Uses recorded data from a recent classroom research project by an English-for-Academic-Purposes class in South Australia to describe an interview process that allows nonnative-speaking learners to experience authentic oral interaction with native speakers. The interview process also provides opportunities for reflecting on the linguistic and…

Reports a study that tested the possibility of language instruction in a MOO (Multiple-User Domain, Object-Oriented). The experiment consisted of two groups: adult evening-school participants in Germany learning English-as-a-Second-Language and American college students in their fourth semester of college German. Partnerships were formed with one…

A study analyzed classroom interaction between language learners in the United States and France using international videoconferencing, focusing on the American learners' Zone of Proximal Development and the differences between learners' capabilities and native speakers' language use. A videotape of the teleconference was found useful in providing…

Analysis of French used in teleconferences between American and French university students, relative to technical and discursive dimensions and learners' Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD), found much of the language used was beyond these learners' capability, due to heightened classroom anxiety and differences in language varieties used by…

This paper considers speakers' differing degrees of self-confidence in their bilingual abilities and their effects on reported language use and observed patterns of language choice. One hundred and twenty individuals from New Zealand's four largest Pasifika communities--Samoan, Cook Islands, Tongan and Niuean--reported on their self-confidence in…

The present study examines pragmatic production of monolingual (L1 Castilian) and bilingual (L1 Catalan, L2 Castilian) learners of English in a foreign language learning context, that of the Valencian Community in Spain. We particularly focused on proficiency-level effects and on the role of the task type in the use of request acts peripheral…

The growing presence of Latino students in U.S. colleges and universities is evident in foreign language (FL) classrooms. Latino students with a high proficiency level in Spanish are usually placed in advanced language or content-based courses along with other non-Latino students. This paper examines university instructors' beliefs and practices…

This is a compilation of reports on international literacy research. The report includes 3 separate reports on France, United Kingdom and Brazil. In the first report, research correspondent Jacques Fijalkow presents research into variations of reading motivation related to students' socioeconomic status (SES), age, and gender. Three of these…

PRAGMATICS & LANGUAGE LEARNING, a refereed series sponsored by the National Foreign Language Resource Center at the University of Hawai'i, publishes selected papers from the biannual International Pragmatics & Language Learning Conference under the editorship of the conference hosts and the series editor. Check the NFLRC website for…

An ongoing series of studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign concerning cross-cultural interpretation of implicature in conversation is discussed. Implicature is defined as the process of making inferences about the meaning of an utterance in the context in which it occurs. The studies focus on non-native speakers' (NNSs')…

A study investigated the use of lexical certainty modifiers, which have a mitigating or emphasizing function (e.g., "I suppose,""sort of,""obviously"). Although certainty modifiers add little to the referential information of messages, they can be very important interpersonally, particularly in terms of politeness.…

This paper addresses problems facing endangered languages and strategies for maintaining Native languages. The most serious case involves languages whose last fluent speakers are elderly or already gone. Speakers of severely endangered languages no longer constitute speech communities. They cannot interact with other speakers because other…

In recognition of a need in the Buffalo area, the State University of New York at Buffalo (SUNY-Buffalo) established the Japanese Language and Culture Program for Business People and Students (JLCP) within the university's Center for Critical Languages. JLCP is a 3-year, 6-semester certificate program open to anyone with at least a high school…

A discussion of the situation of Idoma, a Nigerian language, begins with different accounts of the language's origin, referring to both local legend and cosmology. It then proceeds to a review of modern linguists' efforts, since 1927, to classify the language. A statistical overview contains information on the number of speakers of Idoma as a…

A study investigated the language use of six native Mandarin Chinese-speaking children, recent immigrants to the United States placed in an English-language kindergarten class. Taking the perspective of an immigrant child, the research focuses on the English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) learner's language behaviors when engaging in four classroom…