Many learners, especially those in a foreign-language setting, draw on the classroom as their primary forum for using and experiencing the target language, still for the most part during teacher-led instruction. Nevertheless, communicative language teaching does not provide a decisive definition of "good language use." Teachers usually take an…

This paper presents a quantitative analysis of the variation underlying subject-verb agreement in the spoken French interlanguage of Irish classroom and study abroad learners. Results outline the range of factors constraining that variation, such as the learners' level of informal contact with the language, as well as linguistic factors such as…

This paper centres on published research reports produced by members of the TESOL discourse community. The analysis extends the Hallidayan concept of given/new information from its origins (used for capturing information structure at the clause level) and relates it to the analysis of the macro-structural organisation of TESOL research reports.…

In the field of second language acquisition (SLA) and use, learners' gestures have mainly been regarded as a type of communication strategy produced to replace missing words. However, the results of the analyses conducted here on the way in which Dutch learners of Japanese introduce Ground reference in speech and gesture in narrative show that the…

This study investigated the use of beat gestures (typically the sharp up-and-down movement of the hand) in conjunction with L2 speech production. The L2 participant, although in conversation with another person, synchronized his beats with the parsing of his words into syllables. Based on Gal' perin's formulation for the process of…

The purpose of this study is to investigate how learners of Japanese as a second language (n=16) and Japanese native speakers (n=17) interpret a Japanese refusal gesture, the so-called Hand Fan, to observe how these interpretations are accompanied by similar manual gestures, and to see how participants perceive its comprehensibility. Results…

This paper outlines some reasons for why gestures are relevant to the study of SLA. First, given cross-cultural and cross-linguistic gestural repertoires, gestures can be treated as part of what learners can acquire in a target language. Gestures can therefore be studied as a developing system in their own right both in L2 production and…

It has been claimed that speakers of Spanish and English have different patterns of thinking for speaking about motion both linguistically and gesturally (Stam 1998; McNeill and Duncan 2000; McNeill 2000; Kellerman and van Hoof 2003; Neguerela et al. 2004). For example, Spanish speakers' path gestures tend to occur with path verbs, while English…

This study explores the meanings that learners of English as a foreign language give to teachers' gestures. It is a qualitative, descriptive study of the perceived functions that gestures perform in the EFL classroom, viewed mainly from the language learners' perspective. The data for the study was collected through interviews with twenty-two…

Studies of first and second language acquisition have reported that in the acquisition of long lag (aspirated) stops, the effects of the place of articulation of the stop and the height of the following vowel may be significant. This paper examines these two variables in the acquisition of English long lag stops by Spanish speakers. Results…

In the verbal linguistic systems, the target for English learners in China is educated native speaker accuracy. The target for more socially embedded interchange is yet to be established. Its basis needs to be formed from "what members of the target culture consider appropriate for foreigners and attitudes of learners themselves" (Sieloff Magnan…

Confronted with various issues in teaching business writing to Chinese students in New Zealand, this paper sees the need for bridging the gap between genre-based research and teaching in an intercultural context. Specifically, it develops an intercultural reflective model in the light of Bhatia's sociocognitive genre study as well as…

The simultaneous presence in a learner's grammar of two features that should be mutually exclusive (optionality) typifies second language acquisition. But generative approaches have no good means of accommodating the phenomenon. The paper proposes one approach, based on Truscott and Sharwood Smith's (2004) MOGUL framework. In this framework,…

This study investigated whether individual differences in learners' age of arrival (AOA) and length of residence (LOR) in a country where a second language (L2) is spoken determine the relationship between L2 perception and production. In the first experiment, 40 Korean learners of English and 10 native English speakers participated in vowel…

The current emphasis in second language teaching lies in the achievement of communicative effectiveness. In line with this approach, pronunciation training is nowadays geared towards helping learners avoid serious pronunciation errors, rather than eradicating the finest traces of foreign accent. However, to devise optimal pronunciation training…