La intersecció entre la pragmàtica i l'adquisició de segones llengües

This article provides a review of research in the acquisition of pragmatic knowledge by second language learners. It begins with a definition of pragmatics and second language acquisition that emphasizes the complex relationship between the acquisition of grammar and language use. After examining four possibilities of relationships between pragmatics and language development, the author reviews past and current research focusing on the following topics: the study of pragmatic development, the identification of speech acts, the influence of host and foreign environments, the role of the first and second languages, and speaker interaction

La intersecció entre la pragmàtica i l'adquisició de segones llengües

This article provides a review of research in the acquisition of pragmatic knowledge by second language learners. It begins with a definition of pragmatics and second language acquisition that emphasizes the complex relationship between the acquisition of grammar and language use. After examining four possibilities of relationships between pragmatics and language development, the author reviews past and current research focusing on the following topics: the study of pragmatic development, the identification of speech acts, the influence of host and foreign environments, the role of the first and second languages, and speaker interaction

The effect of corpus-based instruction on pragmatic routines

This study analyses the effects of data-driven learning (DDL) on the phraseology used by 223 English students at an Italian university. The students studied the genre of opinion survey reports through paper-based and hands-on exploration of a reference corpus. They then wrote their own report and a learner corpus of these texts was compiled. A contrastive interlanguage analysis approach (Granger, 2002) was adopted to compare the phraseology of key items in the learner corpus with that found in the reference corpus. Comparison is also made with a learner corpus of reports produced by a previous cohort of students who had not used the reference corpus. Students who had done DDL tasks used a wider range of genre-appropriate phraseology and produced a lower number of stock phrases than those who had not. The study also finds evidence that students use more phrases encountered in paper-based concordancing tasks than in hands-on tasks. Unlike in previous DDL studies, observations of the learning of a specific text-type through DDL in the present study are based on the comparison with both a control learner corpus and an expert corpus. The study also considers the use of DDL with a large class size

The Acquisition of Tense–Aspect: Converging Evidence From Corpora and Telicity Ratings

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/75534/1/j.1540-4781.2009.00895.x.pd

Tutor and Student Assessments of Academic Writing Tutorials: What is "Success"?

The university writing center provides a key support service within the institution, and as such must find ways to evaluate the impact of the instruction they provide. However, many studies of tutorial effectiveness lack adequate analyses of tutorial talk and of both student and tutor interpretations of behavior and outcomes. This study characterizes successful writing tutorials by employing a hybrid mnethodology, interactional sociolinguistics, combining conversation-analytic and ethnographic techniques. Twelve tutorials, six with native speakers of English (NSs) and six with nonnative speakers (NNSs), were analyzed for features such as topic introduction, type and frequency of directives and their mitigation, volubility, overlaps, backchannels, and laughter. By triangulating this analysis with participant interpretations compiled from interview data, a profile of a "successful" tutorial emerged. Associated with perceived success were conversational turn structure, tutor mitigation of directives, simultaneous laughter, affiliative overlaps, and small talk. In addition, symmetrical interpretations of directive forcefulness and tutor "helpfulness" characterized successful tutorials. Implications of the study are both theoretical and practical. Recommendations are made that tutor preparation and in-service training emphasize less idealized, more pragmatic conceptualizations of tutor roles and actions and focus on behaviors demonstrated as constitutive of success

The importance of task variability in the design of learner corpora for SLA research

This cross-sectional study investigates task variability focusing on the use of Spanish past tense morphology in a spoken learner corpus. Sixty L2 learners of Spanish (English L1) from three different proficiency levels (20 per group) and fifteen native speakers completed three communicative tasks (a guided interview, a picture-based narrative, and a historical figures description) and an experimental task, all designed to investigate the acquisition of tense and aspect in L2 Spanish. Data were transcribed in CHAT, and analysed and coded using a specially created interactive coding program that works in combination with the CLAN program (MacWhinney 2000). Results demonstrate significant differences in the emergence and accurate use of past tense morphology across tasks. An additional analysis showed that the less controlled tasks encouraged few instances of more advanced features, suggesting that not all task types are equally successful at eliciting the range of tense-aspect morphological contrasts theoretically relevant for SLA research on tense and aspect.</jats:p

L2 development in an intensive Study Abroad EAP context

The current study’s main aim was to examine development of L2 proficiency over a short period of time by adopting an analytic framework that balances out the strengths and limitations of the existing Complexity, Accuracy, Lexis and Fluency (CALF) framework of linguistic measurement. CALF indices and discourse markers were used to analyse development of proficiency among participants on an intensive EAP course in a Study Abroad context. To investigate the differential rates of development in two different task types, gains in various aspects of proficiency were examined. The results suggest that some CALF measures adequately demonstrate L2 development over a one-month period. Discourse markers provide evidence of L2 development beyond CALF, and add a new dimension to investigating and measuring L2 development. The differences in L2 development indicated in monologic and dialogic performances imply that specific measures of analysis are more suitable to characterize development in different task types