Recent studies of appositives have turned up differences between sentence-medial appositives and sentence-final appositives, for instance, in their availability for discourse continuations. Three experiments investigated whether medial appositives are more difficult to comprehend than final appositives and if so why. Experiment 1 tested…

From its inception in 1977 until its last year of publication by an Australian publisher in 2015, the "Australian Review of Applied Linguistics" featured over 700 articles related to applied linguistics. This publication history provides a unique resource for tracing the scope and change of the applied linguistics landscape in Australia…

This article investigates near-native grammars at the syntax--discourse interface by examining the second language (L2) acquisition of two different domains of object movement in Dutch, which exhibit syntax-discourse or syntax-semantics level properties. English and German near-native speakers of Dutch, where German but not English allows the same…

The development of speech-act theory has provided the hearers with a better understanding of what speakers intend to perform in the act of communication. One type of speech act is apologizing. When an action or utterance has resulted in an offense, the offender needs to apologize. In the present study, an attempt was made to compare the apology…

This article presents a case study research with aims to find out which activities, methodological and textual aspects used in a reading strategies course were causing a group of students difficulties when analyzing critically written information. We conducted the study at Universidad de Córdoba (Colombia) with seventh semester students from the…

Recent research in language contact has investigated bilingual deviations from monolingual norms where syntax interfaces with the lexical and discourse components of the grammar (e.g. Iverson & Rothman 2008; Lozano 2006; Montrul 2004, 2005; Sorace & Filiaci 2006; Tsimpli et al. 2004). Such studies generally show that the…

This article reports on a case study of negotiation that occurred in peer group oral interactions under assessment conditions. Discourse analysis was used to illustrate how participants negotiated and co-constructed the assessment format itself as well as meaning exchange sequences. Analyses of the data point to the advantage of using peer group…

Reviews studies and tests that show how discourse analysis has contributed to the theory, research, and development of language testing, covering the relations among discourse analysis and competence and testing theory; research on language tests and tasks; and task development. A 60-citation unannotated bibliography is included. (CB)

Presents study designed to examine trait structure of a cloze test using confirmatory factor analysis. Results suggest that a modified cloze passage, using rational deletions, is capable of measuring syntactic- and discourse-level relationships in a text, and this advantage may outweigh considerations of reduced redundancy which underlie random…

A study examined the varying degrees to which learners of Spanish at the intermediate and advanced levels use paragraph-like structure in their answers during a simulated oral proficiency exam. Subjects were 24 students preparing for the Spanish Texas Oral Proficiency Test. Data from simulated oral proficiency interviews were compared to a model…

A study examined the linguistic forms in the discourse of speakers during a language test to indicate why they use certain specific forms over others. Ten children were given the Grammatical Analysis of Elicited Language--Simple Sentence Level Test (GAEL), a language proficiency test for hearing-impaired children in the age group of 4 to 8 years.…

A study examined internal structure of the Discourse Completion Test (DCT), a technique used to elicit data in sociolinguistic research, and effects of systematic modification to its situational prompt on subject response. The DCT is a questionnaire containing situations, briefly described, designed to elicit a particular speech act. Subjects read…

In this study, the performance of apologies among 20 non-native speakers (NNSs) of English and 20 native speakers (NSs) of English was examined. Two questions were addressed: How did NNSs' apologies compare with NSs' in identical situations? What relationship existed between the performance of apologies by NNSs and Test of English as a Foreign…

Findings from an interdisciplinary research project, Methods of Analyzing Samples of Elicited Discourse in English and Spanish for Determining Student Language Proficiency, are presented. The research project was designed to develop a unified framework for the analysis of audiotaped discourse samples elicited from Spanish/English bilingual…

The findings from research on written and oral summarization are discussed under three headings: summarizers' strategies, improving summarizers' performance, and the assessment of summary quality. Objective measures of summary quality used by researchers are described, and ways these measures could be adapted for use in higher education assessment…