This study was a cross-sectional investigation into the request strategies used by Iranian learners of English as a Foreign Language and Australian native speakers of English. The sample involved 96 BA and MA Persian students and 10 native speakers of English. A Discourse Completion Test (DCT) was used to generate data related to the request…

The purpose of the study is to provide a guideline for the pedagogical approaches to teach Thai students the grammar of the Chinese adverbs "zai" and "you". Questionnaire results revealed that the reasons for the misuse of "zai" and "you" by Thai university students can be classified into three causes: (1) "zai" and "you" suggest repeatedness and…

This study investigated the differential effects of prompts and recasts, in the context of dyadic interaction, on the acquisition of grammatical gender by adult second language learners of French. Participants were 25 undergraduate students enrolled in an intermediate-level French course at an English-speaking university. All students were exposed…

Most studies in the second language (L2) literature that deal with interface issues do so in holistic terms. On the one hand, researchers have suggested that interface relations between the syntax and other domains are particularly difficult for adult L2 learners. On the other, it has been argued that such relations can be established in a…

This study compared the amount of the second language (L2) use and linguistic gains made by students in three short-term language immersion programs: (1) traditional study abroad, (2) service-oriented study abroad, and (3) foreign language (FL) housing. These were chosen because they represent three distinct program types, providing students with…

We assessed whether and under what conditions noncanonical agreement patterns occur in Russian, with the goal of understanding the factors involved in normal agreement. Russian is a morphosyntactically rich language in which agreement involves features for number, gender, and case. If consistent, overt specification of number and gender agreement…

This article presents new evidence from offline and online processing of garden-path sentences that are ambiguous between reduced relative clause resolution and main verb resolution. The participants of this study are intermediate and advanced German learners of English who have learned the language in a nonimmersed context. The results show that…

Examining the linguistic repertoire of the Anglophone community living in Montreal, this article provides an analysis of the representations of the variety of French spoken by the first generation of young Anglophones who had experienced different types of contact with French. The relation between functional competence and usage of French is…

This article reports on an experimental investigation of knowledge of distributivity in nonnative (L2) Japanese learners whose first language (L1) is English or Korean. The availability of distributive scope in Japanese is modulated by word order and the semantic features of quantifiers. For English-speaking learners, these subtle interpretive…

One fundamental aspect of all educated native speakers' language competence is stylistic variation, or the ability to adjust speech register to situational formality ( Labov, 1972). In this article, we investigate how current introductory and intermediate college French textbooks develop students' sociolinguistic competence and particularly the…

Previous studies have shown that it is particularly difficult for second language (L2) learners to overcome the effects of transfer when they need to unlearn specific aspects of the native language in the absence of explicit input that indicates which properties of the first language (L1) are ruled out by the L2 grammar (Inagaki, 2001;…

In American Sign Language (ASL), native signers use eye gaze to mark agreement (Thompson, Emmorey and Kluender, 2006). Such agreement is unique (it is articulated with the eyes) and complex (it occurs with only two out of three verb types, and marks verbal arguments according to a noun phrase accessibility hierarchy). In a language production…

In the tradition of work by Shaughnessy (1977) and Bartholomae (1980) applying concepts from second language acquisition research to developing writing, we explore the commonalities of L1 and L2 writers on the specific level of linguistic choices needed to order information within and across sentence boundaries. We propose that many of the kinds…

Recent studies of paralinguistic intonational meaning show that languages differ systematically in how pitch range is used to signal meaning differences, contra previous claims. This poses an additional challenge to second language learners, who generally receive little tutoring on intonation. This study investigates learners' competence and…

Second language acquisition research into the effects of corrective feedback has investigated a variety of learning targets using a wide range of implicit and explicit feedback types (Li, 2010). To date, however, its linguistic focus has been limited to theoretically noticeable surface features (Carroll, 2001; Schmidt, 2001), and researchers have…