A study investigated the nature and effectiveness of communication strategies (CSs) used in a negotiation task involving native speakers (NSs) and non-native speakers (NNSs) of Spanish. Subjects were eight university students divided into NS/NNS dyads; the NSs were studying English and the NNSs were studying third- and fourth-semester Spanish. The…

An interactional sociolinguistic discourse analysis of adult, low-literate, beginning learners of English as a Second Language is presented. Four pairs of non-native speakers of English worked together on drill and practice software, interacting with each other, teachers, and software. All had zero to 6 years of previous schooling. Each pair was…

This paper discusses miscommunication in speech acts, speech act research, and applications in the classroom. A new model of speech acts proposed by Celce-Murcia, Dornyei, and Thurrell is discussed. The distinguishing feature of this model is that the pivotal center is discourse competence. Discourse competence interacts with the three subfields…

This study examined the availability and utility of negative feedback provided in the context of task-based adult conversations between native speakers and non-native speakers. Subjects were 10 dyads each consisting of a native English speaker and a college-level student of English as a Second Language. Analysis of conversational interactions…

Some aspects of foreign language classroom discourse are examined from a social theoretical perspective, and an attempt to raise the learners' awareness of the social reality created in interaction with other learners in the foreign language being taught is described. Through peer observation and the retrospective evaluation by the participants of…

A study was undertaken to investigate the variation in the speech of child second language learners as a function of the different discourse constraints imposed by three participant structures: narrator-audience, child-adult conversation, and child-child conversation. The subjects were 18 children aged 7 to 12, temporary residents in the United…

The acceptability of a sentence is dependent on context: some sentences look awkward in isolation but improve in an appropriate context, whereas other sentences look all right in isolation but fail to fit certain types of context. Of particular interest is the degree and specificity of textual fit of different thematic (theme-rheme, topic-comment)…

This paper describes an experiment in which the Developmental Sentence Scoring procedure, which has been used successfully for scoring sentence complexity in child language, was examined for its usefulness when applied to adult learners of English as a Second Language. The technique is based upon a developmental scale of syntax acquisition within…

Turn-taking in language classroom discourse is analyzed in order to discover patterns of instructional teacher-pupil exchange. It is concluded that traditional modes of second language instruction (especially in English as a second language) tend to stifle student initiative. Since students rarely have the opportunity to open an exchange, it is…

Dictations are not sufficient as exercises for developing listening comprehension skills. Other techniques and exercises which have been used in English for Special Purposes classes include practice in note taking, cloze-testing on lectures, mock formal interviews and informal conversations, and discourse analyses of sample lectures. Such analyses…

Conversations between adult students of English as a second language were recorded, transcribed, and analyzed in order to establish principles of extralinguistic conversational repair technique among second language learners. A variety of gestural and kinesic features were discovered; these are described in detail and their use is contextualized…

A study of non-native children's acquisition of communicative competence examined the child's construction of rules of conversation in the second language. The linguistic devices that children use to link up their utterances with those of another speaker, i.e., cohesion-creating devices that create textual unity, were focused upon. Repetition, one…

Investigation of the extent to which young bilingual children's code differentiation correlated with language mixing revealed that children who avoided using their other language when naming pictures of objects which were not known in one of the languages showed significantly less mixing in their speech than children who freely substituted words…

Students of German need to be made aware of the pragmatic contrasts between American English and standard German to avoid unnecessary misunderstandings. Examples are given of contrasts such as power relationships between speaker and listener, affecting choice of verb; the uses of "bitte" and "danke" versus "please"…

The relationship between the source language (Spanish) and the target language (French) in the construction of lexis during target language acquisition was examined in two case studies, leading to the hypothesis that there are both systematic and nonsystematic approaches to the construction of lexis used by Hispanophones learning French.…