Studies analysing the metatalk generated in collaborative writing (CW) tasks have primarily targeted secondary or adult students who wrote either in L1 or L2, and have seldom examined the process of their writing in two languages. Furthermore, these analyses have mostly focused on accuracy discussions and have ignored discussions aimed at making…

Research has pointed to the importance of introducing social aspects of language at the beginning stages of second language (L2) acquisition (Yates, 2017). This proof-of-concept study therefore sought to determine if an explicit pedagogical intervention consisting of various types of sociolinguistic awareness activities could be implemented with…

This study explored peer groups' mediation processes in the digital space. Building upon translingual research and multimodal discourse analysis, the researcher analysed video transcript excerpts of oral conversations and on-screen interactions among university students of different linguistic and cultural backgrounds. This article focuses on…

The present study evaluated the effects of explicit instruction on advanced French second language (L2) learners' (n = 18) contextually appropriate use of two stylistic variables (/l/ deletion vs. retention and "ne" deletion vs. retention) using two different task types. A planned and unplanned oral task was used to assess students'…

This article reports on a study of second language (L2) French learners' self-generated use of gesture to think through and resolve a metalinguistic awareness-raising task during small-group work with an expert mediator. Although the use of gesture in L2 communication and pedagogy has recently received increasing attention, little research has…

Commencing study through a foreign language in senior secondary school brings huge challenges because of the cognitive-linguistic demands of academic subjects. This paper argues for the need to blend sociocultural and systemic functional linguistic (SFL) perspectives to address this enormous task. Firstly, readers' attention is drawn to the less…

This paper reports on a study that examined a group of advanced German L2 learners' awareness and use of English focusing devices. Recent studies suggest that learners are aware of lexical resources, but lack awareness of grammatical structures. Focus constructions, i.e. pragmatically motivated word order variations, are pivotal to any text where…

Teaching materials for university-level second language learners were created with the aim of raising the learners' awareness of the rhetorical organization and salient linguistic features of essays. The teaching method relied heavily on explicit instruction and essential metalanguage. Concludes that explicit genre-based instruction with the…

Despite a significant increase in the number of published genre analyses and a continuing refinement of genre theory, little research has been done to determine the effectiveness of genre-based pedagogy. Research that has been carried out has shown mixed results. One problem that has been identified is that a genre approach requires language…