Jessica Wu is Research and Development Program Director at the Language Training and Testing Center (LTTC) in Taipei, Taiwan. Jessica has been deeply involved in the development and validation of the General English Proficiency Test (GEPT) in addition to a number of other foreign language testing programs. Her research focuses on speaking…

Language is inherently variable, and learner language is particularly variable. The variationist paradigm considers learner language a heterogeneously variable yet inherently rule-governed system. Specifically, learners' alternation between native-like and nonnative-like variants of a variable or invariable target native speaker (NS) form…

Unlike linguistic fossilization, pragmatic fossilization has received scant attention in fossilization research. To bridge this gap, the present study adopted a typical-error method of fossilization research to identify the most frequent errors in pragmatic routines committed by Persian-speaking learners of L2 English and explore the sources of…

The present trend in developing and using semi-direct speaking tests has been supported by test developers and researchers' claim of their increased practicality, higher reliability and concurrent validity with test scores in direct oral proficiency interviews. However, it is universally agreed within the language testing and assessment community…

As a way to examine the validity of deficit perspectives on multicultural children in South Korea--namely, children of mixed parentage who are said to suffer from speech problems and school failure, this study examined their everyday and academic Korean proficiency and its association with their educational achievements. The primary data sources…

Chinese as a foreign language (CFL) learners generally encounter difficulty in using some special rules of Chinese grammar because such grammar points do not exist in their native languages. CFL learners require an effective learning strategy to assist them in acquiring a greater understanding of Chinese grammar. Thus, we integrated a…

This dissertation presents the findings from interviews conducted with language nest workers, teachers, language nest coordinators, administrators of language revitalization programs, principals and directors of language immersion schools that work in close proximity with language nests, and linguists involved in language revitalization efforts.…

In this study, we examined the bilingual language development among Korean American first-graders in two southern California cities and explored the opportunities for language use available to them in various spaces: at school (one dual language immersion school and one traditional English-only public school), at home, and in the community. Data…

In the research literature on interactional competence in talk among second language speakers and their coparticipants, this volume of "Pragmatics & Interaction" is the first to focus on interaction in Japanese. The chapters examine the use and development of interactional practices in a wide range of social settings, from everyday…

Research in second language speech has often focused on listeners' accent judgment and factors that affect their perception. However, the topic of listeners' application of specific sound categories in their own perceptual judgments has not been widely investigated. The current study explored how listeners from diverse language backgrounds weighed…

Our study aimed at finding out the effectiveness of corpus-based vocabulary teaching activities as well as students' attitudes towards concordance-based materials when corpus-based tasks in English vocabulary learning are used. The study was conducted in a preparatory school in a private university. The participants were 28 intermediate level…

This research investigates cross-linguistic influence in the comprehension of L3 French past tense. A close examination was made on the L1 (Chinese) and L2 (English) transfer patterns among 20 English majors in their early acquisition of L3 French passé compose (PC). Data were collected through introspective think-aloud protocol in a comprehension…

The aim of this study was to explore pragmalinguistic strategies employed by a group of Iranian English language learners when making refusals to invitations, requests, offers and suggestions in their first (Persian) and second (English) languages. Data were collected from 86 participants through a Discourse Completion Test (DCT). The social…

This study compares the language learner and test-taking strategies used by Chinese-speaking graduate students when confronted with familiar versus unfamiliar topics in an English multiple-choice format reading comprehension test. Thirty-six participants at a large mid-western university performed three tasks: A content knowledge vocabulary…

While disagreements are often considered dispreferred choices and potentially face-threatening acts due to their oppositional nature, this perception does not adequately reflect the importance of disagreeing for many types of interaction, such as problem-solving and decision-making. Developing ability in performing this speech act therefore…