The present study adds to our understanding of how learners employ lexical and grammatical phenomena to communicate in writing in different types of interlanguage discourse. A multidimensional (factor) analysis of a corpus of L2 Spanish writing (202,241 words) generated by second- and third-year, university-level learners was performed. The…

This paper explores the representation of honorifics in the teaching of Korean as a second language through the analysis of three leading series of textbooks published in Seoul. Despite the fact that Korean is a language with a highly developed honorifics system, these textbooks at times under-emphasize the importance of honorifics and focus…

Based on Byram's (1997) definition of intercultural communicative competence (ICC) and on specific types of discourse analysis proposed by Kramsch and Thorne (2002) and Ware and Kramsch (2005), this article explores how online exchanges can play a role in second language learners' development of pragmatic competence and ICC. With data obtained…

This article presents 2 case studies of intermediate university students of French, Casey and Melanie (both pseudonyms), and their developing use and understanding of stylistic variation over the course of an academic semester. It draws from a variety of data sources: classroom observation, learners' explanations of stylistic variants, learners'…

This paper investigates native speaker (NS) and non-native speaker (NNS) interaction in the workplace in computer-mediated communication (CMC). Based on empirical data from a 10-month email exchange between a medium-sized British company and a small-sized Italian company, the general aim of this study is to explore the nature of the intercultural…

In this article, I examine literacy artifacts placed by students in different locations of a state-run secondary school in the city of Madrid, Spain. The data were gathered as part of a two-year long multilevel ethnography focused on the social and academic trajectories of immigrant students in Spanish compulsory secondary education. The analysis…

Academic literacies research has tended to focus on writers in context, while systemic functional linguistic research has tended to focus on texts in context. While literacy practices and written texts may be usefully analysed independently, this paper describes how an investigation of genres of academic writing in the BAWE (British Academic…

As an area of research that continues to develop, the study of linguistics worldwide presents the opportunity for the improvement of cross-cultural communication through education and research. Language educators are charged with the task of instructing students to effectively communicate across cultures in a multi-lingual world. The…

This study utilizes a pre-test/post-test assessment to investigate the instructional efficacy of a genre-based approach to teaching summary writing. Forty-one EFL university students in Taiwan were asked before and after the instruction to summarize a simplified version of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer in a maximum of 500 words. All the students'…

This paper reports on a comprehensive corpus-based study of regional and stylistic variation in the distribution of the English present perfect. The data represents ten English varieties of both the Inner Circle and Outer Circle, covering four major text types: conversation, news reportage, academic and fictional writing. The results are discussed…

Within a social view of literacy, this paper reports a two-year ethnographic case study of an adolescent multilingual writer, with respect to her transitions across in-school (i.e., Creative Writing class) and out-of-school writing contexts. This study was aimed to address two specific gaps in the fields of second language (L2) writing and…

This paper investigates the consequences of L2 use in university lectures. Data in the study stem from parallel lectures held by the same experienced lecturer in Danish (L1) and English (L2). It is found that the lecturer takes 22% longer to present the same content in L2 compared to L1, and that the lecturer speaks 23% more slowly in L2 than in…

This study analyzes how a teacher in the United States used systemic functional linguistics to design a blog-mediated writing curriculum to support second grade English language learners' (ELLs) literacy development and abilities to use computer-mediated communication tools for social and academic purposes in and out of school. The questions posed…

Studies indicate that cultural properties of texts affect reading at the content and textual levels. However, research has not adequately addressed the effects of the cross-cultural pragmatics of discourse on readers. Therefore, this study explored whether or not cultural factors play a role in reading comprehension by comparing Turkish and…

This article examines the role of linguistic and sociolinguistic factors in the second language (L2) acquisition of Spanish vibrants. The data consist of 2 sets of recordings from 37 students enrolled in a Spanish pronunciation class. The statistical program VarbRul was used to analyze 7,597 samples. The vibration (simple or multiple) and the…