This study addresses how Chinese learners of English as a second language (L2) perceive conversations in English materials as compared to speakers of English as a first language (L1). Data were collected through questionnaires completed by 48 participants (28 L2 English learners in China and 20 L1 English speakers in the UK), eliciting evaluations…

This paper explores, through the use of the observation checklist and Conversation Analysis (CA), the discourse functions elicited by the dialogic task of the Free University of Bolzano (IT) speaking test. It aims to contribute to content validation, which has been claimed to be especially relevant in paired speaking tests, where interaction is…

Conversational language samples were elicited from 24 children (ages 2-7), half with specific language impairment (SLI), half with normally developing language (LN), matched for language level. For the SLI children, but not the LN children, increased proportions of questions were correlated to increased proportions of ellipsis. (Author/JDD)

The selection of papers from the 6th Annual International Conference on Pragmatics and Language Learning (Urbana, Illinois, April 1992) include: "Discourse Markers Across Language" (Bruce Fraser); "Conjunction and Causality: Pragmatics and the Lexicon" (Yael Ziv); "Situated Discourse: The Sociocultural Context of…