Analyzing Use of “Thanks to You”: Insights for Language Teaching and Assessment in Second and Foreign Language Contexts

Betty Lanteigne; Peter Crompton

doi:10.2478/v10015-011-0018-9

Authors

Betty Lanteigne American University Of Sharjah
Peter Crompton American University Of Sharjah

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.2478/v10015-011-0018-9

Keywords:

thanks to you, pragmatic failure, Arabic, expression of gratitude, American and British English corpora, language teaching and testing

Abstract

This investigation of thanks to you in British and American usage was precipitated by a situation at an American university, in which a native Arabic speaker said thanks to you in isolation, making his intended meaning unclear. The study analyzes use of thanks to you in the Corpus of Contemporary American English and the British National Corpus to gain insights for English language instruction /assessment in the American context, as well as English-as-a-lingua-franca contexts where the majority of speakers are not native speakers of English or are speakers of different varieties of English but where American or British English are for educational purposes the standard varieties. Analysis of the two corpora revealed three functions for thanks to you common to British and American usage: expressing gratitude, communicating “because of you” positively, and communicating “because of you” negatively (as in sarcasm). A fourth use of thanks to you, thanking journalists/guests for being on news programs/talk shows, occurred in the American corpus only. Analysis indicates that felicitous use of thanks to you for each of these meanings depends on the presence of a range of factors, both linguistic and material, in the context of utterance.

Author Biographies

Betty Lanteigne, American University Of Sharjah

Betty Lanteigne (PhD - Indiana University of Pennsylvania - sociolinguistics/language assessment/cross-cultural communication) has taught ESL/EFL in the USA, UAE, Palestine, Qatar, Kuwait for 16 years, developed an IEP and an English education B.A., and as a Fulbright Fellow, investigated non-Western English to address culturally inappropriate language assessment. Member of Phi Kappa Phi, Pi Lambda Theta, International Association of Language Testers and TESOL, she has presented about language assessment and sociolinguistics and is affiliated with Language Assessment and Sociolinguistics Department of English American University of Sharjah, UAE.

Peter Crompton, American University Of Sharjah

Peter Crompton (PhD - University of Lancaster, UK - text analysis/corpus linguistics/academic writing) has taught EFL, EAP, and applied English linguistics at universities and colleges in China, Saudi Arabia, Brunei, Lithuania, the UK, and the UAE. He has published and presented in the areas of interaction in academic writing, Business English, intercultural rhetoric, written text structure, and the application of corpus linguistics to language learning.

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