Twenty years ago, a state-of-the-art review in "SSLA" marked the coming of age of the study of temporality in second language acquisition. This was followed by three monographs on tense and aspect the next year. This article presents a state-of-the-scholarship review of the last 20 years of research addressing the aspect hypothesis (AH)…

The aspect hypothesis (Andersen & Shirai, 1994) proposes that language learners are initially influenced by the inherent semantic aspect in the acquisition of tense and aspect (TA) morphology. Perfective past emerges earlier with accomplishments and achievements and progressive with activities. Although this hypothesis has been extensively…

Comembership, an aspect of social identity that involves specific attributes (e.g., race, ethnicity, gender), was investigated in faculty-student advising interviews. Student language indicates that role comembership may increase the complexity of the interaction by increasing the need to mark participant status. (Contains 18 references.) (LB)

A study compared the influence of two forms of discourse completion test (DCT) on the elicitation of rejection of advice. An open questionnaire providing scenarios alone was compared with a classic dialogue completion task in which a conversational turn is provided. The tasks were given to 32 graduate students, 19 native and 13 non-native…

A study investigated the use of verb tense by learners of English as a Second Language (ESL) from the perspective of narrative structure. Subjects were 16 adult intermediate-level ESL learners of varied linguistic backgrounds and 24 native speakers of English. All attended an oral telling of a Hawaiian trickster tale, with a brief introduction,…

Discussion of the role of pragmatics research in language teaching looks at the role such research should play in the language classroom, and the role of researcher, teacher, and teacher educator in making that connection. It is noted that pragmatics research has discovered a number of differences in the ways in which first- and second-language…

A study compared (1) data on rejections of advice by native and non-native speakers collected from natural conversation with (2) data collected from a discourse completion task (DCT). Subjects were students in an academic advising session (13 native speakers, 11 non-native speakers of English) who responded to a DCT and students (18 native…

Reports on a study of adult learners' use of the simple past tense that showed that past tense acquisition occurs in stages determined by the lexical aspects of verbs. The article also describes a pedagogical approach for increasing accurate past tense use through contextualized examples in authentic texts and focused noticing exercises. (Contains…

A study analyzed electronic-mail requests from college students (n=34 native speakers of English/NSs, 65 non-native speakers/NNSs) to faculty, randomly gathered over the period of a year. The requests were analyzed for the affective response they produced both on the faculty recipient and on a non-recipient faculty member, and for linguistic forms…