This volume offers a wealth of new information about the forms of several speech acts and their social distribution in Vietnamese as L1 and L2, complemented by a chapter on address forms and listener responses. As the first of its kind, the book makes a valuable contribution to the research literature on pragmatics, sociolinguistics, and language…

This paper reports on a study designed to investigate the kinds of responses people produce during wrong-number telephone calls and to discover the rules that appear to govern the choices of the responses and their relationships. Fifty-seven calls were placed at different times during the day over a period of several weeks. The sentences used to…

Most second language texts not only do not emphasize negotiation of meaning, but are also structured to mislead learners in their attempt to express meaning (in the learners' native language). Examples from German, Spanish, and French are used to illustrate the need for second language learning to stand alone and independently from the native…

Similarities and differences in language acquisition and variations in patterns of language dominance were studied with three four-year-old girls. The ideoqraphic study of child speech involved a monolingual English-speaking child, a monolingual Spanish-speaking child, and a bilingual English-Spanish-speaking child. The following measures were…

This study of the linguistic acts of assenting and confirming is inspired by an attempt to create instructional materials for the learning of spoken English as a second language, with communicative competence as a goal. Observations are based on several hours of informal conversation between native speakers of English, mostly students and…

This book analyzes an intercultural project undertaken by French and English 14-year-olds based on an exchange of materials created by the pupils and focused on the topic of law and order. The project was based on a view of learning as a dialogic process in a more meaningful way than is often the case in foreign language classrooms. Chapter 1…

This work is intended to find replies to practical questions, such as how well native speakers of Spanish are decoded by native speakers of English, which errors interfere with decoding by the listener, and what the implications of the study might be for teaching. Fifteen Chileans were asked to tell stories in English, and several panels of native…

This article discusses the incompatibility between the goal of communicative competence (defined more narrowly as minimal approximative communicative competence) and current practices of syllabus design, and suggests more relevant alternatives. Foreign language instruction is still dominated by the teaching of language structure for its own sake,…

This study reports on an analysis of questions which were used in the pursuit of understanding in three focussed discussions, two by native speakers (NSs) and one by non-native speakers (NNs). Twelve adult subjects, four NNs and eight NSs, were used. In 66 minutes, only 30 questions were used for the purpose of pursuing understanding. These…

Four issues of the "TESL Reporter" are presented. Contents are as follows: "The Utterance-Response Method to Pattern Drill" by Jason B. Alter; "Your Gestures and Mannerisms: A Help or Hindrance?" by Alice C. Pack; "Part II: A Structural Comparison of English and Tongan" by Ermel J. Morton; "Teaching…