Recasts, a type of implicit feedback, is widely used by EFL teachers for improving learners' communicative competence. Research suggests that teachers may use salience enhancement techniques in order to highlight the positive/negative evidence in recasts. This study was conducted to identify types of recasts and examine the relationship between…

This paper examines possible psycholinguistic mechanisms governing stem vowel changes of irregular verbs in intermediate English learners of German as a foreign language (GFL). In Experiment 1, nonce-infinitives embedded in an authentic fictional text had to be inflected for German preterite, thus testing possible analogy-driven pattern…

This article presents a generative analysis of the acquisition of formulaic language as an alternative to current usage-based proposals. One influential view of the role of formulaic expressions in second language (L2) development is that they are a bootstrapping mechanism into the L2 grammar; an initial repertoire of constructions allows for…

This study investigated the similarities and differences in the use of discourse connectors (DCs) in argumentative essays of American undergraduate students (AMs), Thai with high-English exposure (THHs) and Thai with low-English exposure (THLs). The data of these three groups were collected from 60 essays; 20 essays were from the corpus of…

"Although" is a frequently used subordinating conjunction in English. However, non-nativeness is often observed in Chinese EFL learners' "although" output during pedagogical practice. This paper aims at exploring the characteristics of Chinese EFL learners' "although" employment in Chinese EFL learners' writing. The…

The current study examines English-speaking learners of Spanish and their pragmatic development of request forms during a six-week immersion program in Madrid, Spain. Elicited production and intuition data were analyzed, focusing on personal deictic orientation, directness evidenced by clause type, and the use of "por favor"…

The current study investigated how recasts can promote the L2 pronunciation development of word-initial /?/ by Japanese learners of English in relation to two developmental stages of English /?/ acquisition (i.e. change in second formant [F2] ? change in third formant [F3]) as well as four affecting variables (i.e. the amount of recasts and…

Situated within the recent new wave of second language acquisition studies investigating the acquisition of sociolinguistic variation, this article draws on a longitudinal database of advanced French interlanguage to explore a number of issues that have not yet been extensively investigated. They concern the issue of individual variation in the…

As face-threatening speech acts, requests are of particular interest to second language acquisition scholars. They affect the interlocutors' public self-images, and thus require a careful consideration of the social distance between the interlocutors, their status, and the level of the imposition, factors that are weighed differently in…

With the growing popularity of digital technologies and computer-mediated communication (CMC), various types of interactive communication technology are being increasingly integrated into foreign/second language learning environments. Nevertheless, due to its nature, online communication is susceptible to misunderstandings and miscommunications,…

This study investigated the acquisition of the Spanish clitic se by English native speakers in passive, middle, and impersonal constructions. Little research has been done on this topic in SLA within a UG framework (Bayona, 2005; Bruhn de Garavito, 1999). VanPatten (2004) proposed the Processing Instruction (PI) model arguing for the necessity of…

Many studies have shed light on rater criteria for assessing the performance of language skills (e.g., Eckes, 2005). However, the interface between rater assessment and interlanguage pragmatics (ILP) has remained largely unnoticed. To address this interface, this study explored the ratings native (NES) and nonnative English speaking (NNES)…

Studies in interlanguage pragmatics have shown that L2 learners' proficiency has an influence on the occurrences of L1 pragmatic transfer. However, questions remain whether the relationship between L1 pragmatic transfer and L2 proficiency is positive or negative. This paper is designed to study L1 pragmatic transfer in requests made by Chinese…

The optional use of morphology attested in second language learners has been attributed either to a representational deficit or to a "surface" problem with respect to the realization of inflectional affixes. In this article we contribute to this issue by providing empirical data from the early interlanguage of Greek learners of Turkish. Three…

This chapter presents the results of a study on interlanguage variation. The production of four L2 learners of Italian, tested four times at yearly intervals while engaged in four oral tasks, is compared to that of two native speakers, and analysed with quantitative CAF measures. Thus, time, task type, nativeness, as well as group vs. individual…