The way we ask for something, or "request," is hardly the same across all contexts. The degree to which we show politeness in these instances is closely related to a number of contextual factors (Brown & Levinson, 1987), manifested in the linguistic features that we employ (Blum-Kulka, House & Kasper, 1989; Searle, 1975).…

As Tarone (1998) stated, an understanding of interlanguage variation in relation to contextual changes has been a key issue in both second language acquisition (SLA) and language assessment (LA) research. Research on interlanguage variation has shown that systematic variation is often evidenced when different phonological and syntactic forms are…

This article reports an empirical study investigating L2 acquisition of the Mandarin Chinese "shì…de" cleft construction by adult English-speaking learners within the framework of the Feature Reassembly Hypothesis (Lardiere, 2009). A Sentence Completion task, an interpretation task, two Acceptability Judgement tasks, and a felicity…

This article investigates the second language (L2) acquisition of two expressions of the semantic feature [definite] in Russian, a language without articles, by English and Korean native speakers. Within the Feature Reassembly approach (Lardiere, 2009), Slabakova (2009) has argued that reassembling features that are represented overtly in the…

The purpose of this dissertation was to examine the relationships between working memory (WM) and three commonly used learning strategies or conditions in the nature of proficiency among adult L2 Russian learners. Based on the aptitude-learning condition interaction framework articulated by Robinson (2002b), the study identifies two types of…

Argues from the premise that a language test is a special case of a second language acquisition (SLA) elicitation device and suggests that SLA and language testing share much common ground in terms of research methods, which have similar properties in that they are both used to make systematic observations of language performances from which…

Variability has been the subject of recent debate in the study of learner interlanguage. Empirical evidence from a longitudinal study suggests that learning follows a systematic route. A grammaticality judgment test is appended. (Contains 19 references.) (Author/LB)

This article discusses how research on language transfer in the field of SLA can help to explain the origins of substrate influence in creoles and provide answers to more difficult questions concerning the distribution and verification of substrate features. First, it argues against the view that both SLA and transfer are not involved in the…

The need for an index of development by which second language proficiency could be expediently and reliably guaged has been acknowledged by both second language (L2) teachers and researchers. In two previous L2 studies, the search for an index of development centered on an examination of learner written performance. In an attempt to construct an…

Papers on linguistics and language teaching in this volume are the following: "'Good' and 'Poor' Writing and Writers: Studying Individual Performance as a Part of Test Validation" (Desmond Allison, Evelyn Cheung); "To Test or Not To Test: That Is the Question" (Keith Tong, Rose Chan, Jo Lewkowicz); "Testing Listening…

Papers presented at the symposium on the relationship between language and culture include, in addition to an opening adress: "Sociosemiotics Across Cultures" (Wolfgang Kuhlwein); "Translation Across Languages or Across Cultures?" (Albrecht Neubert); "Grammatical Categories Across Cultures" (Olga Tomic); "On…

The selection of papers from the 6th Annual International Conference on Pragmatics and Language Learning (Urbana, Illinois, April 1992) include: "Discourse Markers Across Language" (Bruce Fraser); "Conjunction and Causality: Pragmatics and the Lexicon" (Yael Ziv); "Situated Discourse: The Sociocultural Context of…

Thirty-five articles on teaching English as a second language are presented under the following headings: (1) "Trends and Practices," (2) "The Matter of Errors," (3) "Second Language Acquisition," (4) "Speaking and Understanding," (5) "Reading and Writing," (6) "Vocabulary," (7) "Testing," and (8) "The Matter of Culture." Authors include Clifford…