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 article presents a generative analysis of the acquisition of formulaic language as an alternative to current usage-based proposals. One influential view of the role of formulaic expressions in second language (L2) development is that they are a bootstrapping mechanism into the L2 grammar; an initial repertoire of constructions allows for…

Presents a research agenda in which the study of interlanguage becomes more central to the study of interlanguage pragmatics, assessing the state of acquisition research in interlanguage pragmatics, surveying work in interlanguage pragmatics that either directly examines or appeals to grammatical competence, showing how acquisition studies in…

The study of language development in second language acquisition naturally leads to information about linguistic processes of second language acquisition, but it also sheds light on learners' individual differences. This article examines the acquisition of the future in L2 English and explores how learners in a longitudinal study respond to input,…

Surveys the development of second language acquisition research in the area of tense and aspect. Research in this area has grown from the incidental investigation of tense-aspect morphology as part of the morpheme-order studies to investigations of the construction of interlanguage temporal semantics. (Author/VWL)

Discusses two hypotheses on the distribution of emergent tense-aspect morphology in second language acquisition: aspect hypothesis and discourse hypothesis. Analyzes narrative structure and lexical aspectual class in a single corpus comprising narratives produced by adult learners of English as a Second Language at various proficiency levels.…

Discusses potential problems and advantages of assessing grammatical competence from production data from interactional contexts. Argues that regardless of difficulties in assessing grammatical competence in interactional contexts, the types of interactions change with time, as the interlanguage grammar develops. (9 references) (Author/CK)

Discussion of the role of pragmatics research in language teaching looks at the role such research should play in the language classroom, and the role of researcher, teacher, and teacher educator in making that connection. It is noted that pragmatics research has discovered a number of differences in the ways in which first- and second-language…

A study compared (1) data on rejections of advice by native and non-native speakers collected from natural conversation with (2) data collected from a discourse completion task (DCT). Subjects were students in an academic advising session (13 native speakers, 11 non-native speakers of English) who responded to a DCT and students (18 native…

Examines the emergence of the present perfect in the interlanguage of adult learners of English as a Second Language (ESL). Part of a growing body of research on the acquisition of temporal expression by learners of a variety of second languages, this study explores a tense/aspect form acquired late in first language acquisition. (Author/VWL)

Examines the emergence of the present perfect in the interlanguage of instructed adult learners of English as a Second Language. Findings indicate that adding a new inflection in the tense/aspect system requires establishing new form-meaning associations as well as revising existing ones. (44 references) (Author/CK)