Research on pragmatic competence involving various approaches has received increasing attention since 1980 when interlanguage pragmatics began to flourish. The aim of this systematic review was to examine and categorize contemporary studies on pragmatic competence of EFL and ESL students and to reveal potential moderators, compare results of…

This study aimed to investigate the production of stress in English compound nouns and phrasal verbs by L1 Thai learners. Based on the Interlanguage Hypothesis (Corder, 1982; Selinker, 1972), it was hypothesized that (1) there is a positive relationship between English proficiency levels and accuracy in stress assignment in compound nouns and…

This cross-sectional study examined the effects of English language proficiency on Jordanian EFL students' production and comprehension of apology strategies. The participants were 270 Jordanian EFL learners and 90 native speakers of English. Data were collected using Written Discourse Completion Test (WDCT) and Multiplechoice Discourse Completion…

This article shows that first language (L1) transfer may not be effectively maintained in the interlanguage due to confounding factors in the second language (L2). When two factors, "A" and "B," are correlated in the L2, second language learners may only acquire "B," even if "A" is present in the L1.…

This paper investigated the "be"-insertion phenomenon in L2 English. L2 learners often insert "be"-forms before thematic verbs, creating nontargetlike forms (e.g. "She is love ice cream"). Based on L2 data from learners of topic-prominent L1s, a group of researchers have claimed that such "be"-forms are…

This study investigates the role of proficiency in the acquisition of conventional expressions as a pragmalinguistic resource in second-language (L2) Chinese. One hundred and four undergraduates, including 57 learners of Chinese as a foreign language at 3 levels of university instruction and 47 native speakers completed an aural-oral discourse…

This study investigated the relationship between language proficiency and negative pragmatic transfer from a first language (L1), focusing on the speech act of refusal as realised by American learners of Arabic as a Foreign Language (AFL) in Egyptian Arabic. Twenty American AFL learners (10 intermediate and 10 advanced) and 2 baseline groups (10…

Morphological complexity (MC) is a relatively new construct in second language acquisition (SLA). After critically discussing existing approaches to calculating MC in first- and second-language acquisition research, this article presents a new operationalization of the construct, the Morphological Complexity Index (MCI). The MCI is applied in two…

This research study empirically investigated the impact of study abroad context on L2 learners' pragmatic development compared with study at home group in Iran. For the study abroad group the participants were selected from the Iranian students who registered in a six-month program in language institutes in India (Mysore) and for the study at home…

L2 requests in developmental pragmatics research are commonly investigated using non-interactive data collection techniques or sidelining the larger discourse sequence in which the request proper is embedded. This study takes a different approach to the study of L2 requests. In a cross-sectional design, we collected role play data from learners at…

It is generally believed that interlanguage pragmatics and motivation play important roles in learning. Motivation is important because it determines the extent of the learner's active involvement and attitude toward learning. The major purpose of this study was to investigate the impact of integrative and instrumental motivation on the…

The purpose of this dissertation was to examine the relationships between working memory (WM) and three commonly used learning strategies or conditions in the nature of proficiency among adult L2 Russian learners. Based on the aptitude-learning condition interaction framework articulated by Robinson (2002b), the study identifies two types of…

Studies in interlanguage pragmatics have shown that L2 learners' proficiency has an influence on the occurrences of L1 pragmatic transfer. However, questions remain whether the relationship between L1 pragmatic transfer and L2 proficiency is positive or negative. This paper is designed to study L1 pragmatic transfer in requests made by Chinese…

Proposes that the study of basilectal and acrolectal Singapore English can contribute to a better understanding of second language acquisition and use, emphasizing the operation of the monitor and specifications of the hierarchy of difficulty in the acquisition of syntactic structures. (Author/CB)

Relates research on second language acquisition (SLA) and research on the language problems of foreign teaching assistants (TAs) and their remediation. SLA research has not yet addressed specific data on the proficiency level needed for effective foreign TAs. Research needs are outlined. (Author/LMO)