Recasts, a type of implicit feedback, is widely used by EFL teachers for improving learners' communicative competence. Research suggests that teachers may use salience enhancement techniques in order to highlight the positive/negative evidence in recasts. This study was conducted to identify types of recasts and examine the relationship between…

The analysis of raters' comments on pragmatic assessment of L2 learners is among new and understudied concepts in second language studies. To shed light on this issue, the present investigation targeted important variables such as raters' criteria and rating patterns by analyzing the interlanguage pragmatic assessment process of the Iranian…

This study investigated the similarities and differences in the use of discourse connectors (DCs) in argumentative essays of American undergraduate students (AMs), Thai with high-English exposure (THHs) and Thai with low-English exposure (THLs). The data of these three groups were collected from 60 essays; 20 essays were from the corpus of…

Adopting a quantitative approach, this paper highlights findings of an exploratory study on Hokaglish, initially describing it as a trilingual code-switching phenomenon involving Hokkien, Tagalog, and English in a Filipino-Chinese enclave in Binondo, Manila, the Philippines. Departing from the (socio)linguistic landscape of the archipelagic…

"Although" is a frequently used subordinating conjunction in English. However, non-nativeness is often observed in Chinese EFL learners' "although" output during pedagogical practice. This paper aims at exploring the characteristics of Chinese EFL learners' "although" employment in Chinese EFL learners' writing. The…

The present study aims to investigate the general characteristics of topicprominent typological interlanguage development of Chinese learners of English in terms of acquiring subject-prominent English structures from a discourse perspective. Topic structures mainly appear in Chinese discourse in the form of topic chains (Wang, 2002; 2004). The…

As face-threatening speech acts, requests are of particular interest to second language acquisition scholars. They affect the interlocutors' public self-images, and thus require a careful consideration of the social distance between the interlocutors, their status, and the level of the imposition, factors that are weighed differently in…

Many studies have shed light on rater criteria for assessing the performance of language skills (e.g., Eckes, 2005). However, the interface between rater assessment and interlanguage pragmatics (ILP) has remained largely unnoticed. To address this interface, this study explored the ratings native (NES) and nonnative English speaking (NNES)…

This study examines the pragmatic strategies that learners utilize to negotiate a resolution when refusing a native speaker of higher status in three asymmetric situations (+Power, +Distance). Following Pomerantz's (1984) analysis of dispreferred responses, this study focuses on refusals to an invitation, a request, and a suggestion. Refusal…