Second language pragmatics are not easily acquired by second language learners for a variety of reasons including negative first language transfer, insufficient grammatical competence, and inadequate instruction. For adult learners living in the second language environment, adequate pragmatic knowledge is essential even for beginning level…

Realizing that ESOL students often do not integrate naturally into their new communities, we developed a reading class that focuses only on topics such as history, culture, arts, nature and entertainment that pertain to Portland or Oregon. In addition to readings, we asked that students go out and "live" what they learned through a…

During the 2014-2015 academic year, the authors conducted roundtables related to queer identity in the English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) classroom at Oregon Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages (ORTESOL's) fall and spring conferences and at an in-service day at Portland State University's Intensive English Language…

The issue of teaching pragmatics in foreign and second language classrooms has received a lot of attention in the recent years. Its origins can be dated back to the Cross-Cultural Speech Act Realization Project (CCSRAP) led by Blum-Kulka, House and Kasper (1989) and the research on interlanguage speech acts that followed (for a comprehensive…

A 20-year veteran teacher of college Spanish, the author decided to take an intensive First-Year German course during one summer. The author found the German class was not only a great opportunity to acquire another language, but a rich source of insight about the language teaching and the learning process itself. Not only did she take German…