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…

I have been interested in the study of language since I was a very young kid, and this caused me to give up everything else just to focus on the study of language. Applied linguistics has specifically been my passion and blessing, and every now and then I prepare a bibliography of research on applied linguistics for people who are interested in…

While the number of studies on pragmatic development has been increasing since Kasper and Schmidt's call for more research into this under-researched area (e.g., [Barron, A., 2003. Acquisition in Interlanguage Pragmatics: Learning How to do Things with Words in a Study Abroad Context. Benhamins, Amsterdam; Achiba, M., 2003. Learning to Request in…

This study addresses the development of the request strategies used in two service encounter scenarios by 31 nonnative speakers of Spanish spending 4 months living and studying in Valencia, Spain. The main method of data collection was an open role-play in which participants interacted with a Spanish native speaker. Results show that while there…

Vygotsky's zone of proximal development (ZPD) has been fruitfully applied in L2 research that examines second and foreign language learning. This paper considers the applicability of the ZPD to interlanguage pragmatics instruction and research. First, the ZPD is defined [Vygotsky, L.S., 1978. Mind in Society: The Development of Higher…

Dutch native children and Turkish immigrant children, born and reared in the Netherlands, were asked to tell a story from a series of pictures, at age six and again at age eight. The Turkish children exhibited about the same level of narrative proficiency in Dutch as their Dutch peers. (Author/LMO)

Presents various viewpoints on dual language acquisition by children. These include native language foundation, first-language monolinguals' vocabulary development, second-language learning, simultaneous acquisition strategies, television as a source of language learning, functions of language in discourse, analysis of conversation, syntax and…

PRAGMATICS & LANGUAGE LEARNING, a refereed series sponsored by the National Foreign Language Resource Center at the University of Hawai'i, publishes selected papers from the biannual International Pragmatics & Language Learning Conference under the editorship of the conference hosts and the series editor. Check the NFLRC website for…

Compares patterns of subject position pronominalization and zero anaphora in English in stories written by monolingual U.S. students and bilingual Mexican students at grades 6 and 12. The possibility of both sentential and discourse level transfer effects resulting from the fact that Spanish allows subject deletion is investigated as is the…