This study investigates the acquisition of genericity in L2 French and L3 English. While some exponents become generic by assembling morphological, syntactic and discursive cues, definite singular nominals additionally require the well-established kind restriction. It is a pragmatic and language-specific constraint. The participants are L1 Arabic…

This study investigates the acoustic realizations of English phonemic contrasts by Korean EFL learners, comparing their productions with those of native English speakers. Focusing on the segmentally correct production, the research aims to determine if Korean learners' acoustic properties align with those of native speakers, influenced by second…

The research investigated pragmatic transfer in responses to English tag questions by L1 Thai learners based on Interlanguage Pragmatics, specifically pragmatic transfer (Kasper & Blum-Kulka, 1993). The L1 Thai learners were categorized into two groups according to their English proficiency levels: advanced and intermediate. Oral and written…

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…

The act of refusal takes place in everyday lives, but it has been discussed to be a difficult speech act for nonnative speakers. This study seeks to investigate Korean EFL learners' refusals in extended discourse along with their pragmatic perceptions. Sixteen college students were engaged in oral role-plays with two native English speakers and…

Variability in the form of article (i.e., a and the) omissions and stressing has been attributed to a mismatch between first (L1) and second language (L2) prosodic and syntactic structures. An overlap between the L1 and L2 systems, on the other hand, is expected to contribute to native-like article productions. This case study aims to explore the…

This paper first surveys three kinds of learner interview corpora (LINDSEI, NICT-JLE Corpus, and Trinity Lancaster Corpus), paying particular attention to their interview structures. Then, it explains the principles and features of the ICNALE Spoken Dialogue (ICNALE SD), which includes 425 videos and approximately 1.6-million-word transcripts of…

The study focuses on the strategies English as a foreign language (EFL) learners choose to take on in requests without evaluating them against the norm of a native speaker, as the concept of native speaker is ideologically problematic in the time of super-diversity. The study uses cultural scripts proposed in the field of cross-cultural pragmatics…

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…

Pragmatic competence plays a very significant role in cross-cultural communication. In Chinese high school, many English teachers focus more on lexical and syntactic aspects of English. The aspect of pragmatics, however, is relatively neglected by high school English teachers. The aim of this research is to investigate pragmatic transfer in…

This article investigates the second language (L2) acquisition of two expressions of the semantic feature [definite] in Russian, a language without articles, by English and Korean native speakers. Within the Feature Reassembly approach (Lardiere, 2009), Slabakova (2009) has argued that reassembling features that are represented overtly in the…

Research into complexity, accuracy and fluency (CAF) as basic dimensions of second language performance, proficiency and development has received increased attention in SLA. However, the larger picture in this field of research is often obscured by the breadth of scope, multiple objectives and lack of clarity as to how complexity, accuracy and…

Testing of second language pragmatic competence is an underexplored but growing area of second language assessment. Tests have focused on assessing learners' sociopragmatic and pragmalinguistic abilities but the speech act framework informing most current productive testing instruments in interlanguage pragmatics has been criticized for…

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…