This paper suggests a series of steps for teaching complaint behaviour in English. The production of complaints requires a meta-pragmatic awareness of their interactive value and functions, their different types and realisations, pragmalinguistic formulae frequently employed or the socio-pragmatic factors affecting them, among others, which many…

This paper presents a qualitative analysis of structured student reflection following carefully designed, collaborative student-centered activities to demonstrate how pre-service teachers may initiate perspectives on language awareness necessary in developing a praxis of language awareness. I begin by identifying a framework for a praxis of…

This paper looks at multicompetence aspects of multilingual learning and offers a new conceptual framework for the discussion of multicompetence. The paper takes Cook's multicompetence theory as the point of departure and proposes a reconceptualisation thereof which is broader in scope and keyed to a dynamic systems and complexity theory…

This study describes how oral language was assessed in an advanced-level college foreign language (FL) conversation course. Learners used the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages Proficiency Guidelines to guide self-analyses of their oral production at intervals throughout the course. The intent was to provide opportunities for…

The Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR) aims to encourage language learners to think about what they do when communicating, and to think about what they can do to help themselves and others to learn a language better. This paper considers to what extent the CEFR supports language learning by looking at how a group of learners, in the…

Discusses a conceptual framework outlining what is known about language development and metalinguistics, and considers ways in which this may provide a reference framework to guide the work of the various committees responsible for developing the language curriculum. The example of the curriculum in Ireland is used to explore the practical…

Different theories of second language acquisition offer conflicting views of the relationship between metalinguistic task performance and oral production. Examined this relationship with respect to the possessive determiners "his/her" in English. Learners' oral production was elicited using a picture description task and described according to…