Information technology students’ involvement in in-class debates: Speech acts and modification of the illocutionary force
Vol.15,No.2(2022)
Discourse and Interaction
Information technology (IT) professionals are a specific discourse community whose oral communication in English as a second language (ESL) predominates at all levels of workplace activities in the multinational IT sector. Since IT students’ pragmatic competence in performing communicative functions is essential for their effective communication in an academic setting and a global work environment, it is important to investigate this aspect of their language systematically and carefully. This paper focuses on IT students’ speech acts and the ways they modify the illocutionary force while participating in in-class debates. The analysis revealed that students used a wide range of speech acts and different metadiscourse markers for both increasing and reducing the illocutionary force. The ways IT students used boosters and hedges also reflect how they assume and share their professional knowledge and experience in their discourse community.
in-class debates; ESP learners; pragmatic competence; speech acts; illocutionary force; boosters; hedges
Eva Ellederová
Brno University of Technology
Eva Ellederová received her Ph.D. in foreign language pedagogy from Masaryk University in Brno, Czech Republic. She graduated from the Faculty of Arts, Masaryk University with a degree in English Language and Literature, but her first degree in Process Engineering was earned from Brno University of Technology. She teaches English for information technology, business English, and practical English courses at Brno University of Technology. She has published several coursebooks including English for Information Technology which was designed as an outcome of her design-based research. Apart from several journal articles, she is the author of the monograph Konstrukční výzkum učebnice pro výuku odborného anglického jazyka. Currently, she focuses on the analysis of information technology students’ spoken language.
Address: Mgr. Ing. Eva Ellederová, Ph.D., Department of Foreign Languages, Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Communication, Brno University of Technology, Technická 10, Brno 616 00, Czech Republic. [email: ellederova@vut.cz]
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