This book constitutes a holistic study of sociolinguistic development among adult second language (L2) learners in a naturalistic setting. Combining results from a cross-sectional and longitudinal micro-development study, it examines the acquisition of both the productive and interpretive skills necessary to engage with the contextually sensitive…

This article discusses the controversial issue of which variety of English learners and instructors should use. The United Nations' Sustainable Development Goal 4, Target 4.7 states that learners need knowledge to promote peace and cultural diversity. It is argued here that a broad awareness of English varieties is a way to achieve this goal, and…

This research study investigates the effectiveness of a pedagogical model (an interventional framework) of contextualised instruction through Reverso Context, a comprehensive language and translation tool, in developing the translation skills of senior EFL student teachers. The study employs a quasi-experimental one-group pre-post design, with a…

Child language acquisition research has provided ample evidence of lexical frequency effects. This corpus-based analysis introduces a novel frequency measure shown to significantly constrain adult language variation, but heretofore unexplored in child language acquisition research. Among adults, frequent occurrence of a form in a particular…

The study investigated the non-intellective correlates affecting the sociolinguistic competence of teacher education students, with a focus on the analysis of their contexts relative to social experiences, language attitude, and use of linguistic forms in different situations. It also determined the common difficulties they experience in the use…

Globalisation has a great influence on the emergence of English as a lingua franca (ELF), particularly in tourism contexts. This paper reports on a piece of research that investigated variants and coinage in spoken ELF interactions between Thai locals and foreign tourists on Koh Lanta, Krabi. The nature of tourism encounters was brief and…

Language variation in a context is influenced by various factors. While there has been some research regarding English language variation, there has not been much research pertaining to Chinese variation (Gao, 2017; Xu, 2015). In the present study, we examined different language usages among different social classes of Tianjin in China in order to…

Previous research indicates that features of speech during mother-toddler interactions are dependent on the situational context. In this study, we explored language samples of 69 mother-toddler dyads collected during standardized toy play and book-reading situations across two countries, Germany and the United States (US). The results showed that…

This article reports on a study investigating the role of scientific concepts in the metapragmatic awareness of Norwegian primary EFL learners following a four-week instructional intervention on requesting informed by sociocultural theory (Vygotsky, 2012/1934). Through introducing pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic dimensions of requesting, the…

There are many purposes for using language which determine how the writer or speaker chooses words, syntactic expressions and figurative language. This is as a result of the fact that language has a very powerful effect over people, their actions and thoughts. This is seen in the use of language in various discourse types which include…

This paper explored a less-studied preposition, "after," and its uses in a corpus. The analysis included an inspection of dictionary senses, followed by the distributional patterns of parts-of-speech, the co-appearing verbs of "after," the contextual uses of [-"ly after"] and [-"ly after"+NOUN], and finally…

This article reports the findings of sociolinguistic research investigating the use of second-person singular pronouns in Costa Rica. The study was carried out onsite and involved 132 interviewees from all seven provinces of the country. These subjects reacted to scenarios in which they had to choose their preferred pronoun of use…

Previous research has primarily addressed the effects of language on the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) mathematics and science assessments. More recent research has focused on the effects of language on PISA reading comprehension and literacy assessments on student populations in specific Organization for Economic Cooperation…

Compliments are expressions of positive evaluation that commonly occur in everyday conversational encounters. This paper aims at raising second language cross-cultural pragmatic awareness through investigating the use of complimenting expressions in Palestinian Arabic which are related to certain social variables, namely, gender, age, education…

One of the most studied forms of multilingual language use is "code-switching," the use of more than one language within a speech exchange. Some forms of code-switching may also be regarded as instances of "translation," but the relation between these notions in studies of multilingual discourse remains underspecified. The…