This study examined the differences and similarities among the writing of three types of developmental English and advanced ESL United States community college students, comparing the writing of resident English learners (RL2), whose home language was not English but who attended United States public schools for five years or more, to that of…

This study addresses the lack of comprehension data in second language acquisition research by focusing on English existential "there"-constructions (ETCs) with a locative extension (e.g., "there is an X on the Y"). The post-copular noun X used in the present study consisted of two types: actual and nonsense. Participants…

Usage-based linguistics posits that communicative functions, including pragmatics, are at the core of language (Tomasello, 1992). It is surprising, then, that pragmatics is rarely systematically included in second language curricula (e.g., Bardovi-Harlig, 2017), especially since pragmatics instruction has been shown to significantly contribute to…

The present study examined the interaction effects between teachers' choice of language in lexical explanation and second language (L2) learners' proficiency level on the learning of phrasal verbs and listening comprehension in a meaning-focused listening activity. Undergraduate L2 learners with two different levels of proficiency (intermediate…

ESL learners can find it challenging to use English in a way that is pragmatically appropriate to the situation and interlocutor. In this article, we explore the impact of increased proficiency on learners' pragmatic performance. ESL learners in Australia at four proficiency levels completed three role plays, and we analysed how the learners…

This research was conducted to investigate how frequently Turkish advanced learners of English use the logical connector "thus" in their academic prose and to investigate whether it was overused, underused or misused semantically in comparison to English native speakers. The data were collected from three corpora; Corpus of Contemporary…

This study aims to further the understanding of first language (L1) lexical transfer within the context of L1 Chinese learners of English. Previous transfer research has often focused on a small subset of grammar errors, without examining how lexical choices, especially in collocations and multi-word units (MWU), might have been influenced by L1…

Courtroom interpreting requires a high level of accuracy due to the strategic use of language in such an institutional setting. It is generally agreed among interpreting scholars that quality interpreting in court should accurately relay both propositional content and illocutionary force of the original utterances. This high standard of accuracy…

Most of the research on second language (L2) narratives has focused on whether or how L2 learners carry their L1 narrative styles into L2 narration; few studies have explored whether L2 learners' knowledge of the L2 also in turn affects their L1 narrative performance. The present study attempted to probe the issue of cultural transfer in narrative…

The present study examines and compares the extent to which advanced L2 learners of Spanish and Spanish heritage speakers acquire the syntactic and semantic properties that regulate the grammatical representation of double complementizer questions in Spanish, a CP-related structure not present in English. Results from an aural sentence completion…

This article reports on the design and use of a profiler for lexical sophistication (i.e., use of advanced vocabulary), which was created to assess the lexical richness of intermediate and advanced Swedish second language (L2) learners' French and Italian. It discusses how teachers' judgments (TJs) of word difficulty can contribute to the…

In view of the growing body of research on humor and language play in computer-mediated communication (CMC) which--more than any other medium--has been associated with goofing off, joking, and other nonserious communication, this paper compares spontaneous foreign language play (L2 play) in text-only synchronous computer-mediated versus…

Situated within the framework of the systemic-functional linguistics (Halliday, 1994) and language-based theory of learning (Halliday, 1993), this article examines a shift toward a more objectified and "scientific" representation of reality in texts written by foreign language (FL) learners at various levels of acquisition. It argues that…

Despite the fact that American Sign Language (ASL) courses at the college-level have been increasing in frequency, little is understood about the capabilities of hearing individuals learning a sign language as a second language. This study aims to begin assessing the language skills of advanced L2 learners of ASL by comparing L2 signer productions…

To extend the reach of the second language (L2) classroom, learners may be given opportunities to interact with native speakers through contact assignments or volunteer work organized through their L2 program. An underlying assumption of these practices is that "real-world" and classroom experience offer different but complementary opportunities…