation where pupils switch to their first language. Otherwise, pupils appear to code-switch as soon as an opportunity presents itself, which was observed in the analyses of recorded lessons.</p>

Face-to-face communication is multimodal. In unscripted spoken discourse we can observe the interaction of several "semiotic layers", modalities of information such as syntax, discourse structure, gesture, and intonation. <br>We explore the role of gesture and intonation in structuring and aligning information in spoken discourse through a study of the co-occurrence of pitch accents and gestural apices.<br> Metaphorical spatialization through gesture also plays a role in conveying the contextual relationships between the speaker, the government and other external forces in a naturally-occurring political speech setting.

This thesis addresses the question of how speakers adapttheir language when they interact with a spoken dialoguesystem. In human–human dialogue, people continuously adaptto their conversational partners at different levels. Wheninteracting with computers, speakers also to some extent adapttheir language to meet (what they believe to be) theconstraints of the dialogue system. Furthermore, if a problemoccurs in the human–computer dialogue, patterns oflinguistic adaptation are often accentuated. In this thesis, we used an empirical approach in which aseries of corpora of human–computer interaction werecollected and analyzed. The systems used for data collectionincluded both fully functional stand-alone systems in publicsettings, and simulated systems in controlled laboratoryenvironments. All of the systems featured animated talkingagents, and encouraged users to interact using unrestrictedspontaneous language. Linguistic adaptation in the corpora wasexamined at the phonetic, prosodic, lexical, syntactic andpragmatic levels. Knowledge about users’linguistic adaptations can beuseful in the development of spoken dialogue systems. If we areable to adequately describe their patterns of occurrence (atthe different linguistic levels at which they occur), we willbe able to build more precise user models, thus improvingsystem performance. Our knowledge of linguistic adaptations canbe useful in at least two ways: first, it has been shown thatlinguistic adaptations can be used to identify (andsubsequently repair) errors in human–computer dialogue.Second, we can try to subtly influence users to behave in acertain way, for instance by implicitly encouraging a speakingstyle that improves speech recognition performance.

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La tesis doctoral que aquí se presenta se podría enmarcar dentro de tres campos lingüísticos: el análisis de género, la retórica contrastiva y el análisis de corpus.El análisis de género (Swales 1981, 1990; Dudley-Evans & Henderson 1990a, 1990b; Henderson & Hewings 1990; Bathia 1993, 2002; Skulstad 1996, 2002; Flowerdew 1994, 2002) es un parte dentro del amplio campo de análisis del discurso (Barber 1962; Halliday, Strevens & McIntosh 1964). En este estudio nos centramos en el estudio de la clase magistral dentro de los denominados géneros académicos en el aula (Fortanet 2004b). La clase magistral es un género hablado y como tal posee ciertas peculiaridades de los géneros hablados en contraposición a los géneros académicos escritos.Nuestro estudio se centra en la comparación y contraste de dos lenguas, el español peninsular y el inglés americano, ya que como corpus se utilizan clases magistrales españolas y norte-americanas y en consecuencia se toman como referencia estudios de retórica contrastiva. En este estudio nos centramos en un aspecto concreto del lenguaje, los marcadores discursivos. Con el análisis de los marcadores discursivos en el lenguaje académico hablado en español e inglés norte-americano pretendemos ver como se usan los marcadores discursivos para favorecer a hablantes nativos y no nativos de español e inglés en el espacio de educación superior.

This thesis aims at contributing to the research on academic conference paper presentations, particularly to the discussion sessions that follow them. The main purpose of this study is to explore the speaker's expression of evaluation in the discussion session of two specialised conference paper presentations in Linguistics and Chemistry from a multimodal approach. I set out to investigate evaluation in spoken academic discourse beyond the traditional linguistic approach to foreground the role of kinesics and paralanguage that co-occur with the linguistic expression of evaluation. To meet the objective of the thesis, the theoretical framework was embedded in techniques of genre analysis (Bhatia 1993, Swales 1990) and discourse analysis, including the theoretical orientations of systemic functional linguistics (Halliday 1978, 1985a), conversation analysis (Schegloff & Sack 1973), pragmatics (Brown & Levinson 1978, 1987), and multimodal discourse analysis (Kress & van Leeuwen 2001). This framework allowed me to identify the structure of the interaction, the rhetorical moves in which the interaction is organised, and finally the linguistic and multimodal expression of evaluation that articulates the rhetoric of the interaction.