Recent studies have brought attention to the potential of translation as a symbolic activity to improve students' translingual competence. This study contributes to this growing field of study by examining students' voices in class discussions in translation classrooms. Five translation sessions were implemented with beginner and intermediate…

Since its inception, pragmatic competence has been studied vastly; the majority of these studies, however, have examined pragmatic production, and pragmatic comprehension is chiefly under-researched. This lack of adequate research also stands true for the underlying pragmatic comprehension processes and strategies. Therefore, the present…

This article presents a didactic experience carried out in the Degree of Translation and Interpreting (English) at Pablo de Olavide University in Seville and it is part of a project of Innovation and Teaching Development. The main objective is the development in students of a metaphoric competence -- metaphorical awareness and strategies to…

The present contribution discusses the importance of communicative strategies in introducing English as a Lingua Franca (ELF). A brief meta-analysis of the research conducted in the area of pragmatics reveals that one of the most salient elements of using ELF is the users' ability to conduct meaningful exchanges through various communicative…

Pragmatic competence is among the explicitly acknowledged sub-competences that make the communicative competence in any language (Bachman & Palmer, 1996; Council of Europe, 2001). Within the notion of pragmatic competence itself, "implicature (implied meanings)" comes to the fore as one of the five main areas there (Levinson, 1983).…

In general terms automaticity could be defined as the subconscious condition wherein "we perform a complex series of tasks very quickly and efficiently, without having to think about the various components and subcomponents of action involved" (DeKeyser 2001: 125). For language learning, Segalowitz (2003) characterised automaticity as a…

Reviews recent literature concerning what to do to help foreign learners of Italian develop communicative competence, i.e., a functional knowledge of the uses of the language. This literature shows that to be conceptually fluent in a language is to know how that language encodes concepts on the basis of metaphorical reasoning. (33 references) (CK)

Points out that earlier research (1991) indicates that adult second language (L2) learners have difficulties determining the relationship between obligatory verb-raising and verbal inflection. Results of the experiments reported here indicate that L2 competence includes a deficit affecting only the lexical or morphosyntactic mechanisms involved in…

Examines group differences in second-language development from perspectives provided by literature on orality and literacy. Results show that university English-as-a-Second-Language students from traditional oral cultures tended to focus on interpersonal involvement in their speaking and writing, and use difficult structures more than students…

Speakers monitor their own speech and, when they discover problems, make repairs. In the proposal examined here, speakers also monitor addressees for understanding and, when necessary, alter their utterances in progress. Addressees cooperate by displaying and signaling their understanding in progress. Pairs of participants were videotaped as a…