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In Untersuchungen über professionelle und lernende Gemeinschaften liegt der Fokus üblicherweise auf der Analyse kooperativer Interaktionen und dem Etablieren geteilter Zielsetzungen. Ich schlage für die Analyse soziokultureller Praktiken in professionellen Gemeinschaften eine breitere Perspektive im Anschluss an BACHTINIAN vor, im Besonderen mit Blick auf mehrstufige (polyphone) Referenzen solcher Praktiken für individuelle und kollektive Erfahrungen. Hierzu greife ich auf Beispiele aus einer Studie zurück, die 2008 bis 2016 in Breslau (Polen) durchgeführt wurde und bei der Lehrer/innen an einem schulischen Tutor/innenprogramm teilnahmen, das auf die Herausbildung neuer Wege individualisierter Erziehung zielte.Im Beitrag diskutiere ich die Nutzbarkeit BACHTINscher Kategorien wie Dialog, Polyphonie und \"zweistimmiges Wort\" für die dokumentarische Methode und umgekehrt deren methodologische Passung für die Reproduktion der epistemologischen Struktur des dialogischen Gegenstands der Studie. Im Ergebnis identifiziere ich drei Stufen der Rekonstruktion dialogischer Bedeutung in der dokumentarischen Methode: 1. die direkte Reflexion polyphoner Stimmen, 2. die Reflexion der Reflexionen, inkl. der theoretisch rekonstruierten durch die Forscher/innen und 3. überlappende Bedeutungen (Zweistimmigkeit). Durch diese interpretative Struktur wird die dialogische Bedeutung nicht auf situationell limitierte Interaktionen reduziert, sondern umgekehrt die Totalität polyphonen Verstehens einer Aktivität sichtbar (Erfahrungssinn).

The current study explored the effects of explicit and implicit instructions on the development of advanced EFL learners’ pragmatic knowledge in terms of apology speech act. A total of 10 English native speakers and 40 advanced EFL students participated in this study. The Iraqi Kurdish EFL learners were selected from grade 12 in British International School in Erbil/ Iraq and their level was determined by Oxford Quick Placement Test (OQPT) proficiency test. These 40 participants were divided randomly into two; explicit group (EG) and implicit group (IG) Later, they were provided a Multiple-choice Discourse Completion Test (MDCT) as a pre-test, which consisted of 10 different situations of apology and were based on the participants’ real-life situation, each situation included 3 options and only one answer could be selected which considered to be the most appropriate answer to them. The aim was to show if there were any significant differences between EG and IG. The English native speakers were given the same (MDCT) and were asked to choose the most appropriate answers. After the treatment, (EG) and (IG) were provided the same MDCT as a post-test. The findings revealed that the results of EG and IG were significant and they showed improvements after the treatment, and the EG outperformed the IG in post-test and delayed-test.

The present investigation aimed at studying emotional terms (ETs) in Persian and English bed-night stories for children by adopting a contrastive analysis approach within two phases. Emotional terms were categorized into two theoretical models (tokens and types) in phase one of the study, and in the second phase, the effect of teaching emotive narratives on learners’ pragmatic knowledge of controlling emotions was scrutinized. To this aim, 30 English bed-night stories (15 in English and 15 in Persian) with similar lengths and difficulty levels were selected randomly. In the first phase of the study, the frequency of occurrence of emotional terms (ETs) in English and Persian English bed-night stories were compared. The results indicated that there were not statistically significant differences between the two groups of stories in terms of the emotion tokens utilized in both languages. Nevertheless, there was a major disparity in the number of ETs found in English and Persian bed-night tales concerning various types of emotions. During the second phase of the study, a group of 25 EFL learners were explicitly taught emotive English bed-night tales. A pre-test post-test design using a Discourse Completion Test was used to seek the efficacy of teaching ETs on the learners’ pragmatic knowledge of controlling emotions. Findings showed that teaching emotive narratives enhanced students’ pragmatic knowledge of emotions significantly. In light of the findings of the study, a number of conclusions are drawn and the implications are discussed.

This article focuses on the teacher community as an agent of school development, and in the context of teacher engagement in new educational practices, it discusses how school change can be analyzed as a process of creating and transforming professional knowledge (orientation pattern). The qualitative research was conducted in 2015–2016 at 12 schools participating in an innovative tutoring program in Wrocław (Poland). A total of 12 group discussions and 52 individual interviews were interpreted using Mannheim’s documentary method. As a result, a typology of the four forms of new professional orientation patterns—niche, instrumental, apparent, and synergic activities—was elaborated, and in a case study, they were applied as a theoretical model to the sociogenetic analysis of the school development process.

Pragmatic competence is an essential language pedagogy component represented in English textbooks. The paper attempts to examine the extent to which pragmatic knowledge was reflected in Iranian high school English textbooks (Vision series). Hence, Halliday’s (1973) model and Halliday, et al.’s (1964) model were used to investigate subcategories of functional knowledge and sociolinguistic knowledge. The data was described by descriptive statistics. The findings revealed the Iranian culture-deprived representation (e.g., traditional customs, and ceremonies such as Nowruz, Chaharshanbesori, and Yalda). Moreover, the results highlighted only a limited number of pragmatic components implicitly introduced in the Vision series, and attention was given to their representation and problematic distribution. Furthermore, the English sociocultural patterns were limited and attempts were made to reflect the Iranian culture and convection of daily communication. Thus, some pedagogical implications were offered to improve the Vision series, using authentic pragmatic content instead of proclaiming the fictitious prescription of its authors.

The present study set out to inspect how organizational and pragmatic knowledge can be functions of the assessment techniques practices implemented in the classroom. To this aim, the effects of teacher, peer, and self-assessment techniques that focused on providing feedback on pragmatic and organizational knowledge were compared. A total number of 98 female Iranian learners studying at pre-intermediate level in a language institute participated in the study. They were randomly assigned to one of the three groups of self-assessment (SA) (N = 32), peer-assessment (PA) (N = 33), and teacher-assessment (TA) (N = 33). Pragmatic competence was gauged using Discourse Role Play Talks (DRPTs) and organizational knowledge was assessed by a scale covering the grammatical and textual knowledge of the participants. The results of the analysis of one-way ANOVA test indicated that self-assessment followed by peer assessment had an advantage over the teacher assessment technique in promoting both pragmatic and organizational competence. In general, the obtained results yielded support for the employment of alternative methods of assessment as pedagogical tools to foster language competence. Implications for EFL pedagogy are discussed.

Identity processing styles are those psychological, sociocultural, and socio-cognitive mechanisms that shape, reshape, and establish different individuals’ identities both in their mother tongues and in the second or foreign language they are striving to acquire. The relationship between these identity processing styles and L2 learners’ pragmatic competence is a crucial issue that has not been explored thus far in an EFL context. Therefore, the present study sought to investigate the relationship between the information-oriented, diffuse-avoidant, and normative identity processing styles as measured by Berzonsky’s (2011) Identity Processing Style Inventory (ISI-4) and L2 speech-act knowledge and production among 122 (82 F and 40 M) Iranian upper-intermediate to advanced proficiency level learners. A validated 35-item multiple-choice discourse completion test (MDCT) including five frequent English speech acts (requests, apologies, refusals, complaints, and compliments/compliment responses) and a related role-play interactive test were then employed. The application of multiple regression revealed that diffuse-avoidant and normative identity processing styles were significant but moderate contributors to both pragmatic knowledge and production; however, information-oriented identity processing style was a weak significant predictor. These findings imply that teachers can manage and tailor the instructional pragmatic practices in accordance with the learners’ identity processing styles.

Using a contrastive analysis approach, this study aimed to study emotive words (EWs) in Persian and English short stories for children. It actually tries to find the similarities and differences between the two languages in terms of using emotive words based on different types and tokens of emotions introduced by Wierzbicka (Emotions across cultures: Diversity and universality, 1999) and Devon (The origin of emotions, 2006). Additionally, it sought to investigate the impact of teaching emotive narratives on the learners’ practical knowledge of controlling emotions. To fulfill this objective, 20 short stories with similar length and level of difficulty were randomly selected, 10 in English and l0 in Persian, and 35 lines of each story were investigated to identify and classify their EWs based on the two models employed for classification. To examine the extent of similarities and differences between the frequency of EWs used in English and Persian short stories, a Chi-square test was run. The results revealed that there was not a significant difference between the two groups of stories in terms of emotion tokens; however, a significant difference was found between the frequency of EWs used in English and Persian short stories concerning different types of emotion. In the second phase of the study, emotive short stories were explicitly taught to a sample of 25 EFL learners; a DCT was utilized as the pre-test and post-test to find if learners’ practical knowledge would improve in the wake of this intervention. The findings revealed a significant improvement in the practical understanding of the participants after being exposed to the instruction of emotive narratives. The results also demonstrated that literature-based activities containing emotional cues could improve young learners’ practical knowledge required for controlling their emotions.

This study examines the potential effectiveness of form-focused instruction (henceforth, FFI) in developing Jordanian EFL learners’ linguistic and pragmatic knowledge. Forty-seven college students of nursing were divided into two groups: an experimental group of twenty-seven students received FFI on grammatical structures (viz. the simple present, gerunds, modal auxiliaries, questions, the present perfect and conditionals type II) and speech acts (viz. apology, request, and suggestion) and a control group of twenty students taught per the guidelines of the prescribed textbook. The data were analyzed using descriptive statistics, Analysis of Covariance (ANCOVA), and Multivariate Analysis of Covariance (MANCOVA). The findings revealed that FFI positively affects students' linguistic and pragmatic knowledge, more so for pragmatic than linguistic knowledge. Several pedagogical implications and recommendations are put forth.

Characterizing the relationship between form-based linguistic knowledge and representation of context has long been of importance in the study of on-line language processing. Recent experimental research has shown evidence of very rapid effects of referential context in resolving local indeterminacies on-line. However, there has been no consensus regarding the nature of these context effects. The current paper summarizes recent work covering a range of phenomena for which referential contrast has been shown to influence on-line processing, including prenominal and post-nominal modification, focus operators, and intonational focus. The results of the body of work suggest that referential context effects are not limited to situations in which the linguistic form of the utterance directly specifies the point of contact with context. Rather, context effects of a pragmatic, Gricean nature appear to be possible, suggesting the relationship between linguistic form and context in rapid on-line processing can be of a very indirect nature.