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The purpose of this paper is to work toward more fully conceptualizing literacy practices as social by theorizing the combined relational and intellectual context for learning. This context is created through students’ and their teachers’ uses of language. In particular, the quality of language that creates this intellectual relational context is relational-keys that are inherent to any talk between people. Building upon Hymes (1974) conceptualization of key, relational-keys can be described as the emotional mood or spirit of a conversation, but they are much more than that per se. They are constitutive of the complex, multi-layered relationships that people have with each other, with themselves and with the material environment through their uses of language.

Drawing upon a classroom ethnographic study in a first-grade classroom and using discourse analysis of classroom interactions, the author uses data from instructional conversations to illustrate how students and their teachers collaboratively perform relational-keys.

Findings reveal that students and their teacher perform relational and intellectual stances toward reading and toward each other through relational-keys, that frame the act of reading and their experience of doing it together.

The concept of relational-key provides literacy researchers with another tool to analyze what happens in instructional conversations. It also provides teachers with a curricular resource to identify relational-keys that are enacted. Therefore, teachers are able move away from the enaction of relational-keys that contribute to subtractive schooling, and toward relational-keys that nurture empowering stances in students toward reading and their relationships.

This study aimed to investigate the impact of social networks on learning requests by Arab undergraduate EFL students.

Furthermore, both types of requests (i.e. direct and indirect) have been compared under the same condition. A total of 40 Saudi EFL learners participated in this study. Their scores in the pre-test and post-test were compared.

Results of the post-tests indicated that the experimental groups' performance significantly outscored the control groups. However, no significant difference was reported between the two experimental groups (i.e. direct and indirect).

Requests, as a component of pragmatics, have been investigated extensively in the literature to aid second/foreign language learning. However, little is known about the manner by which social networks could foster learning requests.

The past two decades have seen an increase in personal mobility; people are often transferred by their companies to divisions in other countries. As a result, interactions between members of different cultures are prevalent in organizations; such interactions can cause miscommunication and conflict unless people understand the meaning and assumptions underlying communicative behavior such as account‐giving. Unfortunately, there has been little conceptual or empirical work examining effective account‐giving and account evaluation in intercultural situations. In an attempt to fill this gap in the literature, this paper presents a literature review and develops a theoretical model of the relationships among culture, face concerns, account‐giving, and evaluation of accounts.

English instructors' pragmatic competence (PC) is an aspect of the overall communicative competence forming the basis of language instructors' knowledge. Their knowledge of pragmatics should not be overlooked when seeking to understand foreign language learners' communicative ability. This study aims to investigate the pragmatic awareness and teaching practices of non-native EFL instructors with different qualifications and from various cultural backgrounds in Saudi Arabia.

To obtain a broader perspective, this study adopted a quantitative research design. An online questionnaire, developed from Ivanova (2018) and Tulgar (2016), was accessed by 320 instructors at one English teaching institute in Saudi Arabia. The questionnaire consisted of demographic information about participants and 12 closed Likert-type questions.

The data analysis showed that most of the language instructors were aware of PC. However, some variations were evident in their views of the importance of pragmatics in teaching and learning and in their actual pragmatic teaching practices.

This study emphasizes the importance of pragmatic awareness for EFL instructors. It indicates that while non-native English instructors' academic levels and cumulative experience in teaching English play a major role in teaching, instructors have several challenges in teaching pragmatics and promoting students' awareness of pragmatics in this context. For effective second language teaching of pragmatics, instructors, managers and policymakers need to recognize the importance of pragmatics and competencies that students need to develop in EFL contexts.

To present sociocybernetic models of observers in interaction with the aim of encouraging reflection on what is good practice in human communication.

Foundational cybernetic concepts of “process and product” are drawn upon to develop models of “belief”, “meaning”, “truth” and “power”.

“Belief”, following Pask and Rescher, is modelled as a coherent, self‐reproducing system of concepts. “Meaning”, following Peirce, is modelled in terms of the pragmatic consequences of holding certain beliefs to be true. The concept of “truth” is modelled as “justified true belief”, the classic ideal of the “objective sciences”. “Power” is modelled as the pragmatic consequences of social interaction.

The paper invites the members of the sociocybernetics community to reflect on the reflexive nature of these models and to critically monitor and evaluate the quality of the communication within that community.

Using the framework of second‐order cybernetics, explores the institutional practices which lead to inadvertent pathologies of communication. As an example, a certain university regularly carries out large‐scale surveys of student attitudes towards its courses. Three interested parties are the researchers, senior management concerned with quality, and faculty members who produce the courses. All agree the surveys should be carried out, but there are no guarantees that the survey findings are appropriately interpreted and acted on. This kind of scenario is common in large institutions. Second‐order cybernetics offers a theoretical framework that can shed light on these communicative practices and help unpack them in a way that is “politically” neutral. It can also help foster reflective practice in the spirit of action research and “action learning”. Presents case histories of pathologies and gives an example of how pathologies of communication may prevent relevant research being undertaken.

The purpose of this paper is to reframe the role and function of perceived “bad English” in an international business (IB) context to illustrate that “bad English” could in fact facilitate cross-cultural communication in individuals who do not have English as first language.

This study uses the Bakhtinian concept of heteroglossia as a theoretical framework. For the method of analysis, applied linguistics is used in particular through the lens of systemic functional linguistics (SFL) as discourse analysis method to analyze transcribed interview texts. Data collection is via long interviews with 33 top level managers in Swedish managed organizations in Singapore offices.

The study illustrates, through respondent interviews and discourse analysis, that perceived “bad English” could help facilitate communication across cultures in a cross-cultural working context. The study also shows how different individuals, depending on personal experience and cultural background, employ different means to navigate and manage language differences at work.

The findings confirm a Baktinian perspective of language as a heteroglot, where individual identities and understanding of context at work including work behavior are an amalgamation of collected experiences. While many individuals who do not have English as mother tongue might feel embarrassed by their poor English, this study shows that there are many Englishes existing in different working contexts. This study has a limited sample of respondents, pertaining to Swedish and Singaporean top managers in Swedish managed organizations in Singapore.

This study could be useful for multinational corporations that are interested in strategically managing their corporate language policies, taking into account cognitive differences or cultural identities in different offices worldwide.

At a social level, Bakhtin’s language as a heteroglot brings to awareness that at any one time, while individuals are drawn to identify with their dominant (national) culture and language, in effect, with increased contact with other cultures in working environments, both language and cultural identities shift and evolve with the workplace.

This study contributes to the growing language in IB research. The novelty in this study is the employment of a Bakhtinian perspective and specifically the employment of SFL as a method of data analysis.

The purpose of this study was to identify similarities and differences in US and Chinese subjects’ emotional responses to and perceptions of courtesy of simulated English-language communication prompts.

Data were collected through a web-based stimulus administered on US and Chinese students. Subject responses to eye contact and smile images and a set of verbal expressions were measured on ratings of emotion and courtesy.

Smiling with direct eye contact and warmed-up verbal expressions were found to elicit a higher level of emotional response and were perceived as viable server politeness cues. US and Chinese participants had similar responses to facial and verbal prompts.

This paper contributes to understanding about service employee cues, such as courtesy, that can influence service quality in a cross-cultural tourism setting.

News agencies are important stakeholders for large organizations, since the news they distribute will be adopted by other news outlets, which influence public opinion and hence corporate reputation. The purpose of this paper is to advance the understanding of how corporate earnings press releases are transformed into financial news by investigating whether the frames introduced by companies are adopted or reframed by news agencies.

A content analysis of framing techniques in corporate earnings releases and their corresponding news-agency releases was performed, focussing on the financial figures and benchmarks presented, performance attributions, and the tonality of the texts.

The findings suggest that news agencies reframe earnings releases at the textual-pragmatic level by reducing their length, using fewer financial figures, and changing the position of these figures in the texts; they increase transparency by avoiding adjusted financial figures, qualifying figures, and adding analyst assessments; and they change the tonality by down-toning positive statements and highlighting negative aspects.

This paper makes a contribution to the field of corporate financial communication, which has not shed much light on the transformation of earnings press releases into financial news. In addition, this paper contributes to the stream of research on journalistic transformations of corporate press releases in general, which has ignored the influential role of news agencies as both manufacturers and wholesalers of news.