In the field of Second Language Acquisition (SLA), the role of transfer has been theorized and studied to account for the influence of the native language on an interlanguage. However, stemming from behaviorist mentality, the concept of "transfer" has become widely associated with the direct transfer of habits and fails to take into…

Relative clause is one of the most important language points in College English Examination. Teachers have been attaching great importance to the teaching of relative clause, but the outcomes are not satisfactory. Based on Error Analysis theory, this article aims to explore the reasons why senior high school students find it difficult to choose…

The analysis of raters' comments on pragmatic assessment of L2 learners is among new and understudied concepts in second language studies. To shed light on this issue, the present investigation targeted important variables such as raters' criteria and rating patterns by analyzing the interlanguage pragmatic assessment process of the Iranian…

This paper presents an extension of the Multiple Grammars Theory (Roeper, 1999) to provide a formal mechanism that can serve as a generative-based alternative to current descriptive models of interlanguage. The theory extends historical work by Kroch and Taylor (1997), and has been taken into a computational direction by Yang (2003). The proposal…

This article examines the Multiple Grammars (MG) theory proposed by Luiz Amaral and Tom Roeper in the present issue and presents a critique of the research that went into the theory. Topics discussed include the allegation that the bilinguals and second language learners in the original article are primarily students in an academic setting, Amaral…

This article will discuss why cursing and swearing, as manifestations of emotional language, should be addressed in foreign language learning (FLL). Psycholinguistic and pragmatic studies have argued that cursing and swearing are a central component of an individual's communicative repertoire, fulfilling a variety of functions, including…

Interlanguage pragmatics concerns the inspection of interactions among people in society while they are aware of the effects that interaction imposes on them regarding culture, social values and individuals' peculiar interpretations. Of high value in social interaction, politeness is an essential constituent of interlanguage pragmatics. If…

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…

Speech acts are the major concern of interlanguage pragmatists. The present study aimed to 1) examine the reliability and validity of an interlanguage pragmatic (ILP) competence test on speech acts in a Chinese EFL context, and 2) investigate EFL learners' variations of ILP competence by language proficiency. Altogether 390 students participated…

Explicit instruction in strategies for interlanguage pragmatic learning is fundamental to the development of a comprehensive set of pragmatic abilities in the target language. In this article, we begin by providing an overview of previous work in the area of language learner strategies directed at the teaching and learning of pragmatics. We then…

Reporting on a descriptive study on the first semester Chinese language learners' openings and closings in online chats with age-peer native speakers of Chinese, this paper demonstrates the great promise that telecollaboration holds for foreign language education, and argues for an increasing role of pragmatics in Chinese language instruction, and…

"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…

Complaint is intrinsically an abusive act which tends to offend the complainees. In spite of this complainers could consider politeness when they still intend to maintain a good relationship with the complainees. This paper investigated politeness strategies involved in complaints relating to different social status levels and social distances.…

This article reports empirical findings from an ongoing investigation into the acquisition of second-language (L2) phonemic contrasts. Specifically, we consider the status and role of the phenomenon of hypercorrection in the various stages through which L2 learners develop and internalize a target language (TL) contrast. We adopt the prevailing…

This study investigated whether second language (L2) learners of English could learn to produce stranded prepositions through structural priming. Structural priming is the tendency for speakers to repeat the structure of previously experienced sentences, without intention or conscious awareness of such behaviour, and is thought to be associated…