This article reports a study that involved simulated job interviews with 27 high-proficiency English-as-an-additional-language (EAL) candidates and nine professional interviewers and that evaluated three conditions: a control group and two experimental groups (one receiving only personalized, training-focused feedback on interview skills…

Paired speaking tasks are now commonly used in both pedagogic and assessment contexts, as they elicit a wide range of interactional skills. The current study aims to offer an investigation of the interaction co-constructed by learners at different proficiency levels who are engaged in a paired speaking test, and to provide insights into the…

Communicative adequacy is a key construct in second language research, as the primary goal of most language learners is to communicate successfully in real-world situations. Nevertheless, little is known about what linguistic features contribute to communicatively adequate speech. This study fills this gap by investigating the extent to which…

Reviews the various definitions of communicative competence, and argues for a view of communicative competence as language use, a lesser but more readily achievable ambition for both theory and pedagogy. (Author/CB)

This paper reviews briefly the close relationship that foreign language research has sustained with social and political power since the emergence of applied linguistics as a field of scientific inquiry and, more recently, with the demands of economic competitiveness and national security. It examines two debates that capture well the conflicting…

Attempts to clarify the notion of language competence and draws on its relevance to language teaching practices. Language use competence may involve the adjustment of pre-assembled and memorized patterns and not so much the generation of expressions by direct reference to rules. (Author/CB)

Describes attempts to formalize and characterize a theory of communicative competence, focusing on the advantages of a preference model (which identifies and grades learning variables in order of importance) and of models developed on the premise of parallel distributed processing (which suggest that such rule-based processing are in fact gross…

Within '"communicative language teaching," "natural" language has had a privileged position, and a focus on form has been seen as something inauthentic or as something that is inconsequential for learning (for a critique, see Kramsch and Sullivan 1996; Cook 1997). Yet in the present study of an immersion classroom, it was found that children with…

The concept of "communicative competence" is one of the most influential theoretical developments in language education as it helped redefine the objectives of L2 instruction and the target language proficiency. While acknowledging these contributions, this paper asks if the conceptual formulation of "communicative competence" has other…

In cross-cultural interaction in medical settings, the potential for miscommunication increases when the language proficiency of one of the interactants is low. Sources of communicative success include the ability of both parties to draw contextually triggered inferences providing a basis for making perceptual contributions and using communication…

Describes the study of learning strategies employed by successful (defined in terms of oral communicative abilities) Chinese learners of English. These strategies are compared to those of less successful learners and those of other population types from other studies. The test of oral communicative abilities is described. A strategies…

Examines the intersection of learner identity, social position, and second-language acquisition. The article, which focuses on a case study of a white woman learning Japanese in Japan, presents a conversation between the learner and her professor to show the dynamic coconstruction of identity and sociolinguistic proficiency within conversational…

Classroom observation of three adult English as a second language classes and pre- and post-testing of students for proficiency were used to investigate the relationships between instructional processes and learning outcomes. The observation scheme, Communicative Orientation of Language Teaching, and the various results are described in detail.…