Directives in office hour consultations: A corpus-informed investigation of learner and expert usage

This paper investigates spoken directive language use in office hour consultation contexts by international teaching assistants (ITAs) in training, individually and in comparison with practicing academic professionals. The purpose is to inform instruction in advanced spoken English for academic purposes, to contribute to intercultural pragmatics research, and to illustrate the strengths of a mixed corpus and discourse analytic approach for the investigation of learner language. The study employs corpus techniques to compare use by groups and individuals, and qualitative analysis supported by data from surveys and interviews to profile three learners. Interpreted using a social-functional politeness framework, the corpus results show that the ITA group makes fewer uses of both independence and inclusion appeals than the practicing academics, while the profiles provide insight into how learner histories, understandings, and developmental trajectories influence individual patterns of use.