In today's multilingual and multicultural societies, different languages and cultural orientations converge for complex purposes. This study examines how Spanish language students and their native peers (L1 peer = L1P) experiment with dynamic and culturally embedded language uses in higher education. The data included conversation recordings…

The present study examines the lack of representation of minority communities in the existing literature by examining the representation of Afro-Latinxs in texts and visuals in seven Spanish as a Heritage Language (SHL) textbooks, and the ideologies behind these representations. Drawing upon Norman Fairclough's (1995) model for conducting Critical…

This study evaluates attitudes toward nonnative Englishes among students, faculty, and staff at a STEM-focused U.S. university. The study utilizes the verbal-guise technique: Participants listened to and rated three summaries of the same short story as told by native speakers of U.S. English, Chinese, and Arabic. This adapted verbal-guise…

Adopting the interactional linguistic framework, the study aimed at exploring the range and frequency of interactional functions of yes/no tokens used by Thai university students of A2 proficiency in their English conversation, and contrasting their use with that of English native speakers (ENSs). The data was derived from 83, two-three party…

This paper investigates mainland Chinese students' experiences of learning English as a second language (L2) in a multilingual university in Hong Kong, with particular attention to their negotiation of participation and identity. Drawing on a series of in-depth interviews with a group of mainland Chinese students, the study revealed that their…

The act of refusal takes place in everyday lives, but it has been discussed to be a difficult speech act for nonnative speakers. This study seeks to investigate Korean EFL learners' refusals in extended discourse along with their pragmatic perceptions. Sixteen college students were engaged in oral role-plays with two native English speakers and…

This paper discusses to what extent synchronous communication via Skype by Argentine university students of History and Danish university students of Spanish contributed to fostering intercultural competence in the two groups of participants. Intercultural gains are considered both as part of the planned tasks to be solved by the participants…

The field of L2 pragmatics demonstrates the effect of instructional intervention on the development of L2 learners' pragmatic competence. Nevertheless, effective instruction requires knowledge of pragmatic performances of L2 learners in naturally occurring conversations, in comparison to those of the target community speakers. This study, using a…

Opportunities for language learners to access authentic input and engage in consequential interactions with native speakers of their target language abound in this era of computer mediated communication. Synchronous audio/video calling software represents one opportunity to access such input and address the challenges of developing pragmatic and…

This study concerns the mechanisms involving temporal update in discourse comprehension, comparing traditional approaches based on "Aktionsart" and Iconicity against an approach based on narrative expectations. Our experiments suggest that readers pay more attention to fine-grained discourse properties (such as salient temporal…

This study analyzes the conversational styles of two dyads who engaged in a semester-long, video-mediated telecollaboration between Japan and America. While one dyad expressed the greatest satisfaction and developed the autonomy to continue the project beyond the curricular requirement, the other dyad expressed the greatest frustration, requiring…

This article examines the discursive construction of social presence and identity in a bilingual collaboration between tertiary distance learners of German in New Zealand and Academic English students in Germany. Drawing on positioning theory, this small-scale study investigated the collaborative practices of a group of students, whose synchronous…

The article explores "culture talk" at the outset of first-time encounters between teachers and students of English as a foreign language in the conversation lounge of a Japanese university. It analyses the interactional procedures by which the foreign place of origin of the teacher becomes the topic of conversation following his or her…

University students who enrol in foreign language (FL) programmes are motivated by various needs, but in particular the need to achieve communicative fluency, which generally requires interaction with others. This study therefore explores the notion of 'interactivity,' as conceptualised in second language learning theories and how it might be…

The present paper examines negotiation of meaning and language-related episodes in Chinese-German eTandem interaction, focusing on Chinese as target language. Against the background of the interactionist approach to language learning and drawing upon Swain and Lapkin's (1998, Interaction and second language learning: Two adolescent French…