Following the social turn in Second Language Acquisition (SLA) in the 1990s (Block, 2003), researchers have increasingly focused on the emic perspective of learners. As a result, identity, subjectivity, and agency have come to the forefront in SLA research. In an effort to afford learners the means to negotiate meaning more freely and to position…

This paper addressed the under-investigated question whether speech act moves can be identified and classified in conversation by examining the content, positioning, and strategic role of utterances in turns and turn sequences. To this end, offering exchanges were analysed in the transcripts of 31 open role-plays. These were elicited from American…

The present study investigated the production of the speech act of disagreement among Tunisian non-native students of English and American native speakers of English. Discourse completion test (DCT) was used to elicit disagreement strategies by the informants. Non-native informants produced a total of 376 acts and native informants produced 395…

The present study aimed at investigating the influence of social power, as a social hierarchy, on perception of speech act of apology by 40 Jordanian second language speakers (JL2Ss) compared to that of 40 Jordanian non-English speakers, those whose English proficiency is low (JNESs) and 40 English native speakers (ENSs). Discourse Completion Test…

This article explores the development of pedagogical content knowledge in relation to one teacher's experience in learning to engage in a Vygotskian approach to teaching second language (L2) pragmatics known as "concept-based pragmatics instruction" (CBPI). The teacher, Mrs. Hanks, was a PhD candidate in second language acquisition at…

The assessment of second language (L2) pragmatic competence typically involves questionnaires, such as discourse completion tasks. This article describes a novel approach to using questionnaires to assess L2 metapragmatic capacities while simultaneously promoting their development: engaging learners in cooperative interaction as they complete the…