In this paper, we explore the extent to which a stay abroad in a Danish university in which English is a frequent medium of instruction can be a very suitable context for students to increase their language proficiency and to develop both awareness of their communicative skills and their confidence in them. The data analysed come from (i) a pre-…

This article reports on a study that investigated the role of metapragmatic awareness of L2 learners in Hong Kong, and the impact it has on language choices when addressing requests in English. Simulated open role-plays and retrospective interviews were used to explore the ways in which mainland Chinese undergraduates assess, plan and produce…

Research has shown that code-switching (CS) between languages in spoken discourse is prevalent in multilingual contexts and is used for many purposes. More recently, it has become the subject of much concern in academic contexts in negatively affecting students' language use and learning. However, while the concern has been increasing, no rigorous…

Non-linguists' perceptions of language in use are generally considered to be strongly influenced by evaluative factors: attitudes, values and ideology. Such a perspective represents a somewhat biased approach to ordinary people's knowledge about language, which is characteristic of both sociolinguistics and its sub-branch, perceptual dialectology.…

In this study, framed within a sociocultural theory of mind, we explore the role of languaging in mediating between students' understanding of a grammatical concept and their written production of the forms related to that concept. The development of scientific concepts, in this case of the concept of voice in French, involves the use of language…

Self-repetition is commonly found in spoken discourse, and it could be argued that it is an interactional necessity. Self-repetition in spontaneous talk is pervasive and performs a variety of functions. Some regard it as signalling redundancy, disfluency, or both, in spoken language, whereas others consider it to be facilitating the production of…