The teaching of discourse features which affect the relations among sentences in a paragraph has often been delayed until students are considered advanced. Yet, because control of such features is considered essential to gaining control of language segments, instruction in these features should be given from the beginning. One category of…

A role-playing procedure for elicitation of speech acts was designed to study aspects of the communicative competence of second language learners, namely, their language variation with respect to deference when the age and sex of the addressee are systematically manipulated. Sixteen Spanish-speaking adult learners of English as a second language…