The purpose of this study was two-fold: first, it aimed at examining the impact of expository text topics on the listening comprehension of L2 learners; second, it aimed to investigate the impact of macro, micro, and macro-micro discourse markers on the listening comprehension of expository texts by L2 learners. The participants (N =105) were male…

Humor and language play have been recognized as important aspects of second language (L2) development. Qualitative studies that have documented the forms and functions of language play for adult and child L2 users have taken place largely in classroom settings. In order to gain a fuller understanding of such creative manipulations by L2 users, it…

Adopting a decompositional approach to items in the lexicon, this article reports on an empirical study investigating Chinese speakers' second language (L2) acquisition of English "wh-on-earth" questions (i.e. questions with phrases like what on earth or "who on earth"). An acceptability judgment task, a discourse-completion…

This paper addresses the issue of corrective feedback (CF), a topic widely investigated in the last few decades (Sheen, 2011), and instructional context. We observed and recorded the oral interaction of an intact class of thirty Spanish intermediate-level high-school learners and two teachers in two settings: a traditional form-oriented English as…

The aim of this study is to examine the strategies majority language-speaking parents use to support the development of the minority language in families who follow the pattern of exposure known as one-parent-one-language (OPOL). In this particular pattern of raising a child bilingually, each parent speaks only their own native language to their…

This paper reports on the results of a study that analyzed second language practitioners' and researchers' on-line interactions about six published articles written by the researcher participants. The project used Lavis et al.'s (2003) knowledge transfer framework and Graham et al. (2006) knowledge to action framework as foundations to create a…

Drawing from a social constructionist perspective to written scholarly communication, this paper argues that training in academic writing for students in higher education especially in second language contexts should go beyond emphasis on grammatical correctness and paragraphing strategies, and also focus on the rhetorical character of academic…

In this article we consider how the roles of learner and teacher are configured in a teletandem exchange between two students working in a university language centre with no external tutor present. Teletandem is a multilateral exchange (Lewis et al. 2011) via desktop videoconferencing. It is based on the tandem method, where two learners with…

This paper represents some suggestions towards discourse-analytic approaches for ESL/EFL education, with the focus on identifying the textual forms which can contribute to the textual difficulty. Textual difficulty/comprehensibility, rather than being purely text-based or reader-dependent, is certainly a matter of interaction between text and…

This paper presents a multimodal discourse analysis of a story that has been turned into a Yoruba song-drama, highlighting the ideational, interpersonal and textual aspects of the song-drama. The data is a short song-drama meant to teach children importunity, determination and hard work through persistence. The multimodal and narrative conventions…

This article addresses a critical problem about asymmetrical power relationships and uneven conditions in English language education exerted via identity shaping discourses in the document Educación: "Visión 2019" issued by the Colombian Ministry of National Education. The study follows the critical discourse analysis method. It…

This study evaluates the extent to which the production of referring expressions such as noun phrases and pronouns to fulfill various discourse functions in narratives of Chinese-English bilingual children matches that of their monolingual peers in each of the two languages. Spoken narratives in English and Chinese were elicited from 30 9-year-old…

This study considers code-switching (CS) and pausing in two sociolinguistically distinct groups in London and Cyprus, bilingual in Greek-Cypriot Dialect (GCD) and English. The characteristics of their speech are examined both in monolingual and bilingual modes (Grosjean, 2001). It was hypothesised that in London Greek-Cypriots, where CS is a…

Learning takes place in a particular social context and in interaction with others. One of the tools of mediation between the learner and the subject to be learned is talk. In a teacher training context, it is through the use of particular talk that trainers can guide and scaffold their trainees towards learning, and the basic premise is that…

Learning a foreign language requires students to acquire both grammatical knowledge and socio-pragmatic rules of a language. Pragmatic competence as one of the most difficult aspects of language provides several challenges to L2 learners in the process of learning a foreign language. To overcome this problem, EFL teachers should find the most…