Competent L2 writing has been described in research in terms of an increasing incidence, variety, and length of clauses; a countervailing compactness and tightness with reduced number of clauses even as clause length expands; and various interrelationships between syntactic realizations of texts and the genres they represent. These partly…

This study investigates second language (L2) interactional competence in Mandarin Chinese, with a specific focus on dispreference organization in refusals. Twenty-eight L2 Chinese learners at 3 proficiency levels (A2, B1, and B2) and 10 native speakers each participated in 3 role plays. We found that learners at different levels clearly differed…

This study explores the lexical profile of essays written by 48 advanced learners of second language (L2) Russian who participated in the Russian Overseas Flagship, an intensive year-long study abroad program designed to help students reach Interagency Language Roundtable (ILR) Level 3 proficiency in all skills. Using the lexical frequency profile…

This article reports on an experimental study addressing the second language acquisition of Mandarin temporality. Mandarin Chinese does not mark past, present, or future with dedicated morphemes; the native English of the learners does. It was hypothesized that, in their comprehension, learners would utilize the deictic pattern of expressing…

An experiment investigated adult language learners' ability to develop fully integrated cognitive representations of a difficult second language (L2) morphosyntactic feature: the Korean honorific verbal affix "(u)si." Native speaker (NS) and nonnative speaker (NNS) latencies during a word-by-word self-paced reading comprehension task…

This article introduces conceptual grammar as an approach to the analysis and teaching of grammar in foreign and second language contexts through a combination of paradigms: corpus, discourse analysis, and cognitive linguistics. Although the approach is applicable to virtually any language and any construction within that language at various…

Investigated the role of higher-level syntactic and semantic processes and lower-level word recognition and graphophonic processes in adult English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) reading comprehension. Particular focus wa on the extent to which these processes can discriminate skilled from less-skilled readers in a sample of fairly advanced ESL…

Examined the development of the word knowledge of two groups of advanced learners of French as a second language by means of a slightly revised version of a particular test format. Studied the type of distractor most suited to the participants, distinguished the role of three types of associations, and linked qualitative aspects of word knowledge…

Reviews the nature and functions of prosody, and contrasts English and Cantonese for this feature of language as background for two experimental studies. Thirty Cantonese advanced speakers of English were tested for their recognition memory of English sentences in which prosody-cued meaning contrasts in otherwise identical sentence pairs. Results…

Draws on experiences from a 7-week exchange between students learning German at an American college and advanced students of English at a German university. Maps out the benefits to using a MOO (multiple user domains object-oriented) for language learning: a student-centered learning environment structured by such objectives as peer teaching,…