Abstract
The academic mentoring of undergraduate students has been a focus of interest in educational research, with attention being drawn to the role of individual mentoring for students’ overall academic achievement. However, the quality of the interaction in mentoring sessions is an important aspect of this kind of communicative event: how successful the dyads are in communicating with each other may very well affect the academic outcomes pursued. This article contributes to this research by examining a corpus of 27 conversations recorded at five different European universities in which Spanish Erasmus students sought advice from their lecturers at the host university about various aspects of their academic work. The quantitative and qualitative analysis of these conversations shows that the student responses to the advice given by their mentors varied considerably, ranging for a preference for minimal response tokens such as yeah or uhu to more engaged replies, consisting of utterances which built on and contributed to developing the topic at hand. These different “response-styles” were not found to be related to the student’s mastery of English, as assessed on the current Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) scales, and therefore cannot be solely attributed to the linguistic disadvantage that may oblige a speaker to consistently adopt the role of secondary speaker in such conversations. Rather, it appears to relate more closely to how the individual student enacts his/her role in this type of interaction. I point out some pedagogical implications of these findings and suggest the need for further research.
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Notes
- 1.
These were the tokens used for generating word lists, and did not include items not found in dictionaries.
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Acknowledgement
The research reported here was made possible by funding of the project (reference: FFI2011-22809) by the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación.
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MacArthur, F. (2016). Beyond Engaged Listenership: Assessing Spanish Undergraduates’ Active Participation in Academic Mentoring Sessions in English as Academic Lingua Franca. In: Romero-Trillo, J. (eds) Yearbook of Corpus Linguistics and Pragmatics 2016. Yearbook of Corpus Linguistics and Pragmatics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-41733-2_8
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