Slobin's (1996) "thinking for speaking" hypothesis has been recently adopted by second language researchers as a valuable lens from which to examine the complexities of possible conceptual restructuring during interlanguage development. This paper reviews a sample of studies analyzing the linguistic and conceptual patterns observed in…

Since the colonization of the Americans, Filipinos have been using English as their second language and have been accustomed to using the language alongside local languages. The centuries of the extensive contact between American English and Filipino language raises questions pertaining language change and language identity. This paper reports the…

This research is a multi-aspect exploratory investigation of Russian English institutional written discourse and highlights its features demonstrated by Russian native learners, tertiary students of English for the tourism and hospitality industry. The author approaches the theme from the perspectives of World Englishes and the pedagogical agenda.…

Mobile technologies are increasingly finding their way into classroom practice. While these technologies can create opportunities that may facilitate learning, including the learning of a second or foreign language (L2), the full potential of these new media often remains underexploited. A case in point concerns tablet applications for language…

Evaluation is an important aspect in communication in any language as it not only functions to express language users' evaluative stance but also to construct and maintain relations between interactants. In the teaching of languages in addition to English, paying attention to evaluative language contributes to an understanding of the…

This study compares mastery of gender assignment and agreement in Italian by adult Italian-German bilinguals who have acquired two languages simultaneously (2L1), and by adult German highly proficient second language learners (L2ers) of Italian. Our data show that incompleteness in bilingual acquisition and in second language (L2) acquisition…

The present research applies the concepts of attention, awareness, and noticing to a previously unresolved strand of inquiry: accent marks in L2 (second language) French. Previous research found that learners who typed accented words had better recall of the accent marks than those who wrote the same words by hand. Sturm suggested that it may have…

Purpose: This study aims to investigate the use of diacritics in the Arabic script of Malay to facilitate Arab postgraduate students of UKM to read the Malay words accurately. It is hypothesised that the Arabic script could facilitate the reading of Malay words among the Arab students because of their earlier exposure to the Arabic script in…

L1 habits often tend to interfere with the process of learning a second language. The vowel habits of Arab learners of English are one such interference. Arabic orthography is such that certain vowels indicated by diacritics are often omitted, since an experienced reader of Arabic knows, by habit, the exact vowel sound in each phonetic…

This paper reports on a comparative study of pauses made by L2 learners and native speakers of English while narrating picture stories. The comparison is based on the number of pauses and total amount of silence in the middle and at the end of clauses in the performance of 40 native speakers and 40 L2 learners of English. The results of the…

In this article, Lardiere responds to peer comments regarding her earlier article "Some Thoughts on the Contrastive Analysis of Features in Second Language Acquisition" (EJ831786). Lardiere acknowledges the reviewers' thoughtful contributions and expert expansion on various facets of the original article. While she states that it is clear from the…

This paper addresses the issue of whether negative sentences containing auxiliary "do" in L1 and L2 English share the same underlying syntactic representation. To this end, I compare the negative sentences produced by 77 bilingual (Spanish/Basque) L2 learners of English with the corresponding data available for L1 acquirers reported on in Schutze…

This comparative study, conducted in multicultural London, investigates the occurrence in interviews with a researcher and in constructed same-sex peer conversations of five linguistic features characteristic of London English in the speech of two groups of British-born adolescents: ethnic Bangladeshis and ethnic Chinese of Cantonese heritage. The…

Six Mandarin affricates (i.e., zh[ts], ch[ts[superscript h]], z[ts], c[ts[superscript h]], j[tc], q[tc[superscript h]), which are not universally present in other languages, have been extensively challenging for learners of Mandarin Chinese. In the current study, perception of these affricates was investigated via an experiment in which native…

Initial studies on the acquisition of two Spanish copulas, "ser" and "estar", emerged from a research agenda exploring whether second language (L2) development was driven by universal mechanisms manifested in stages rather than an accumulation of entities (Rutherford, 1987). Concerning the Spanish copulas, the stages of acquisition through which…