The terms "interactional competence" and "learning" are discussed in the context of recent research in the areas of cognitive science and ethnomethodological conversation analysis studies of language learning. Two data excerpts from a longitudinal case study of a beginning learner of English are presented to illustrate (1) the…

This paper argues that descriptions of Sri Lankan English (SLE) are influenced by ideologies of linguistic racism and coloniality through an examination of the possible reasons for their neglect of Burgher English -- an underprivileged variety of SLE spoken by a minority community. Although descriptions of SLE identify different categories of the…

Dative alternation between prepositional and double object datives has been a popular topic in second language (L2) acquisition, but only few studies deal with discourse constraints such as the "given-before-new" principle, or given-new (GN) ordering, which describes the tendency to place given information before new information. The…

This article adopts the surface overlap and derivational complexity hypotheses to study crosslinguistic transfer in the adult second language (L2) acquisition of English genitive alternation (between the s-genitives and the of genitives) by intermediate and advanced Egyptian Arabic-speaking learners. While the "s"-genitive (e.g.…

The present study aimed to catalogue and compare usage patterns of verb-particle constructions (VPCs) in Modern Standard Arabic and English by native and learner writers. Building upon an analysis of a multi-genre monolingual Arabic corpus, use of both Arabic and English VPCs was explored in a bilingual L1 (first language) Arabic L2 (second…

To participate in the global conversation on how to combat climate change, Japanese university students need to better utilise their English for Academic Purposes (EAP) skills outside the second language (L2) classroom. Therefore, this study seeks to enhance the public speaking skills of Japanese university students by analysing and drawing from a…

How strongly a verb is associated with a construction plays a crucial role in the learning of argument structure constructions. We examined the effect of verb-construction association strength on second language (L2) constructional generalization by analysing L2 learners' production and comprehension of two complex constructions (i.e. ditransitive…

This study demonstrates how native and learner corpora can enhance modal verb treatment in English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) textbooks used in mainland China. Data analysis compares modal verbs in the textbook and native corpus by referring to distributional features, semantic functions and co-occurring constructions; and the analysis of the…

The literature on the topical organization of essays suggests that there are four possible types of progression from the topic of one clause to the topics of the following clauses. These are parallel, sequential, extended parallel, and extended sequential progressions. Essay writers' ability to create cohesion and coherence can be evaluated on the…

This thesis examines the role of the African substrate languages in the emergence of Atlantic Creole grammatical structures. Alleyne (1980) and Faraclas (1990) have convincingly demonstrated that a survey of the grammatical features that typify the Colonial Era English-Lexifier Creoles of the Atlantic reveals remarkable similarities with those…

This manuscript reports on a corpus-based comparison of native and nonnative graduate students' language production in an asynchronous learning environment. Using 486 discussion board postings from a five-year period (2009-2013), we analyzed the extent to which native and nonnative university students' writing differed in 10 measures of syntactic…