Examines the production of wh-questions in the speech of four monolingual child speakers of Catalan who were recorded longitudinally as part of an earlier study, obtained from the CHILDES database. Proposes that the early absence of wh-questions is a consequence of the early underspecification of tense. (Author/VWL)

Through sequential analysis of actual interactions, describes real-world discourse activities performed by competent native and nonnative speakers of English to handle complex academic tasks. Using data from a graduate seminar, details two interactional resources exercised by the seminar participants in the doing of disagreement and critique.…

Investigates the nature of cohesion, content, and grammar emergent in children's essays, with emphasis on understanding of cohesion and coherence. Conceptual definitions of these constructs are summarized into a picture-based narrative writing task for elicitation and scoring criteria for quantification. First and second graders from an immersion…

Includes an interview with a noted figure in the field of language assessment. Discusses his work on washback theory as well as his experiences with and views on the challenges and advantages of computer-based and Web-based testing. (Author/VWL)

Includes an interview with a noted figure in the field of language assessment. Focuses on a range of test development projects, including several related to the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) scale. (Author/VWL)

Analyzes the extensive use of personal examples and stories in the academic essays of students who are nonnative speakers of English. Draws on a large database of college examination essays to compare the use of personal examples in essays written by native and nonnative speakers. Finds nonnative students not only use examples more often than…

Examines writing in Lithuanian, a language that has received little scholarly attention in the West and particularly the variety of Lithuanian used by the Lithuanian immigrant community in the United States. Examines articles from both Lithuanian and American Lithuanian newspapers to see how the written American variety differs from native norms…

Looks at interactions between English-as-a-Second-Language students and English-speaking staff at the front desk of a language institute. Analysis focuses on the sequential organization of front desk encounters, revealing ways the participant's shared orientations to the organization and goals of these encounters facilitate native…

Looks at conversation in Japanese between native and nonnative speaking peers. Focuses on other-repair, taking the conversation analytic approach to phenomena in nonnative discourse. Identifies a range of speaking practices as well as embodied resources that are understood by recipients as inviting or initiating other repair. (Author/VWL)

Examines nonnative-nonnative speaker interaction in English among novice-level Japanese native speakers, focusing on the ability to manage the kind of precision timing found in the turn-taking practices of native speakers. Emphasis is on the interactional competence of low-level nonnative speakers in an ability that is fundamental to the conduct…

This interview with one of the founders of conversation analysis focuses on issues regarding the use of conversation analysis to study nonnative discourse. (Author/VWL)

Challenges experimental studies of children's lexical acquisition by analyzing the process of introducing lexical items as a collaborative activity between adult and child. Examines conversational exchanges in which new words are introduced, and shows that there are many types of introductions of lexical items that go beyond the strategies of…

Synthesizes work on research concerned with the influence of a second language on speaker's first language competence in late bilingualism. Research in the areas of phonology, morphosyntax, lexis, semantics, pragmatics, rhetoric, and conceptual representations suggests that borrowing, convergence, shift, restructuring, and loss result from the…

Discusses the ongoing debate in the field of language assessment concerning the relative strengths of analytic versus holistic composition rating scales. Uses multiple regression analysis and exploratory factor analysis to evaluate both methods, and finds that because different rating scales measure different constructs, they cause the meaning of…

Investigates native speakers' (NS) perceptions of coherence and comprehensibility of nonnative speakers' writing and talk that lacks or misuses grammatical cohesive devices. NS readers of NNS texts with missing cohesive devices assumed coherence and imposed coherence on the text by adding grammatical cohesive devices missing in the original,…