This study reports evidence of cross-linguistic influence (CLI) that surfaced from English compositions of SiSwati learners of English in Swaziland, where English is a second language. Although CLI has been studied widely in other languages, it has not been studied in SiSwati and English, and its implications for instruction are not known.…

A study compares and contrasts a set of English and Spanish prepositions of location in the context of prototype theory. It seeks to establish the prototype concept of each preposition and the degrees of prototypicality by testing for native-speaker choices of examples that illustrate best the most basic use of the preposition. The prepositions…

This paper attempts a brief account of recent trends in interlanguage studies. Interlanguage may be defined as a separate linguistic system which results from a learner's attempted production of a target language norm. According to the recreation hypothesis, this is a dynamic system of increasing complexity, whereas, according to the restructuring…

A comparison of three models of language learning: the Creative Construction Hypothesis, the Interlanguage Hypothesis and The Approximate Systems Model. Evidence is provided to support the hypothesis that the third model which incorporates both functional and linguistic analysis describes second language learning and explains why learners progress…

Attempts to demonstrate the strategies used by the second language learner in deciphering unfamiliar linguistic material. (AM)

It has been claimed that error analysis (EA) has two broad aims and two levels of application: pedagogical (relevant to syllabus design and second language teaching) and psycholinguistic (relevant to language learning studies). At the moment, EA's pedagogical claims are stronger than its psycholinguistic ones. In its early days, EA defined its…

Discussion of the role of pragmatics research in language teaching looks at the role such research should play in the language classroom, and the role of researcher, teacher, and teacher educator in making that connection. It is noted that pragmatics research has discovered a number of differences in the ways in which first- and second-language…

The "state of the art" in the three fields of contrastive analysis, error analysis and interlanguage is critically examined from the point of view of evolving an explanatory theory of a second language learner's performance. Each field is discussed with respect to its outreach, theoretical assumptions, methodology, claims and empirical…

Language educators find two kinds of errors in the interlanguages of language learners: developmental and interference. While developmental errors reflect a normal pattern of development common among all language learners, interference errors are caused by the learners' native languages. This paper deals with a number of die-hard types of…

Thirty-five articles on teaching English as a second language are presented under the following headings: (1) "Trends and Practices," (2) "The Matter of Errors," (3) "Second Language Acquisition," (4) "Speaking and Understanding," (5) "Reading and Writing," (6) "Vocabulary," (7) "Testing," and (8) "The Matter of Culture." Authors include Clifford…