Many connectives, such as "therefore" and "however," are used very frequently in the written modality. Their acquisition thus represents an important milestone in developing written language competences. In this article, we assess the development of competence with such connectives by native French speakers in a sentence-level…

This article positions research on the acquisition of pragmatics as an inquiry in the greater field of second language acquisition research. Viewing pragmatics from this intersection, I consider five areas of research that are of interest in both fields and have the potential to make significant contributions to second language pragmatics…

The present study investigates the role of speech repetition in oral fluency development. Twenty-four students enrolled in English-as-a-second-language classes performed three training sessions in which they recorded three speeches, of 4, 3, and 2 min, respectively. Some students spoke about the same topic three times, whereas others spoke about…

Researching the longitudinal development of second language (L2) learners is essential to understanding influences on their success. This 7-year study of oral skills in adult immigrant learners of English as a second language evaluated comprehensibility, fluency, and accentedness in first-language (L1) Mandarin and Slavic language speakers. The…

Since listening comprehension presupposes an orderly conversion of running speech into discrete linguistic units, certain restoration processes must apply. An approach is provided to explain the metamorphosis that language undergoes from dynamic speech representations to citation form strings, under listening conditions. Some performance…

Testing of a second-language phonological acquisition model with four beginning learners of Spanish supported the claim that transfer processes decrease over time while developmental processes increase and then decrease. Analysis also revealed a hierarchical organization of processes in second-language acquisition and an interaction of the native…

The present study investigated the changes in Japanese students English writing behaviors over a 3.5-year period using multiple data sources including written texts, videotaped writing behaviors, and stimulated-recall protocols. Data from student interviews supplemented the analyses. Because 6 (henceforth, English as a second language [ESL]…

This study presents and tests a hypothesized structural model that attempts to explain the relationship of writing in English as a foreign language by Taiwanese university students to a variety of factors. Investigated were factors considered to be inhibiting (writing apprehension and writer's block), factors considered to be facilitative (free…

Examined two hypotheses regarding reading skill development--the script-dependent hypothesis and the central processing hypothesis--by studying the linguistic, cognitive, and basic reading skills of 70 children in grades 1 through 5 learning to read in English (first language) and Persian (second language) concurrently. Findings supported both…