Masters Degrees (General Linguistics)

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Browsing Masters Degrees (General Linguistics) by Author "Bester, Zaan"

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    An investigation into the ability of South African students at Stellenbosch University to interpret implicatures in their second language English
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2012-12) Bester, Zaan; Conradie, Simone; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of General Linguistics.
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Due to increasing concern about the low levels of throughput at university level, and with an ever-growing awareness of the important role that students’ academic literacy plays in academic success, Stellenbosch University implemented language support courses in various faculties across the campus. In addition, the massification of higher education means that the demographic profile of the student population in university classrooms has changed, and lecturers are increasingly faced with students from a variety of multicultural contexts. It is within this context that a study was done to determine to what extent linguistic and cultural background affects a speaker’s ability to derive meaning from conversational and, by extension, academic implicatures in English. Previous studies have found that native speakers (NSs) and nonnative speakers (NNSs) of English infer different meanings when confronted with particular types of implicature and that NNSs tend to interpret certain types of implicature correctly more often than others. First-year students at Stellenbosch University with a variety of mother tongues were asked to complete a questionnaire containing various types of implicatures. Their responses indicated significant differences in the accuracy with which NSs and NNSs interpreted certain types of implicatures, and in the meanings they arrived at. The thesis considers possible reasons for these differences, and discusses the implications of the study’s results for academic literacy/language support courses offered at South African universities.