There are two broad approaches to the research and teaching of second-language (L2) pronunciation--'bottom-up' and 'top-down'--which roughly align with structural and communicative approaches to language teaching. A bottom-up approach, explicitly focusing on de-contextualised linguistic forms, is structuralist and predominated in the second half…

The present paper attempts to provide a critical evaluation of the most prominent pedagogical models that have dealt with the language of the second language (L2) learner starting from the second half of the 20th century. The three most influential approaches in the domain are investigated in this study: contrastive analysis (CA), error analysis…

This book is the first comprehensive investigation of interlanguage pragmatic issues in a primary school context that is based on both primary school teachers' statements on their own teaching realities, views and preferences, and a thorough investigation of materials used by teachers and recommended by teacher educators in the state the primary…

Although Chinese college students have studied English for many years, they still have much difficulty in writing a good paper. There are many factors resulting in their inability to write well, such as students' lack of vocabulary, having a poor knowledge of grammar, language transfer, and so on. But, of these factors, the negative transfer of…

In the field of Second Language Acquisition (SLA), the role of transfer has been theorized and studied to account for the influence of the native language on an interlanguage. However, stemming from behaviorist mentality, the concept of "transfer" has become widely associated with the direct transfer of habits and fails to take into…

The purpose of this study is to report the history of communication strategy and highlight the importance of strategic competence. It provides the histories and characterizations of communication strategy. Besides, it presents from which perspectives these definitions of communication strategies were developed. Various earlier and latter…

This paper is motivated by the premise that little is known about the use of requestive strategies in request emails in Chinese English-as-a-Foreign-Language (EFL) context. Specifically, the paper examines and compares requestive strategies in request emails between two groups of university students, namely English majors (EM) and non-English…

The following article aims to revisit Selinker's theory of Interlanguage by analysing a group of undergraduates' written scripts in L2. The initial outcomes of the study establish a linguistic parallelism between students' Interlingua and English as a lingua franca in the academic world. In the light of this comparison, certain theoretical…

In the tradition of work by Shaughnessy (1977) and Bartholomae (1980) applying concepts from second language acquisition research to developing writing, we explore the commonalities of L1 and L2 writers on the specific level of linguistic choices needed to order information within and across sentence boundaries. We propose that many of the kinds…

A spoken language eye-tracking methodology was used to evaluate the effects of sentence context and proficiency on parallel language activation during spoken language comprehension. Nonnative speakers with varying proficiency levels viewed visual displays while listening to French sentences (e.g., "Marie va decrire la poule" [Marie will…

This paper presents a brief summary of processability theory as proposed by [Pienemann, M., 1998a. "Language Processing and Second Language Development: Processability Theory." John Benjamins, Amsterdam; Pienemann, M., 1998b. "Developmental dynamics in L1 and L2 acquisition: processability theory and generative entrenchment." "Bilingualism:…

This article discusses the strategies used by Cantonese ESL learners to cope with their problems in pronouncing English initial consonant clusters. A small-scale research study was carried out with six secondary and six university students in Hong Kong, who were asked to perform four speech tasks: the reading of a word list, the description of a…