Students commonly find specialist scientific language problematic. This study investigated developments in chemical language usage by six "non-traditional" students over the course of 1 to 4 years. The students participated in semi-structured interviews and were asked to explain specific chemical scenarios. Interviews were transcribed…

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…

Though dynamic assessment (DA) has gained strong theoretical and empirical support over the last decades, second language (L2) practitioners have blamed it for its applicability in large classes. To ameliorate this limitation, peer-dynamic assessment (peer-DA), rooted in the conceptualization of zone of proximal development (ZPD), can be…

Pragmatic formulas have been recognized as linguistic building blocks necessary for successful speech act performance. Current approaches to speech act teaching overlook pragmatic formulas, promoting an incomplete view of pragmatics instruction. This paper reports on the results of a classroom-based study in which a formula-enhanced treatment…

Research into instructed pragmatics mainly comparing implicit and explicit instruction has gained salience in language teaching research in the last two decades. The present study was designed to investigate the effect of cognitive and interpersonal task-based instruction on EFL Learners' production of two speech acts of apology and request. To…

This study aimed to investigate the production of stress in English compound nouns and phrasal verbs by L1 Thai learners. Based on the Interlanguage Hypothesis (Corder, 1982; Selinker, 1972), it was hypothesized that (1) there is a positive relationship between English proficiency levels and accuracy in stress assignment in compound nouns and…

This cross-sectional study examined the effects of English language proficiency on Jordanian EFL students' production and comprehension of apology strategies. The participants were 270 Jordanian EFL learners and 90 native speakers of English. Data were collected using Written Discourse Completion Test (WDCT) and Multiplechoice Discourse Completion…

There have been a number of studies on the use of complaints as a speech act. The majority of these studies have included analysis of how different first language speakers make complaints while only a limited number of studies have examined the effects of instruction on the development of complaints as a speech act. Those that have examined this…

The present study investigated the production of the speech act of disagreement among Tunisian non-native students of English and American native speakers of English. Discourse completion test (DCT) was used to elicit disagreement strategies by the informants. Non-native informants produced a total of 376 acts and native informants produced 395…

This study uses both offline and online tasks in order to investigate whether second language learners of English from an article-less first-language (Mandarin) are able to integrate the indefinite article into their grammar despite the lack of articles in their first language. This article reports on two studies, one on learners' sensitivity to…

This interlanguage study examines the L2 mental lexicon of Thai EFL learners with different degrees of language exposure--i.e., the high exposure group and the low exposure group. The scores from the English Language Exposure (ELE) Questionnaire were used to select the two groups of participants. To explore the lexical processing and the…

Pragmatic competence is considered one of the principal elements of second/foreign language learners' communicative language ability. However, in comparison to other components of communicative language competence, learners' pragmatic competence is far less researched. Of many components of this ability, ample research studies have been centered…

This paper focuses on the teaching of pragmatics in English as a Foreign Language classroom and how the traditional way of teaching languages can be challenged. It also aims to highlight the importance of incorporating computer-assisted activities as well as other resources that can be introduced into the classrooms in order to teach pragmatics.…

The present paper explored how plays could contribute to pragmatic development when employed as a medium of implicit or explicit instruction. 80 undergraduate English-major students were divided into four experimental groups two of which were literary and two nonliterary. Implicit Literary, as one of the literary groups was exposed to…

This study analyses the effects of data-driven learning (DDL) on the phraseology used by 223 English students at an Italian university. The students studied the genre of opinion survey reports through paper-based and hands-on exploration of a reference corpus. They then wrote their own report and a learner corpus of these texts was compiled. A…