The aim of this paper is to determine whether all languages in the linguistic repertoire of a multilingual speaker manifest cross-linguistic influence (CLI) and establish the directions of CLI on the basis of chosen vowels from the linguistic repertoire of two groups: the Bilingual group (L1 Polish/L2 Danish) and the Multilingual group (L1…

Based on Selinker's hypothesis of five psycholinguistic processes shaping interlanguage (1972), the paper focuses attention on the Russian L2-learners' overreliance on the L1 as the main factor hindering their development. The research problem is, therefore, the high incidence of L1 transfer in the spoken and written English language output of…

This study investigated French and Spanish EFL (English as a foreign language) learners' preferred use of three-word lexical bundles with discourse or stance-oriented function with a view to exploring the role of first language (L1) frequency effects in foreign language acquisition. Word combinations were extracted from learner performance data…

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…

The current study investigated the influence of context-external variables; social power (High, Equal and Low) and social distance (Familiar and Unfamiliar) on the perception of Jordanian and English speech act of apology. Discourse Completion Test (DCT) and Scaled Response Questionnaire (SRQ) were used to elicit data from three groups: 40…

The present study aims to investigate the general characteristics of topicprominent typological interlanguage development of Chinese learners of English in terms of acquiring subject-prominent English structures from a discourse perspective. Topic structures mainly appear in Chinese discourse in the form of topic chains (Wang, 2002; 2004). The…

It is generally believed that interlanguage pragmatics and motivation play important roles in learning. Motivation is important because it determines the extent of the learner's active involvement and attitude toward learning. The major purpose of this study was to investigate the impact of integrative and instrumental motivation on the…

Building on previous studies of cross-linguistic influence (CLI) on SLA, and principled criteria for confirming its existence in L2 data, an empirical study was run on 74 Arab learners of English (ALEs). A detailed analysis was made of interlanguage stages of the simple past tense forms in 222 written texts produced by ALEs in the classroom…

Studies in interlanguage pragmatics have shown that L2 learners' proficiency has an influence on the occurrences of L1 pragmatic transfer. However, questions remain whether the relationship between L1 pragmatic transfer and L2 proficiency is positive or negative. This paper is designed to study L1 pragmatic transfer in requests made by Chinese…

This chapter presents the results of a study on interlanguage variation. The production of four L2 learners of Italian, tested four times at yearly intervals while engaged in four oral tasks, is compared to that of two native speakers, and analysed with quantitative CAF measures. Thus, time, task type, nativeness, as well as group vs. individual…