Marie-Luise Pitzl-Hagin and Stefanie Riegler will represent the Department of English Language Teaching & Learning Research with lectures at the 14th English as a lingua franca conference in Prague (11.09-24.09.2024) (Link to the programopens an external URL in a new window).
Marie-Luise Pitzl-Hagin will give the plenary lecture together with Barbara Seidlhofer and Martin Dewey “Where are we? Where are we going? The past, present, and future of English(es) and ELF research” hold.
Abstract
This panel is intended to provide a stimulating way into the conference as we get together on-site after a long pandemic and virtual-only phase. Taking the title of this session, provided by the ELF14 organizers, as our brief, we will aim to address these large-scale questions in a way that offers for both newcomers to ELF research and ELF veterans some stock-taking of the state of the art in ELF study and perspectives on future prospects.
We will pass under brief review some staging posts of development in the 25-odd year history of ELF study and home in on some aspects of its research that seem particularly significant from our various vantage points.
In the process, we will provide an overview of empirical work on spoken ELF interactions that has been carried out over the past two decades. In doing so, particular emphasis will be put on group characteristics of ELF interactions that might in the future help us gain a more detailed understanding of how ELF use develops situationally across different domains and settings.
We shall also consider the crucial issue of the applied linguistic relevance of ELF research to ‘real-world’ problems brought about by globalization and its implications for language education, particularly the pedagogy of ELT.
We hope that this short tour d’horizon will stimulate anticipation in anticipation of the great variety of ELF14 presentations and discussions to come.
Stefanie Riegler’s lecture “Pragmatically annotated VOICE data for function-based ELF analyses: reliability and potentials of AI” will present current results from her dissertation project.
Abstract
Form-to-function approaches have been influential methodologies in English as a lingua franca (ELF) research. They start from a certain set of linguistic forms to investigate the variety of communicative functions these fulfill (Rühlemann & Aijmer, 2015, p. 9). By contrast, function-based analyses taking the reverse order are less prominent. They require functional annotation of the pragmatic purposes that resources serve in communication but are ideal for studying variable and adaptive form-function relations as characteristic of ELF settings. This annotation is laborious and, according to Artstein and Poesio (2008, p. 555), often perceived to be less reliable than other forms of corpus annotation. At the same time, however, scholars deem pragmatic annotation highly desirable and useful for corpus-based pragmatic enquiries (cf. e.g. Clancy & O’Keeffe, 2015, p. 251).
The aim of this paper is to study the reliability of data from the Vienna-Oxford International Corpus of English (VOICE) (VOICE, 2021) annotated for pragmatic functions. For this purpose, the paper introduces the annotation system and provides examples of annotated VOICE data. The paper then discusses cases of agreement and disagreement between annotations assigned by three different human annotators. It reports Cohen’s Kappa and Krippendorff’s Alpha coefficients as statistical measurements indicating the reliability of the functionally annotated ELF data. The paper finally compares the human annotations to the way the same data samples have been annotated by the artificial intelligence (AI) system ChatGPT (OpenAI, 2023). The purpose is to give a brief outlook on the potentials and limitations of AI for pragmatically annotating ELF data.
Either way, be it human or AI-based, the annotation of pragmatic functions greatly enhances ELF data and paves the way for more function-based methodologies in ELF research. These methodological approaches are especially well suited for investigating the innovative form-function mappings characteristic of ELF communication.
References
Artstein, R., & Poesio, M. (2008). Inter-coder agreement for computational linguistics. Computational Linguistics, 34(4), 555–596. https://doi.org/10.1162/coli.07-034-R2opens an external URL in a new window
Clancy, B., & O’Keeffe, A. (2015). Pragmatics. In D. Biber & R. Reppen (Eds.), The Cambridge handbook of English corpus linguistics (pp. 235–251). Cambridge University Press.
OpenAI. (2023). ChatGPT (Mar 14 version) [Large language model]. https://chat.openai.com/chatopens an external URL in a new window
Rühlemann, C., & Aijmer, K. (2015). Introduction: Corpus pragmatics. Laying the foundations. In K. Aijmer & C. Rühlemann (Eds.), Corpus Pragmatics (pp. 1–26). Cambridge University Press.
VOICE. (2021). The Vienna-Oxford international corpus of English [Computer software]. https://voice3.acdh.oeaw.ac.atopens an external URL in a new window
