This paper examines the status-unequal requests of 89 advanced mixed-L1 learners and 87 British English native speakers elicited by a written discourse completion task. Significant differences were observed in all three dimensions analysed: internal and external modification, and perspective. The data demonstrate learners' overuse of zero marking…

This study investigated the effects of first language prosodic transfer on the perception and production of English lexical stress and the relation between stress perception and production by second language learners. To test the effect of Thai tonal distribution rules and stress patterns on native Thai speakers' perception and production of…

This paper investigates the extent to which productive use of formulaic sequences by intermediate students of two typologically different languages, i.e., English and Spanish, is associated with their oral proficiency in these languages. Previous research (e.g., Boers et al., "Language Teaching Research" 10: 245-261, 2006) has shown that…

This study explores dispute sequences in talk between bilingual couples communicating in Japanese. Specifically I examine naturally occurring face-to-face talk between Japanese wives and their American husbands who communicate primarily in Japanese at home. Conversation analysis (CA) is employed to document occasions where the talk between these…

This article serves as a primer to Mandarin Chinese mainly for chemical practitioners who have no familiarity with the Mandarin Chinese language and who may travel to East Asia during their career or work in collaboration with Chinese-speaking people. Eight vocabulary lists (given in English, written Chinese, and Pinyin romanization) feature…

Drawing on Lave and Wenger's (1991) and Wenger's (1998) "communities of practice" (CoP) framework, this study explores the shared repertoire of humor practices in the creation of community within the context of a culturally diverse and multilevel adult Arabic language classroom consisting of two native speakers, five heritage language learners…

The recognition of second language (L2) development as a dynamic process has led to different claims about how language development unfolds, what represents a learner's linguistic system (i.e., interlanguage) at a certain point in time, and how that system changes over time (Verspoor, de Bot, & Lowie, 2011). Responding to de Bot and…

This study examines pragmatic differentiation in early trilingual development through a longitudinal analysis of language choice in a developing Tagalog-Spanish-English trilingual child. The child's patterns of language choice with different language users are analyzed at age 1 ; 10 and 2 ; 4 to examine: (1) whether evidence for pragmatic…

Since the late 1980s, collocations have received increasing attention in applied linguistics, especially language teaching, as is evidenced by the many publications on the topic. These works fall roughly into two lines of research (a) those focusing on the identification and use of collocations (Benson, 1989; Hunston, 2002; Hunston & Francis,…

This study investigates cross-linguistic influence (CLI)--also known as first language (L1) transfer--on referent introduction and tracking in oral narratives in Japanese as a second language (L2) within the framework of functional approaches to language learning. Narrative discourse produced by two groups of learners of Japanese, one whose L1 is…

This study examines an interlanguage in which Moroccan learners of Dutch use non-thematic verbs in combination with thematic verbs that can be inflected as well. These non-thematic verbs are real dummy auxiliaries because they are deprived of semantic content and primarily have a syntactic function. Whereas in earlier second language (L2) research…

This article deals with the interlanguage of adult second language (L2) learners acquiring finiteness. Due to the inaccessibility of bound inflectional morphology, learners use free morphology to mark a syntactic relationship as well as person and number features separately from the thematic verb, expressed by a pattern like "the man is go".…

This paper quantifies differences in speaking rates in a first and second language, and examines the effects of slower rates on the speakers' abilities to convey information. The participants were 14 fluent (CEF B2/C1) English L2 speakers who held the same oral presentation twice, once in English and once in their native Swedish. The temporal…

While knowledge of what constitutes fluent speech has developed over the past several decades, it is still unclear how language teachers can facilitate its acquisition by second language learners. Fluency is generally accepted as being a function of temporal variables of speech such as rate of speaking and the number of words or syllables uttered…

This semi-longitudinal study examined the development of narrative writing quality of young Turkish second language learners in mainstream Dutch-only education, and the impact of student-level and classroom-level predictors of narrative writing quality, using hierarchical linear modelling. Writing samples of 106 third graders and 111 fourth…