This study examines the impact of High-Immersion Virtual Reality (HiVR) as a tool for teaching English L2 pragmatics to international students enrolled in an Intensive English Program at a US university. This research focuses on integrating HiVR into explicit L2 pragmatics instructional treatments. A quasi-experimental design was employed to…

This study examines low-intermediate to advanced ESL learners' awareness of semantic prosody. Semantic prosody is a word/unit association that expresses an attitudinal meaning (described as favourable, neutral, unfavourable), which emerges from the word's typical lexical environment. Sensitivity to and awareness of such associations is an…

This study investigated the relationship between language proficiency and negative pragmatic transfer from a first language (L1), focusing on the speech act of refusal as realised by American learners of Arabic as a Foreign Language (AFL) in Egyptian Arabic. Twenty American AFL learners (10 intermediate and 10 advanced) and 2 baseline groups (10…

This is a study of two Australian learners of Indonesian during a short stay abroad. It examines their contrasting success in acquiring L2 address terms, in tandem with their contrasting experiences of the L2 culture setting. It thereby helps explain the persistent finding of great individual variation in L2 gains--and in particular pragmatic…