Research into instructed pragmatics mainly comparing implicit and explicit instruction has gained salience in language teaching research in the last two decades. The present study was designed to investigate the effect of cognitive and interpersonal task-based instruction on EFL Learners' production of two speech acts of apology and request. To…

This paper shows the need to triangulate different approaches in Bilingualism and Second Language Acquisition (SLA) research to fully understand late bilinguals' interlanguage grammars. Methodologically, we show how experimental and corpus data can be (and should be) triangulated by reporting on a corpus study (Lozano and Mendikoetxea in…

For corrective feedback (CF) to contribute to second language (L2) development, some cognitive processes need to be completed. Learners need to notice and comprehend the CF, reflect on and deeply process it, and finally integrate it into their interlanguage (Gass, 1997). Written languaging (WL), which requires learners to explicitly explain to…

The present study is an attempt to describe the development and validation of an inter-language pragmatic questionnaire to examine the kind of instructional approaches and techniques that EFL teachers use to practice the pragmatic features in their classes. The research made use of two theories; cognitive processing and language socialization…

Unagreement patterns consist in a person feature mismatch between subject and verb that is nonetheless grammatical in Spanish. The processing of this type of construction gives new insights into the understanding of agreement processes during language comprehension. Here, we contrasted oscillatory brain activity triggered by Unagreement in…

Recent research has shown that certain learners' responses to feedback, specifically repair and modified output, are predictive of subsequent second language (L2) development. Yet, little is understood about why these responses are associated with second language acquisition (SLA). The current study investigated this question by exploring the…

The benefits of instruction on learners' production and awareness of speech acts is well documented (see Alcon and Martinez-Flor, 2008, for a review of pragmatics in instructional contexts). However, few studies examine the influence that instruction may have on the cognitive processes involved in speech act production (Felix-Brasdefer, 2008). In…

The present study adopted a cognitive linguistic framework--Talmy's (1985, 1991, 2000) typological classification of motion events--to investigate how second-language (L2) Chinese learners come to express motion events in a targetlike manner. Fifty-five U.S. university students and 20 native speakers of Chinese participated in the study. A…

Descriptions of speech act realisations of native and non-native speakers abound in the cross-cultural and interlanguage pragmatics literature. Yet, what is lacking is an analysis of the cognitive processes involved in the production of speech acts. This study examines the cognitive processes and perceptions of learners of Spanish when refusing…

Provides an explanation for the existence of free variation in learner language. Argues that interlanguage is best conceptualized as sets of loose lexical networks that are gradually reorganized into a system or systems. Free variation arises when learners add items to those they have already acquired and before they analyze these items and…

Proposes that interlanguage constructions are driven by different types of morphemes, and argues that the reason why morphemes are not acquired at the same rate is that they are projected differently from the mental lexicon. Claims that early IL forms are the consequences of the learner's incomplete acquisition of the abstract lexical entries of…

Argues that the cognitivist hypothesis of interlanguage neither explains nor provides a principled basis for classroom practice. Suggests that it diverts attention from the contexts and practical situations in which errors occur. (Author/VWL)

From the perspective of Fodor's (1983) theory of mental organization and Chomsky's (1995) Minimalist theory of grammar, considers constraints on the interpretation of French-type and English-type cardinality interrogatives in the task of sentence comprehension, as a function of a universal parsing algorithm and hypotheses embodied in a French-type…

Addresses the issue of second language (L2) epistemology assuming Chomsky's (1995) discussion of the place of universal grammar in mental design. Discusses interaction of adjectival restriction in interrogative expressions, contrasts plausibility of nativist and non-nativist approaches to the etiology of such grammatical knowledge, an reports…

This study documents the sensitivity of English-French interlanguage to the process-result distinction with respect to the licensing of multiple postnominal genitives, despite a lack of direct positive or negative evidence for this distinction in the input. Documentation argues that the Universal Grammar-governed map between syntactic structures…