Adapting the propositions and concepts of ethnolinguistic identity theory, the present paper examined the interactive effects of identification with English, interlanguage boundary, and the perceived ethnolinguistic vitality of English on mobilising efforts towards English, and competitive efforts against English as a third language among young…

In this article, we aim to contribute to the debate about the use of subordination as a measure of language proficiency. We compare two theories of SLA--specifically, processability theory (PT; Pienemann, 1998) and dynamic systems theory (DST; de Bot, Lowie, & Verspoor, 2007)--and, more particularly, how they address the development of…

This cross-linguistic study investigates the functionality and use of one particular linguistic collocation in each of two languages, viz. the French c'est and the Swedish det ar, both meaning "it is." The data are drawn from conversational speech production by adult native speakers and second language learners. The investigation shows that these…

This article investigates verb placement, especially Verb second (V2), in post-puberty second language (L2) learners of two closely related Germanic V2 languages: Swedish and German. Hakansson, "et al." (2002) have adduced data from first language (L1) Swedish-speaking learners of German in support of the claim that the syntactic property of V2…

Posits two hypotheses arising from the great immigration to Sweden and the immigrants' use and learning of Swedish: (1) Swedish as used by immigrant children may show certain features, related to a creolization process; and (2) the Swedish language may in future show signs of influence from the varieties used by persons with immigrant background.…

This case study investigated whether patterns obtained from elicited speech also hold for conversational data. A longitudinal corpus of spontaneous/natural speech from an adult first-language Spanish learner of second-language Swedish is studied. (Author/VWL)

This study deals with the development and recoverability of word-final codas in Chinese-Swedish interlanguage. The relation between consonant deletion and vowel epenthesis is investigated from both a developmental perspective and a grammatical-functional one. Longitudinal, conversational data from three Chinese beginner learners of Swedish were…

Five papers on bilingualism are presented. "Giving Transfer a Boost--Describing Transfer Variation in Learners' Interlanguage Performance" by Claus Faerch suggests, outlines, and illustrates a heuristic principle for describing the result of positive transfer from one language to another, based on the assumption that learners maximize…

Present results of a longitudinal study of vocabulary development as it takes place in a classroom setting involving elementary-level Swedish-speaking learners of English. The study used spew tests requiring pupils to write down as many words as they could in one minute that began with a given letter. (Author/LMO)

Demonstrates the use of a multivariate technique known as logit analysis, applying it to authentic data drawn from Juurakko (1996) which studies the influences of the source language and the target language on the use of prepositions in Finnish pupils' learner Swedish. The interlanguage data for the analysis consist of essays written in Swedish by…

This collection of six essays and one bibliography on second language learning includes: (1) "Transfer in Relation to Some Other Variables in L2-Learning" (Hakan Ringbom); (2) "Word Frequencies in Finnish and Finland-Swedish Learner Language" (Hakan Ringbom); (3) "The Influence of Swedish on the English of Finnish…

This paper discusses the interlanguage conversation as a process in an institutional setting. The interaction type in question is language proficiency interview and the material discussed is a series of interviews of French second language learners whose mother tongue is either Finnish or Swedish. These interviews are compared to non-evaluative…

This issue of the journal includes these papers on contrastive linguistics: "Contrastive Patholinguistics: The Acquisition of English Grammatical Morphemes by German Dyslexics in a Foreign-Language Teaching Context" (Udo O. H. Jung); "Contrastive Pragmatics" (Marie-Louise Liebe-Harkort); "On Questions in English and Swedish" (Kay Wikberg); "On…

The alternating and mixed use of Swedish and Finnish and special trade slang in three relatively small firms (employing a total of 678 employees, 40 percent of whom were Swedish-speaking, 56 percent Finnish-speaking, and 4 percent bilingual) in the bilingual city of Vasa, Finland was analyzed. (CB)

A study of the effects of learning Swedish as a third language on the previously-learned English of native Finnish-speaking students examined 10,000 English-language school-leaving examinations of Finnish students for possible examples of Swedish influence in vocabulary, grammar, and word order. The examinations were those graded by a native…