According to the US Department of State, a native English speaker can learn Spanish in about 600 h, but would take four times as long to learn Japanese. While it may be intuitive that similarity between a foreign language and a native tongue can influence the ease of acquisition, what is less obvious are the specific cognitive and emotional…

This study examines the interpreter role among students who serve as interpreters in a community health clinic system in the Midwestern USA as part of a community health-themed service-learning course for advanced Spanish students. Drawing on Positioning Theory (Davies and Harré 1990), I consider the ways in which three second language learners…

Various studies have consistently shown that collocations are processed faster than matched control phrases, both in L1 and in L2. Most of these studies focused on adjacent collocations (e.g. provide information). However, research in corpus linguistics normally uses a span to identify collocations (e.g. plus or minus four words), and these…

This paper investigates the phenomenon of greeting in English, which can be surprisingly challenging for speakers of other languages, such as Chinese. By 'greeting' we mean the seemingly 'simple' act of choosing conventionalized expressions at the opening of an encounter. Following pilot interviews with Chinese learners of English who reported…

While it is possible to express the same meaning in different ways ('bread and butter' versus 'butter and bread'), we tend to say things in the same way. As much as half of spoken discourse is made up of "formulaic language" or linguistic patterns. Despite its prevalence, little is known about how the processing system treats novel…

The current study takes a bidialectal perspective for the conceptualization of pragmatic competence and its development through illuminating the need for the field to move forward and overcome the standard language ideology in research on L2 pragmatic competence. To this end, it brings bidialectal practices to the forefront to investigate L2…

Despite the continually growing number of non-native English-speaking (NNES) teachers in English language teaching, the profession is nonetheless still shaped by native speakerism (Holliday 2005), the idealization of native English speakers (NESs) as linguistically and culturally superior to their NNES counterparts. Such an ideology leads to…

The aim of the study was to check whether minorities such as LEP/ZEP (limited/zero English proficiency) speakers can expect the same access to justice as competent English speakers in a majority language (US English) justice system. The main hypothesis is that, due to linguistic and cultural factors, the instances of miscommunication in the…

The current study investigated linguistic influences on comprehensibility (ease of understanding) and accentedness (linguistic nativelikeness) in second language (L2) learners' extemporaneous speech. Target materials included picture narratives from 40 native French speakers of English from different proficiency levels. The narratives were…

This article is a conceptual and methodological exploration of a new construct, task interactional difficulty, and of a possible approach to assessing task demands in general. After arguing for the use of 'task difficulty' instead of 'task complexity', the notion of task interactional difficulty is analyzed, first by reviewing previous SLA…

Lexical items that are encountered more frequently and in varying contexts have important effects on second language (L2) development because frequent and contextually diverse words are learned faster and become more entrenched in a learner's lexicon (Ellis 2002a, b). Despite evidence that L2 learners are generally exposed to non-native input,…

This article discusses a sociocultural usage-based perspective on the development of sociolinguistic competence. Previous research has focused on learners' acquisition and use of alternative ways of 'saying the same thing' (i.e. native-like variation) in relation to study abroad, contact with native speakers, and pedagogy. Missing from the…

This article explores the online processing of singular he and she and singular they by learners of English to discover whether singular they presents a processing problem for non-native speakers (NNSs). It also examines the extent to which such issues may vary as a function of L2 proficiency at B2, C1, and C2 levels. A self-paced reading study…

This study evaluates the way in which interpreters activate the source language and the target language (TL) when they perform the interpreting task. We focused on syntactic ambiguities. In sentences like "Someone shot the servant of the actress who was on the balcony," two antecedents ("servant" and "actress") are…

This study investigates how the use of discourse markers reflects speaking fluency in Chinese learners. In this study, 220 min of online Chinese courses were transcribed, with 17 Chinese learners and 5 native Chinese teachers as participants. Half of the transcribed data were drawn from students living in Taipei, Taiwan, a Chinese-speaking…