The concepts of language acquisition and interlanguage as they relate to second language teaching methods are discussed. The aim of such teaching should be error-free communicative competence. Formal teaching is not enough to ensure a high level of proficiency. (CB)

Argues against the current oral proficiency testing approach in favor of an approach in which researchers come to understand what it means for real speakers to interact with each other in the everyday world of human activity. Problematic trends are addressed, and a principled theory of oral proficiency is identified. (DJD)

Reports on a longitudinal study of young immigrants' spoken Danish during the first months of their stay, focusing on the Albanian-, Vietnamese-, and English-speaking adolescents' syntactic development from a functional perspective. Changes in early syntax are seen as being rooted in cognitive as well as interactional dimensions of language use.…

Tested the hypothesis that synchronous computer-mediated communication (CMC) can indirectly improve second language oral proficiency by developing the same cognitive mechanisms underlying spontaneous conversational speech. Findings show a significant difference between the experimental and control groups oral proficiency development with…

Investigations of Japanese speakers' interlanguage constructions of English existential sentences with a locative sentential topic found a general shift from topic-comment to subject-predicate structures as proficiency increased. (24 references) (Author/CB)

Analyzes the difference between "ultimate-target language" (authentic English in all its varieties), "learner's language" (with its limitations), and "learning-goal language," this latter referring to differentiated instruction with graded "input" steps. Teaching suggestions are given. (IFS/WGA)

Aimed to account for the different levels of pragmatic development among 137 university-level Japanese learners of English, as functions of their varying levels of English proficiency and amount of exposure to English. (Author/VWL)

From an interlanguage perspective, argues that many perplexing errors in second language writing are the result of the interaction between developing linguistic competence and basic principles of ordering information in texts that learners already know. Shows how this interaction results in errors at the sentence level. These insights are applied…

Analysis of four adult Quechua speakers' acquisition of clitic pronouns in Spanish revealed that educational attainment and amount of contact with monolingual Spanish speakers were positively related to native-like norms of competence in the use of object pronouns in Spanish. (CB)

Examination of the accommodation process in interlanguage discourse in a foreign language focused on the effects of various accommodation and negotiation strategies. Dyads of English as a second language students with different proficiency levels accommodated each other in ways similar to interaction between native and non-native speakers.…

Discusses the treatment of idioms in language learning, specifically questions that need to be addressed when decisions are made on the role of idioms in language-learning programs. Particular emphasis is on the extent to which idioms present a particular source of misunderstanding and confusion for learners. (Author/VWL)

This article presents evidence of syntactic transfer from Chinese to English based on data obtained from 710 Hong Kong Chinese ESL learners at different proficiency levels. Three methodologies were used: self-reporting in individual interviews, translation (with and without prompts), and grammaticality judgment. The focus of the study was on 5…

This study deals with the development and recoverability of word-final codas in Chinese-Swedish interlanguage. The relation between consonant deletion and vowel epenthesis is investigated from both a developmental perspective and a grammatical-functional one. Longitudinal, conversational data from three Chinese beginner learners of Swedish were…

Recent unrelated studies reveal what appears to be a common acquisitional pattern in second language acquisition (SLA). While some findings show that advanced learners can indeed achieve convergent, native-like competence with formal syntactic properties (even when these are underdetermined by the input), other findings suggest that they can…

This paper attempts to provide a framework within which the terminology used to talk about the learner's interlanguage may be defined so as to represent categories of types of interlanguage phenomena which are often discussed by teachers and researchers interested in second language acquisition. Several distinct types of "communication…