This study investigates the acquisition of genericity in L2 French and L3 English. While some exponents become generic by assembling morphological, syntactic and discursive cues, definite singular nominals additionally require the well-established kind restriction. It is a pragmatic and language-specific constraint. The participants are L1 Arabic…

Teaching L2 pragmatics is often not covered in teacher education programs, and is an excellent area for continuing professional development. As part of a larger project on instructed interlanguage pragmatics, volunteer instructor participants were asked to teach a series of lessons on pragmatics to university-aged (19-23) ESL learners in ESL and…

This study sets out to examine the pragmatic competence of Cantonese adult learners of English possessing different levels of proficiency when performing the speech act of requesting for a formal purpose in writing. Pragmatic judgment--one of the two aspects of pragmatic competence--was examined by studying the most proficient group (i.e., native…

As the instructional shortcomings of Focus on FormS and Focus on Meaning have surfaced, Focus on Form (i.e., drawing brief attention to linguistic forms while learners engage primarily in meaning) has slowly but steadily gained the attention of researchers and teachers. The research question underlying this study was whether Focus on Form could be…