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,…

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…

A study attempts to refine the discourse domain hypothesis of second language learning, which holds that a second language is acquired with reference to speaker-specific topic areas rather than as a general, context-independent competence, by examining the discourse domains developed by one non-native speaker of English in conversations with two…

The study focused on problems that Finnish learners of English (NNS) encounter with epistemic modality in conversational interaction with native speakers of English (NS). Epistemic modality refers to modal expressions that convey the speaker's commitment to the truth of the propositions he is expressing (e.g., "surely he…

Monographs on pragmatics and language learning include: "Do We All Apologize the Same?--An Empirical Study on the Act of Apologizing by Spanish Speakers Learning English" (Montserrat Mir); "Conversational Openings in Kiswahili: The Pragmatic Performance of Native and Non-Native Speakers" (Alwiya S. Omar); "Experimental and…