Analyzes essays and responses to cloze passages by second language learners to determine how speakers of various backgrounds establish a past-time discourse frame. Argues that speakers of Chinese, Korean, Indonesian, and Japanese may conceptualize time domains differently from English speakers and that students must learn that objective time and…

Quantitative analysis of 1,083 first language and second language academic texts establishes that advanced nonnative-English-speaking students in U.S. universities employ excessively simple syntactic and lexical constructions at median frequency rates significantly higher than those found in basic texts by native English speakers. (Author/VWL)

A total of 455 essays written by Asian learners of English as a Second Language (ESL) were compared to 280 essays on similar topics written by native speakers of American English. Results found that the usage of the root modals "must,""have to,""should,""ought to," and "need to" appears to be…

In a survey, 130 English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) students were asked to describe the meanings of English tenses in terms of time concepts used in ESL grammar texts. Results suggest that grammar teaching utilizing descriptions of time accepted in English-speaking communities to explain usages and meanings of English tenses can limit learner…

Considering the complicating effect of cultural differences in writing conventions, this study examines discourse tradition as influenced by Confucian/Taoist precepts and those of U.S. academic environments, the latter requiring rational argumentation, justification, and proof. Pedagogical implications of native-speaker and nonnative-speaker…

This article presents an overview of recent developments in second language (L2) teaching and highlights the trends that began in the 1990s and the 2000s and are likely to continue to affect instruction in L2 skills at least in the immediate future. Also highlighted are recent developments in instruction as they pertain specifically to the…