Making pragmatics accessible to a wide range of students and instructors without dumbing down the content of the field, this text for language professionals: (1) raises awareness and increases knowledge and understanding of how human beings use language in real situations to engage in social action; (2) fosters the ability to think critically…

The issue of teaching pragmatics in foreign and second language classrooms has received a lot of attention in the recent years. Its origins can be dated back to the Cross-Cultural Speech Act Realization Project (CCSRAP) led by Blum-Kulka, House and Kasper (1989) and the research on interlanguage speech acts that followed (for a comprehensive…

This article discusses sociolinguistically oriented research on second language acquisition (SLA) in the decade since Firth and Wagner (1997). Over the last 10 years, substantial progress has been made in developing a model of the sociolinguistic processes that inform second language acquisition. This model is supported by empirical evidence on…

Presents a multi-targeted model of interlanguage variation. Advanced learners handle variation differently than native speakers. The establishment of pedagogical norms or classroom replicas of the target language which reflect actual behavior of native speakers, appropriate for foreigners, is stressed. Two variable features of French illustrate…

This article discusses how research on language transfer in the field of SLA can help to explain the origins of substrate influence in creoles and provide answers to more difficult questions concerning the distribution and verification of substrate features. First, it argues against the view that both SLA and transfer are not involved in the…