Foreign language educators have been striving to improve practices that support language teaching for adults for many years. Common knowledge insists that children are better language learners than adults. Creation of the new field of neurolinguistics at the end of the 20th century brought about new opportunities for both teachers of foreign…

This study examines proposals made during planning talk--a speech act that has received little attention in previous literature--to determine the applicability of the stages of second language (L2) pragmatic development posited by Kasper and Rose (2002). Although Kasper and Rose suggest that formulas play a prominent role in L2 pragmatic…

This study investigated how the speech act of refusal is realized in Egyptian Arabic by intermediate and advanced American learners of Arabic as a foreign language. It also compared the performance of the learners to that of native speakers of Egyptian Arabic and native speakers of American English. The study aimed to investigate the relationship…