The article analyses the effectiveness of two different learning approaches on the development of lexical knowledge in LSP classes at university. In a GFL lecture in the Bachelor's degree programme in Marketing and Commerce, different tasks were used within an intentional and an incidental learning setting to develop lexical knowledge. The experimental group used an application to memorise the specialised vocabulary (intentional learning), while the control group worked on writing tasks (incidental learning). All other relevant learning factors were identical for both groups. After completing learning units 1 and 2, experimental and control group were swapped for learning units 3 and 4 in order to avoid bias. Learning progress of each group was measured throughout the entire semester and took place at the end of each learning unit using a total of 4 tests. Each test consisted of 3 subtests: vocabulary test, writing test and C-test. Tests 1 & 2 were repeated 8 weeks later as delayed tests. The results show that the task format used in the learning phase to acquire vocabulary has an influence on the different competences measured. Furthermore, it was shown that intentional learning using an application led to better learning gains in the areas of general language proficiency and vocabulary knowledge. Delayed tests also showed that learning gains are maintained over time and remain consistent even after swapping experimental and control group. Didactic implications can be derived from the results obtained in this study.
A few previous studies have investigated the role of photographs in communicating corporate sustainability, but Chinese cases and their diachronic changes are neglected. Accordingly, this study aims at exploring how Chinese companies illustrate the concept of sustainability through using photographs and how the use has evolved. A case study was designed to analyze the use of photographs in the sustainability reports of Huawei, a leading global provider of information and communications technology (ICT) infrastructure and smart devices based in China. Adopting the method of quantitative content analysis, this study relied on visual grammar as a framework to dissect a total of 1,405 photographs featuring in the sustainability reports published by Huawei from 2008 to 2022. These photographs were coded and classified with respect to their representational, interactive and compositional meaning potential, which consider both their motifs and structural aspects. The findings show that as Huawei’s use of photographs in its sustainability reports over a 15-year span has evolved through three phases, its visual representation of sustainability has shifted from what it has done to how it is done better. Meanwhile, a tendency towards visual legitimation through drawing on the rhetorical functions of photographs has been revealed in Huawei’s recent sustainability reports. These results can provide insights into future research on the visual representation of sustainability in digital channels.
Less existing research explains why resonance as verbal engagement to establish an alignment in rural China’s medical consultations characterized by knowledge-power asymmetry between village doctors and patients, rural-urban schemata mismatch in disease conceptualization, and aged-related expression barriers in discovery accounts. In this article, we investigate the discursive strategies and functions of resonance by village doctors in China’s naturalistic rural medical consultations based on the demographically sampled regions of 32 rural medical institutions in 11 provinces of the P. R. China. The findings show two sets of strategies: explicit resonance in the form of content recurrence, structural replication and sentence-final particles, and implicit resonance in the form of backchanneling tokens, discourse markers and relevance acknowledgment. These strategies blend to form an allied voice that balances the clinician-patient epistemic gap, rural-urban cognitive divide, and intergenerational communicative dissonance by cognitive and affective alignment.
This article makes the case for the expanded conversational sequences observable in a specific type of professional, radio-mediated communication -- interaction of vessel traffic services (VTS). Within the theoretical framework developed by Schegloff (2007) and Kendrick et al. (2020), we examined patterns of sequential expansion in VTS interaction via Very High Frequency (VHF) radio at a major port located in China. Using the method of Conversation Analysis to analyze the authentic, audio-recorded language data, we illustrated how functional motivations for sequential expansion in informal, ordinary conversations can be mobilized into the mechanisms of routinized maritime communication. We argue that 1) expansions happening at different sequential positions perform specific communicative functions to execute institutional practices in VTS interaction; and 2) that communicative meanings constructed via expanded sequences in VTS interaction have important procedural consequences and demonstrate distinct institutional adaptations to the core properties of human interactive language use. The findings not only build on the main lines of development in the application of conversation analysis to interaction in contextualized, specialized discourse, but also bring to light the limitations of stipulated communication protocols in safety-critical, high-stake talk.
