We investigated the effect of part of speech adoption on the utterance length of Mandarin-speaking children. A total of 209 typically developing Taiwanese children aged 3-6 years participated in the study. They included 90 boys and 119 girls recruited from preschools in Miaoli City, New Taipei City, and Taipei City. We collected children's…

Despite evidence on the interaction between cognitive individual differences (IDs) and task complexity, our knowledge of how affective IDs, such as foreign language enjoyment (FLE), interact with task complexity and other factors is limited. Since tasks and activities were found by Dewaele and MacIntyre (2014) to be most relevant to FLE, and since…

Drawing on Conversation Analysis, this paper investigates how an English native speaker interviewer utilizes clarification requests as a form of recipient design during an interview to resolve problems of non-understanding. This data is contrasted with interviews between English language learners at a private university in Taiwan. The findings…

In this study, we examined the use of compliments, self-praise, and self-denigration, as exchanged among nonnative English users. This was part of participation in an online cross-cultural exchange project (Ibunka 2019), which involved learners from six countries (Algeria, Brazil, Indonesia, Japan, Taiwan, and the Netherlands). The aim of the…

The present study aimed to examine the effect of proficiency on the pragmatic comprehension of speech acts, implicatures, and routines, as well as the way learners of different proficiency levels employ strategies when comprehending a pragmatic task. Thirty-three high-proficiency and forty-one low-proficiency Chinese learners of English completed…

This study reports the development of a scale to evaluate the speech act performance by intermediate-level Chinese learners of English. A qualitative analysis of the American raters' comments was conducted on learner scripts in response to a total of 16 apology and request written discourse completion task (WDCT) situations. The results showed…

In this paper I discuss a study that involved incorporating instructional pragmatics into an ESL Methodology course. Graduate students who were taking an ESL Methodology course were required to read the literature on interlanguage and instructional pragmatics and teach requestive speech act strategies to Taiwanese EFL students through…

In Taiwan, pragmatic competence has often been a neglected area in English education. Learners may be linguistically competent, but do not know how to use L2 appropriately. Through the teaching of complaint behaviors, the author demonstrates how pragmatic components can be incorporated into a college-level language classroom. After the…

A study examined young children's use of the Mandarin "jiu" in its adverbial form in conditional sentences. The language corpus included: (1) spontaneous speech samples of 66 children aged 4, 5, 6, and 7 years in 20 Taiwan locations and (2) story repetitions by 461 4-, 5-, and 6-year-olds in 22 locations. The data indicate that children…

Using a questionnaire, this study investigates what representatives of the American English and Mandarin cultures say when they want to refuse a request. Findings stress the differences between the strategies of refusal such as expressing or avoiding an expression of a positive attitude, or giving external or personal reasons for refusing. (18…

A study of social and cultural factors that affect the appropriateness of verbal expressions in different languages focuses on the comparative uses of three common expressions ("thank you, I'm sorry, excuse me" and their equivalents) in English and Chinese. First, the usage patterns of the three expressions are explained briefly, and the…