- Email: [email protected]
Processing perspectives on task performance
160
Book reviews / System 49 (2015) 157e166
The insightful volume closes with a discussion on how to evaluate language programmes and appeals to language educators to enable students to “become intercultural mediators interpreting the world for themselves and for others” (p. 178). It closes a passionately written and convincing volume, which I can highly recommend to both scholars and practitioners working in language education. References Council of Europe. (2008). White paper on intercultural dialogue. “Living together as equals in dignity”. Strasbourg, France: Committe of Ministers, Council of Europe. http://www.coe.int/t/dg4/intercultural/source/white%20paper_final_revised_en.pdf (accessed 01.12.14). Kramsch, C. (1987). Foreign language textbook's construction of reality. Canadian Modern Language Review, 43, 95e119. €rungen. Psychologie der zwischenmenschlichen Kommunikation [Talking with each other: €rungen und Kla Schulz von Thun, F. (1981). Miteinander reden: Sto disturbances and clarifications. The psychology of interpersonal communication]. Reinbek: Rowohlt. Watzlawick, P., Bavelas, J. B., & Don, D. D. (2011). Pragmatics of human communication: A study of interactional patterns, pathologies and paradoxes. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.
Vera Busse University of Oldenburg, Germany E-mail address: [email protected]
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.system.2014.12.004
Processing Perspectives on Task Performance, Peter Skehan (Ed.). John Benjamins, Amsterdam (2014). 266 pp. Since the late 1980s, there has been a surge of interest in researching second language task-based performance and the processing influences upon it. Although such research has undoubtedly shed light on the topic, Skehan believes that we are still unable to advance “strong and wide-ranging models” (p. 4) of task performance. In his view, this is mainly due to the piecemeal fashion in which many previous studies were undertaken, which has prevented a coherent picture from emerging. To avoid such shortcomings, he underlines the importance of conducting studies within a general research framework that has the potential to organise findings as they emerge. Moreover, he claims that it is essential to base any research of second language task-based processing within the realm of psycholinguistic theory. In so doing, he supports applying a modified version of Levelt's (1989) model of first language speaking to investigations of second language speaking. In this way, it is possible to provide a firm psycholinguistic background for organising our thinking about second language speaking. In addition, Skehan proposes a Tradeoff perspective to second language performance, which assumes that attentional and working memory resources are limited. From a limited capacity viewpoint, demanding spoken language tasks may create difficulties for a second language learner because of processing limitations. Such inhibiting effects on performance dimensions are likely to occur because an inferior second language mental lexicon, particularly at lower proficiency levels, strongly influences how second language speaking will proceed. In his view, analysing task-based processing through the Levelt model and from the Tradeoff Hypothesis standpoint, allows researchers to identify the pressures that cause what ideally should be a smooth, parallel process to become serial and effortful. It is then possible to explore ways of mitigating these difficulties through effective use of task choice and task conditions. As part of the Task-Based Language Teaching book series, this volume seeks to explore the link between task features (types, conditions, characteristics) and performance dimensions (complexity, accuracy, fluency). The book begins with an introductory chapter that sets the scene and explains the rationale behind the six empirically based studies described in chapters 2e6. All of the researchers adopt Skehan's Tradeoff perspective to second language performance. Furthermore, they are motivated by his general framework for investigating second language task performance, which highlights the main features of tasks and their implementation phases. In terms of focus, there are three chapters on planning (chapters 2, 3, and 4), one on the post-task phase (chapter 5), and two studies on task characteristics (chapters 6 and 7). The major themes are discussed in the final chapter, along with the findings reported in each study. The remainder of the final chapter addresses the pedagogical implications of the studies. As far as planning is concerned, Wang (chapter 2) examines the usefulness of conventional pre-task planning and online planning, and their synergistic effects in combination. She found that having less time pressure when speaking was associated with higher levels of performance, but only when there was the previous opportunity to plan strategically. This was not the case when there was more time available, that is, on-line planning. This suggests that less demanding
Book reviews / System 49 (2015) 157e166
161
performance conditions create a better context to remember what was planned beforehand. In other words, it seems that on-line planning enables “the fruits of the planning to be realised” (p. 220), with increases in both accuracy and complexity. Interestingly, Wang also reports that repetition was the only condition to have a positive impact on all three performance areas (accuracy, complexity, and fluency). Thus, it appears that getting students to repeat a task immediately leads to dramatic improvements in performance. In chapter 3, Bui compares the effects of conventional pre-task planning with the effect of speaking about something familiar. He found that they differed in their influence on various performance areas, as well as the magnitude of the effects. Thus, being ready, that is familiar with the information, has a lexical, accuracy, and fluency impact, while conventional pre-task planning has more impact on structural complexity. In the final study on planning, Pang and Skehan (chapter 4) carry out a qualitative study of what participants say they do when they plan strategically. They observed that certain types of planning behaviours are likely to be more effective than others. This leads them to speculate that it may actually be possible to train learners how to make better planning choices, as well as to adopt planning behaviours that are likely to target specific performance dimensions. In chapter 5, Li explores ways of guiding learners' attention so that accuracy, the most difficult aspect of performance to influence, is made more important for the speaker. She specifically focuses on what happens after a task, rather than before it. Interestingly, her study finds that post-task transcription shows a noticeable effect for improvements in formal aspects of language. In other words, learners who were anticipating post-task transcription produced significantly more accurate knowledge. Thus, it appears that when learners are forewarned about having to transcribe the content of earlier recordings, they may direct more attention to accuracy. This suggests that within the attentional resources that are available during task performance, it may be possible to prioritise particular areas. Turning to task structure and processing conditions, Skehan and Shun (chapter 7) report an effect of task structure on complexity, accuracy and fluency, with a tighter structure leading to raised performance in each of these areas. The clearest effects were with the There-and-then condition, which raised performance in all areas. However, they also recorded a significant effect for structure in the Here-and-now condition when processing conditions were mitigated by using pausing or a summary. Similarly, Wang and Skehan (chapter 6) found that structure may promote accuracy, as well as having some contribution to make to language complexity and fluency. They also report that structure has its clearest effect in the Thereand-then condition. In other words, when there is processing pressure, as is the case in the Here-and-now condition, the effect of structure is low with complexity and fluency, and practically non-existent with accuracy and lexis. Thus, having a more structured task fails to overcome the demanding processing pressures in the Here-and-now condition to any significant degree. This helps explain why the mediated Here-and-now performances in the Skehan and Shun chapter generated a significant effect for structure there. Based on the findings presented in the volume, it is suggested that second language teachers could substantially benefit from understanding why ineffective preparedness, unstructured tasks, and heavier processing pressure may result in lower spoken performance in particular areas. Such knowledge could assist teachers in selecting spoken language tasks, in order to maximise the supportive conditions they contain. In terms of the data that emerged, Wang's conclusion about the usefulness of repetition is particularly illuminating. Hence, it appears that although repetition may be boring from a teaching perspective, it is highly valued and satisfying from the learner's point of view (Bygate, 2006). It was also interesting to discover the positive impact on accuracy of including a post-task phase, as well as the suggestion that ideas, structure, and organisation seem to fade less quickly than form. This adds additional support to the belief that more attention should be given to focusing on form. Finally, it was surprising to learn how accuracy and complexity may potentially both be raised by providing learners with supported on-line planning opportunities. Before concluding, I should highlight some potential limitations of the volume. First and foremost, it is perhaps open to question how applicable the findings are among learners of varying proficiency. As the studies in this volume all focus predominantly on intermediate level learners, it is difficult to generalise the findings to other levels of learners. As a result, the claims made about performance must be restricted to members of the intermediate proficiency range. Similar studies using learners from other proficiency ranges would certainly have helped to support the claims made in this book. Secondly, although the studies are all well presented and explained, there were a few language issues which involved instances of both unnatural and ungrammatical language in the task instructions of, at least, one study. To sum up, I feel that Processing Perspectives on Task Performance is an extremely timely contribution, which is highly recommended reading for both researchers and students of psycholinguistics. Undoubtedly, the major attraction of this book is the fact that all of the studies adopted a similar research framework, which allowed the chapters to interweave and build upon each other. A myriad of findings are presented, hopefully providing much food for thought and laying the foundation for future studies of task-based processing. In so doing, this will help provide additional support for Skehan's Tradeoff hypothesis, and will also bring us closer to the ultimate goal of modeling task performance. References Bygate, M. (2006). Areas of research that influence L2 speaking instruction. In E. Uso-Juan, & A. Martinez-Flor (Eds.), Current trends in the development and teaching of the four language skills (pp. 159e186). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Levelt, W. J. M. (1989). Speaking: From intention to articulation. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
162
Book reviews / System 49 (2015) 157e166
James Rock Cattolica del Sacro Cuore di Milano, Italy Universita E-mail address: [email protected]
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.system.2014.12.003
Critical and Corpus-based Approaches to Intercultural Rhetoric, Diane Belcher, Gayle Nelson (Eds.). University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor (2013). vi þ260 pp. Ever since the term “Intercultural Rhetoric (IR)” was proposed by Ulla Connor in 2004 in an attempt to supersede its predecessor “Contrastive Rhetoric (CR),” this area of research has seen an ever-growing body of IR-titled literature. In addition to journal articles, two book-length works have been particularly widely cited, Contrastive rhetoric: Reaching to intercultural rhetoric (Connor, Nagelhout, & Rozycki, 2008) and Intercultural rhetoric in the writing classroom (Connor, 2011). The volume under review is the most recent effort in the same vein to move the field forward. With its brand new reconceptualization of culture as one of the highlights, this volume epitomizes both qualitative and quantitative approaches currently adopted in IR, as shown by the “critical” and “corpus-based” in the title. The volume falls into four parts with ten chapters in total, supplemented by an Introduction and an Afterword. In the first part, “Corpus and Critical Perspectives”, in separate chapters, Ulla Connor and Will Baker portray a bird's eye view of both the conceptual and methodological landscapes in the field to set the stage for the rest of the volume. In the first chapter, Connor remarks that the employment of corpus technologies has served to establish IR as an evidence-based line of research. While the use of corpora has exhibited its power in identifying the distributional patterns at the lexico-grammatical level, its affordance for discoursal analysis is often handicapped by its inherent inability to make human-like judgments. To reconcile the distinction between bottom-up and top-down analyses, Connor champions the combination of both for corpusbased IR research. Connor also cautions that IR should not solely rely on corpus-based findings, arguing that IR's contextsensitive and socially-situated text analysis continues to require qualitative or ethnographic methods. In the second chapter, Will Baker critically responds to the problematic term “culture” in IR. Contrastive rhetoric has taken a “received” notion of culture, which carries the risk of essentializing and stereotyping certain cultures. While intercultural rhetoric has begun to critique this static understanding of culture in earlier studies, Baker still laments the absence of a more critical postmodernist view of culture if IR treats culture as a category of analysis. He views the relationship between language and culture as “emergent, situated, and dynamic” (p. 26). The second part, “Critical-Analytical Approaches”, contains three chapters. Xiaoye You's chapter studies ethos-building practices on a Japan-based electronic bulletin board. Adopting an intercultural rhetoric framework, You's research focuses on how English mediates in the formation of new Internet culture in a virtual community. His study reveals that site configurations and contexts of interactions combine to help foster individual ethos, and English, as a lingua franca, has a crucial role to play in the negotiation and accommodation between and among community members. You's study, among other things, demonstrates that as a useful lens, ethos has become “a worthy place to study culture and discourse in virtual communities” (p. 68). Extra credit should be given to You for his two years of lurking on the forum without any degree of involvement in order to secure objective and sufficient data. Ramon Escamilla's chapter is a critical discourse analysis-based examination of the Japanese mainstream news media in constructing the identity of resident foreign nationals. Combining CDA and corpus analysis, this study unlocks some discriminatory discourse strategies evidenced by the distributional patterns of linguistic features, with particular focus on the term, Gaikokujin, which is by far the most common term used to refer to foreign nationals in Japanese society. In the end, the author attempts to relate his research to intercultural rhetoric by putting that both CDA and IR allow us to “critically examine the social practices surrounding text through the medium of the text itself” (p. 91) and bring benefits to cross-cultural written discourse. In the third chapter of this part, Guillaume Gentil outlines the potential benefits and challenges of developing a bilingual corpus-assisted methodology for intercultural rhetoric, illustrated by a study of a bilingual English-French corpus of submissions. Claiming that it is the first ever attempt to apply corpus-assisted discourse studies in IR research, Gentil creatively and skillfully adopts different corpus tools for different purposes. Finally, Gentil points to two options when it comes to the lack of availability of suitable computer tools: one is to develop more sophisticated software, the other is to “experiment with innovative uses of a combination of existing software” (p. 122). Three chapters are placed under the title of “Corpus-based Approaches” in the third part. Eric Friginal adopts Biber's multidimensional approach to analyzing outsourced call centre discourse by Indian and Filipino agents. Corpus-based linguistic analysis finds that there exist culture-specific style differences between Indian and Filipino groups. To account for the differences, the author maintains that English proficiency, first language background, micro-cultures, and training available should be factored in. Similar to You's chapter, Amanda Lanier Temples and Gayle Nelson’ chapter is also concerned with a
Book reviews / System 49 (2015) 157e166
The insightful volume closes with a discussion on how to evaluate language programmes and appeals to language educators to enable students to “become intercultural mediators interpreting the world for themselves and for others” (p. 178). It closes a passionately written and convincing volume, which I can highly recommend to both scholars and practitioners working in language education. References Council of Europe. (2008). White paper on intercultural dialogue. “Living together as equals in dignity”. Strasbourg, France: Committe of Ministers, Council of Europe. http://www.coe.int/t/dg4/intercultural/source/white%20paper_final_revised_en.pdf (accessed 01.12.14). Kramsch, C. (1987). Foreign language textbook's construction of reality. Canadian Modern Language Review, 43, 95e119. €rungen. Psychologie der zwischenmenschlichen Kommunikation [Talking with each other: €rungen und Kla Schulz von Thun, F. (1981). Miteinander reden: Sto disturbances and clarifications. The psychology of interpersonal communication]. Reinbek: Rowohlt. Watzlawick, P., Bavelas, J. B., & Don, D. D. (2011). Pragmatics of human communication: A study of interactional patterns, pathologies and paradoxes. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.
Vera Busse University of Oldenburg, Germany E-mail address: [email protected]
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.system.2014.12.004
Processing Perspectives on Task Performance, Peter Skehan (Ed.). John Benjamins, Amsterdam (2014). 266 pp. Since the late 1980s, there has been a surge of interest in researching second language task-based performance and the processing influences upon it. Although such research has undoubtedly shed light on the topic, Skehan believes that we are still unable to advance “strong and wide-ranging models” (p. 4) of task performance. In his view, this is mainly due to the piecemeal fashion in which many previous studies were undertaken, which has prevented a coherent picture from emerging. To avoid such shortcomings, he underlines the importance of conducting studies within a general research framework that has the potential to organise findings as they emerge. Moreover, he claims that it is essential to base any research of second language task-based processing within the realm of psycholinguistic theory. In so doing, he supports applying a modified version of Levelt's (1989) model of first language speaking to investigations of second language speaking. In this way, it is possible to provide a firm psycholinguistic background for organising our thinking about second language speaking. In addition, Skehan proposes a Tradeoff perspective to second language performance, which assumes that attentional and working memory resources are limited. From a limited capacity viewpoint, demanding spoken language tasks may create difficulties for a second language learner because of processing limitations. Such inhibiting effects on performance dimensions are likely to occur because an inferior second language mental lexicon, particularly at lower proficiency levels, strongly influences how second language speaking will proceed. In his view, analysing task-based processing through the Levelt model and from the Tradeoff Hypothesis standpoint, allows researchers to identify the pressures that cause what ideally should be a smooth, parallel process to become serial and effortful. It is then possible to explore ways of mitigating these difficulties through effective use of task choice and task conditions. As part of the Task-Based Language Teaching book series, this volume seeks to explore the link between task features (types, conditions, characteristics) and performance dimensions (complexity, accuracy, fluency). The book begins with an introductory chapter that sets the scene and explains the rationale behind the six empirically based studies described in chapters 2e6. All of the researchers adopt Skehan's Tradeoff perspective to second language performance. Furthermore, they are motivated by his general framework for investigating second language task performance, which highlights the main features of tasks and their implementation phases. In terms of focus, there are three chapters on planning (chapters 2, 3, and 4), one on the post-task phase (chapter 5), and two studies on task characteristics (chapters 6 and 7). The major themes are discussed in the final chapter, along with the findings reported in each study. The remainder of the final chapter addresses the pedagogical implications of the studies. As far as planning is concerned, Wang (chapter 2) examines the usefulness of conventional pre-task planning and online planning, and their synergistic effects in combination. She found that having less time pressure when speaking was associated with higher levels of performance, but only when there was the previous opportunity to plan strategically. This was not the case when there was more time available, that is, on-line planning. This suggests that less demanding
Book reviews / System 49 (2015) 157e166
161
performance conditions create a better context to remember what was planned beforehand. In other words, it seems that on-line planning enables “the fruits of the planning to be realised” (p. 220), with increases in both accuracy and complexity. Interestingly, Wang also reports that repetition was the only condition to have a positive impact on all three performance areas (accuracy, complexity, and fluency). Thus, it appears that getting students to repeat a task immediately leads to dramatic improvements in performance. In chapter 3, Bui compares the effects of conventional pre-task planning with the effect of speaking about something familiar. He found that they differed in their influence on various performance areas, as well as the magnitude of the effects. Thus, being ready, that is familiar with the information, has a lexical, accuracy, and fluency impact, while conventional pre-task planning has more impact on structural complexity. In the final study on planning, Pang and Skehan (chapter 4) carry out a qualitative study of what participants say they do when they plan strategically. They observed that certain types of planning behaviours are likely to be more effective than others. This leads them to speculate that it may actually be possible to train learners how to make better planning choices, as well as to adopt planning behaviours that are likely to target specific performance dimensions. In chapter 5, Li explores ways of guiding learners' attention so that accuracy, the most difficult aspect of performance to influence, is made more important for the speaker. She specifically focuses on what happens after a task, rather than before it. Interestingly, her study finds that post-task transcription shows a noticeable effect for improvements in formal aspects of language. In other words, learners who were anticipating post-task transcription produced significantly more accurate knowledge. Thus, it appears that when learners are forewarned about having to transcribe the content of earlier recordings, they may direct more attention to accuracy. This suggests that within the attentional resources that are available during task performance, it may be possible to prioritise particular areas. Turning to task structure and processing conditions, Skehan and Shun (chapter 7) report an effect of task structure on complexity, accuracy and fluency, with a tighter structure leading to raised performance in each of these areas. The clearest effects were with the There-and-then condition, which raised performance in all areas. However, they also recorded a significant effect for structure in the Here-and-now condition when processing conditions were mitigated by using pausing or a summary. Similarly, Wang and Skehan (chapter 6) found that structure may promote accuracy, as well as having some contribution to make to language complexity and fluency. They also report that structure has its clearest effect in the Thereand-then condition. In other words, when there is processing pressure, as is the case in the Here-and-now condition, the effect of structure is low with complexity and fluency, and practically non-existent with accuracy and lexis. Thus, having a more structured task fails to overcome the demanding processing pressures in the Here-and-now condition to any significant degree. This helps explain why the mediated Here-and-now performances in the Skehan and Shun chapter generated a significant effect for structure there. Based on the findings presented in the volume, it is suggested that second language teachers could substantially benefit from understanding why ineffective preparedness, unstructured tasks, and heavier processing pressure may result in lower spoken performance in particular areas. Such knowledge could assist teachers in selecting spoken language tasks, in order to maximise the supportive conditions they contain. In terms of the data that emerged, Wang's conclusion about the usefulness of repetition is particularly illuminating. Hence, it appears that although repetition may be boring from a teaching perspective, it is highly valued and satisfying from the learner's point of view (Bygate, 2006). It was also interesting to discover the positive impact on accuracy of including a post-task phase, as well as the suggestion that ideas, structure, and organisation seem to fade less quickly than form. This adds additional support to the belief that more attention should be given to focusing on form. Finally, it was surprising to learn how accuracy and complexity may potentially both be raised by providing learners with supported on-line planning opportunities. Before concluding, I should highlight some potential limitations of the volume. First and foremost, it is perhaps open to question how applicable the findings are among learners of varying proficiency. As the studies in this volume all focus predominantly on intermediate level learners, it is difficult to generalise the findings to other levels of learners. As a result, the claims made about performance must be restricted to members of the intermediate proficiency range. Similar studies using learners from other proficiency ranges would certainly have helped to support the claims made in this book. Secondly, although the studies are all well presented and explained, there were a few language issues which involved instances of both unnatural and ungrammatical language in the task instructions of, at least, one study. To sum up, I feel that Processing Perspectives on Task Performance is an extremely timely contribution, which is highly recommended reading for both researchers and students of psycholinguistics. Undoubtedly, the major attraction of this book is the fact that all of the studies adopted a similar research framework, which allowed the chapters to interweave and build upon each other. A myriad of findings are presented, hopefully providing much food for thought and laying the foundation for future studies of task-based processing. In so doing, this will help provide additional support for Skehan's Tradeoff hypothesis, and will also bring us closer to the ultimate goal of modeling task performance. References Bygate, M. (2006). Areas of research that influence L2 speaking instruction. In E. Uso-Juan, & A. Martinez-Flor (Eds.), Current trends in the development and teaching of the four language skills (pp. 159e186). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Levelt, W. J. M. (1989). Speaking: From intention to articulation. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
162
Book reviews / System 49 (2015) 157e166
James Rock Cattolica del Sacro Cuore di Milano, Italy Universita E-mail address: [email protected]
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.system.2014.12.003
Critical and Corpus-based Approaches to Intercultural Rhetoric, Diane Belcher, Gayle Nelson (Eds.). University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor (2013). vi þ260 pp. Ever since the term “Intercultural Rhetoric (IR)” was proposed by Ulla Connor in 2004 in an attempt to supersede its predecessor “Contrastive Rhetoric (CR),” this area of research has seen an ever-growing body of IR-titled literature. In addition to journal articles, two book-length works have been particularly widely cited, Contrastive rhetoric: Reaching to intercultural rhetoric (Connor, Nagelhout, & Rozycki, 2008) and Intercultural rhetoric in the writing classroom (Connor, 2011). The volume under review is the most recent effort in the same vein to move the field forward. With its brand new reconceptualization of culture as one of the highlights, this volume epitomizes both qualitative and quantitative approaches currently adopted in IR, as shown by the “critical” and “corpus-based” in the title. The volume falls into four parts with ten chapters in total, supplemented by an Introduction and an Afterword. In the first part, “Corpus and Critical Perspectives”, in separate chapters, Ulla Connor and Will Baker portray a bird's eye view of both the conceptual and methodological landscapes in the field to set the stage for the rest of the volume. In the first chapter, Connor remarks that the employment of corpus technologies has served to establish IR as an evidence-based line of research. While the use of corpora has exhibited its power in identifying the distributional patterns at the lexico-grammatical level, its affordance for discoursal analysis is often handicapped by its inherent inability to make human-like judgments. To reconcile the distinction between bottom-up and top-down analyses, Connor champions the combination of both for corpusbased IR research. Connor also cautions that IR should not solely rely on corpus-based findings, arguing that IR's contextsensitive and socially-situated text analysis continues to require qualitative or ethnographic methods. In the second chapter, Will Baker critically responds to the problematic term “culture” in IR. Contrastive rhetoric has taken a “received” notion of culture, which carries the risk of essentializing and stereotyping certain cultures. While intercultural rhetoric has begun to critique this static understanding of culture in earlier studies, Baker still laments the absence of a more critical postmodernist view of culture if IR treats culture as a category of analysis. He views the relationship between language and culture as “emergent, situated, and dynamic” (p. 26). The second part, “Critical-Analytical Approaches”, contains three chapters. Xiaoye You's chapter studies ethos-building practices on a Japan-based electronic bulletin board. Adopting an intercultural rhetoric framework, You's research focuses on how English mediates in the formation of new Internet culture in a virtual community. His study reveals that site configurations and contexts of interactions combine to help foster individual ethos, and English, as a lingua franca, has a crucial role to play in the negotiation and accommodation between and among community members. You's study, among other things, demonstrates that as a useful lens, ethos has become “a worthy place to study culture and discourse in virtual communities” (p. 68). Extra credit should be given to You for his two years of lurking on the forum without any degree of involvement in order to secure objective and sufficient data. Ramon Escamilla's chapter is a critical discourse analysis-based examination of the Japanese mainstream news media in constructing the identity of resident foreign nationals. Combining CDA and corpus analysis, this study unlocks some discriminatory discourse strategies evidenced by the distributional patterns of linguistic features, with particular focus on the term, Gaikokujin, which is by far the most common term used to refer to foreign nationals in Japanese society. In the end, the author attempts to relate his research to intercultural rhetoric by putting that both CDA and IR allow us to “critically examine the social practices surrounding text through the medium of the text itself” (p. 91) and bring benefits to cross-cultural written discourse. In the third chapter of this part, Guillaume Gentil outlines the potential benefits and challenges of developing a bilingual corpus-assisted methodology for intercultural rhetoric, illustrated by a study of a bilingual English-French corpus of submissions. Claiming that it is the first ever attempt to apply corpus-assisted discourse studies in IR research, Gentil creatively and skillfully adopts different corpus tools for different purposes. Finally, Gentil points to two options when it comes to the lack of availability of suitable computer tools: one is to develop more sophisticated software, the other is to “experiment with innovative uses of a combination of existing software” (p. 122). Three chapters are placed under the title of “Corpus-based Approaches” in the third part. Eric Friginal adopts Biber's multidimensional approach to analyzing outsourced call centre discourse by Indian and Filipino agents. Corpus-based linguistic analysis finds that there exist culture-specific style differences between Indian and Filipino groups. To account for the differences, the author maintains that English proficiency, first language background, micro-cultures, and training available should be factored in. Similar to You's chapter, Amanda Lanier Temples and Gayle Nelson’ chapter is also concerned with a