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MULTIPLE VOICES IN THE TRANSLATION CLASSROOM. Maria Gonzalez Davies . Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2004. Pp. x + 259. $150.00 cloth, $42.95 paper. In recent times, translator education has, in general, tried to stay away from SLA. One of the reasons for this lies in the prescriptivist belief that students should have acquired their languages by the time they start their translation education. Yet the reality is that current translation practice throughout the world includes many cases of incomplete language acquisition, especially in immigrant communities, and that translation into a second language is common (Campbell, 1998; McAlester, 1992; Newmark, 1988). Therefore, this volume is, in principle, a relevant publication for the field of SLA.

LANGUAGE LEARNING AND TEACHER EDUCATION: A SOCIOCULTURAL APPROACH. Margaret R. Hawkins (Ed.). Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters. Pp. ix + 204. 39.95 paper.This book, according to the editor, “took shape from discussions among language teacher educators” who were interested in “reconceptualizing and redefining their practices” (p. 3) in order to reflect a shift from viewing language learning as an object to be dissected on paper to a view of language learning as discourses embedded in and shaped by situated social situations. It was, therefore, not surprising to discover that the chapters in this edited volume are all framed within a common sociocultural perspective that views language not as monolithic but as composed of many different social languages or discourses. Traditionally, language instruction, whether it be the teaching of traditional foreign languages, English as a foreign language or English as a second language, has focused on teaching grammatical structures and has been centered around teaching one correct form.

PHONETICS AND PHONOLOGY IN LANGUAGE COMPREHENSION AND PRODUCTION: DIFFERENCES AND SIMILARITIES. Niels O. Schiller and Antje S. Meyer (Eds.). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2003. Pp. 355. $123.20 cloth.This collection offers various psycholinguistic perspectives on the link between the processes of speech comprehension and production. Some authors in this collection approach the topic by reviewing how well existing models deal with the comprehension-production relationship; others propose new approaches, including ones that show compatibility with evidence from neuroimaging studies. The final two of the nine papers address the topic from a SLA standpoint.

CORPORA AND LANGAUGE LEARNERS. Guy Aston, Silvia Bernardini, and Dominic Stewart (Eds.) . Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2004. Pp. 311. $119 cloth. The papers in this volume come from the fifth TaLC meeting in Bertinoro, Italy, in 2002 and address a range of issues related to using corpora for language learning and teaching. The introductory chapter by the three editors provides an overview of the book and also recaps the conference discussion between Sinclair and Widdowson regarding the nature of authentic language and its place in language instruction. The main portion of the book is divided into three sections: “Corpora by Learners,” “Corpora for Learners,” and “Corpora with Learners.” These three sections are framed by two chapters: one by Hoey on lexical priming and a final chapter by Fletcher on using the web as a resource for creating corpora.

TEACHING AND LEARNING BY DOING CORPUS ANALYSIS. Bernard Ketteman and Georg Marko (Eds.). Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002. Pp. vii + 390. $148.00 cloth.This substantial volume contains 23 papers selected from the Fourth International Conference on Teaching and Language Corpora (TALC) held in Graz, Austria in the summer of 2000. Like many edited conference proceedings, the chapters in this book vary quite widely in both the quality and quantity of the work presented. Further, the substance of some of the stronger contributions—such as Coxhead on academic vocabulary and Lee on a genre-specific index for the British National Corpus (BNC)—had already appeared in journals at the time of this volume's publication (Coxhead in TESOL Quarterly and Lee in Language Learning and Technology). In his opening remarks, McEnery salutes the widening range of topics in this volume, but I am less sanguine about the value of adding breadth. Certainly, the new emphasis on the role of corpora in translation studies and the teaching of translation in the final section is well motivated, but it is less clear whether Renouf's discussion of short-dimension diachronic change or Flowerdew's use of language learning diaries has much to do with the central issues in TALC.

NOUN COMBINATION IN INTERLANGUAGE: TYPOLOGY EFFECTS IN COMPLEX DETERMINER PHRASES. Christiane Bongartz . Tubingen: Niemeyer, 2002. Pp. xv + 161. 48.00 € paper. Bongartz's monograph uses a crosslinguistic typological approach to examine the impact of first language (L1) noun combination strategies on the development of analogic interlanguage forms. A three-language comparison of the typologically distinct languages Czech, Chinese, and English shows two basic noun combination patterns: phrasal combinations and the use of incorporation strategies for the creation of compounds. Czech prefers phrasal combinations, English allows for both phrasal combinations and compounds, whereas Chinese is at the opposite end of the typological continuum insofar as it demonstrates a preference for compounds. Empirical data from Czech and Chinese learners of English as a second language reveal that L1 combination preferences indeed affect which English strategy is chosen: Czech learners use phrasal combinations more often and Chinese learners prefer compounds.

This paper considers how implicit and explicit knowledge are dissociable but cooperative. It reviews various psychological and neurobiological processes by which explicit knowledge of form-meaning associations impacts upon implicit language learning. The interface is dynamic: It happens transiently during conscious processing, but the influence upon implicit cognition endures thereafter. The primary conscious involvement in SLA is the explicit learning involved in the initial registration of pattern recognizers for constructions that are then tuned and integrated into the system by implicit learning during subsequent input processing. Neural systems in the prefrontal cortex involved in working memory provide attentional selection, perceptual integration, and the unification of consciousness. Neural systems in the hippocampus then bind these disparate cortical representations into unitary episodic representations. These are the mechanisms by which Schmidt's (1990) noticing helps solve Quine's (1960) problem of referential indeterminacy. Explicit memories can also guide the conscious building of novel linguistic utterances through processes of analogy. Formulas, slot-and-frame patterns, drills, and declarative pedagogical grammar rules all contribute to the conscious creation of utterances whose subsequent usage promotes implicit learning and proceduralization. Flawed output can prompt focused feedback by way of recasts that present learners with psycholinguistic data ready for explicit analysis. Other processes of acquisition from output include differentiation, analysis, and preemption. These processes of conscious construction in working memory underpin relationships between individual differences in working memory capacities and language learning aptitude.Thanks to Rod Ellis for first suggesting that I try to write this and to the staff and students at Department of Applied Language Studies and Linguistics University of Auckland (2003), the TESOL Program Temple University Japan (2003), the Chester Language Development Reading Group, and the LOT winter school (2004) for helping me think it through. I am particularly grateful to Michel Paradis, Michael Swan, Karen Roehr, Anne Feryok, and Tamar Keren-Portnoy for pointing their giant biological cameras of consciousness at a prior draft, and for sharing their awareness with me in kindly and constructive fashion. I have learned a lot from it.

OPTIMALITY THEORY IN PHONOLOGY: A READER. John J. McCarthy (Ed.) . Oxford: Blackwell, 2004. Pp. xvi + 603. $79.95 cloth, $44.95 paper. Optimality Theory in phonology is a textbook for an advanced-level phonology course that contains excerpts from 33 important articles and manuscripts on Optimality Theory (OT). For each chapter, McCarthy adds brief introductory notes and a list of study and research questions. The introductory notes provide background information and short remarks on the significance of the selected works. The study and research questions help readers to understand the material, and some questions are challenging enough to lead to interesting topics for research. Given the rapid development of OT in the past decade, it is not an easy task to compile such a reader. Overall, McCarthy makes excellent selections, and this book would be a useful textbook for many phonology classes. This text would also be appropriate for independent study, but those who are not familiar with OT may want to read Kager's ( 1999 ) introductory textbook before reading this volume. For an in-depth survey and overview of OT and an extensive list of references, the reader is referred to McCarthy ( 2002 ).

Swain's (1985, 1995, 2000) output hypothesis states that language production is facilitative of second language (L2) learning. An important component of the output hypothesis involves pushing learners to produce appropriate, accurate, and complex language (Swain, 1993), which may occur when interlocutors provide learners with negative feedback (Gass, 1997, 2003; Long, 1996; Mackey, in press; Pica, 1994; Swain & Lapkin, 1995). When learners modify their previous utterances in response to negative feedback, learning opportunities are created by both the provision of negative feedback and the production of modified output. Consequently, it is difficult to determine how these interactional features—alone or in combination—positively impact L2 development. The current study examines the impact of negative feedback and learners' responses on English as a second language (ESL) question development, which is operationalized as stage advancement in Pienemann and Johnston's developmental sequence for ESL question formation (Pienemann & Johnston, 1987; Pienemann, Johnston, & Brindley, 1988). Thai English as a foreign language (EFL) learners (n = 60) carried out a series of communicative tasks with native English speakers in four conditions that provided different negative feedback and modified output opportunities and also completed four oral production tests over an 8-week period. Analysis of the treatment data identified the amount of modified output involving developmentally advanced question forms produced by the learners, and analysis of the test data revealed whether the learners' stage assignment changed over time. Logistic regression indicated that the only significant predictor of ESL question development was the production of modified output involving developmentally advanced question forms in response to negative feedback.I am grateful to Alison Mackey for her insightful comments on this paper and on the dissertation research on which it is based. I also thank Rhonda Oliver, Jeff Connor-Linton, Jennifer Leeman, Jenefer Philp, Ana-Maria Nuevo, and the anonymous SSLA reviewers for their valuable comments. Any errors, of course, are my own.

LITERACY AND THE SECOND LANGUAGE LEARNER. Joann Hammadou Sullivan (Ed.) . Greenwich, CT: Information Age, 2002. Pp. xii + 279. $29.95 paper. In this age of Internet plenty, research collections need a justification for presentation in book format. According to the editor's introduction, the main justification for Literacy and the second language learner is to provide a sampling of the range of “possible voices and possible questions that make up the broad and complex field of second language literacy study” (p. xi).

This study investigates the effects of receptive and productive vocabulary learning on word knowledge. Japanese students studying English as a foreign language learned target words in three glossed sentences and in a sentence production task in two experiments. Five aspects of vocabulary knowledge—orthography, syntax, association, grammatical functions, and meaning and form—were each measured by receptive and productive tests. The study uses an innovative methodology in that each target word was tested in 10 different ways. The first experiment showed that, when the same amount of time was spent on both tasks, the reading task was superior. The second experiment showed that, when the allotted time on tasks depends on the amount of time needed for completion, with the writing task requiring more time, the writing task was more effective. If the second experiment represents authentic learning, then a stronger argument can be made to use productive vocabulary learning tasks over receptive tasks.I wish to acknowledge the generous input of the following people in the evolution of this paper: Paul Nation, Jonathan Newton, and Jim Dickie from Victoria University of Wellington, and the anonymous SSLA reviewers, for their helpful comments.

TEACHING ACADEMIC ESL WRITING: PRACTICAL TECHNIQUES IN VOCABULARY AND GRAMMAR. Eli Hinkel . Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 2004. Pp. xii + 360. $79.95 cloth, $37.50 paper. In this text, Hinkel argues that second language (L2) writing instruction has long favored teaching the writing process and discourse and rhetorical features of text while neglecting the essential language skills that L2 writers need to succeed in mainstream university classes. She attempts to redress this perceived shortcoming by identifying and describing the formal syntactic and lexical characteristics of academic text and advocating the explicit teaching of these key structures and lexical chunks.

A series of experiments shows that Spanish learners of English acquire the ship-sheep contrast in a way specific to their target dialect (Scottish or Southern British English) and that many learners exhibit a perceptual strategy found in neither Spanish nor English. To account for these facts as well as for the findings of earlier research on second language (L2) speech perception, we provide an Optimality Theoretic model of phonological categorization that comes with a formal learning algorithm for its acquisition. Within this model, the dialect-dependent and L2-specific facts provide evidence for the hypotheses of Full Transfer and Full Access.We would like to thank the audiences of the 25th Penn Linguistics Colloquium (Philadelphia, 2001), Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition 2001 (Palmela), and EuroSLA 11 (Paderborn, 2001) and of talks in Lisbon, Amsterdam, Edinburgh, Utrecht, and Munich, all in 2001 as well, for their questions and remarks, and Rachel Hayes, Michael Sharwood Smith, and five anonymous SSLA reviewers for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper. This research was partially sponsored by grant 355-75-003 to Boersma from the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO).

THE L2 ACQUISITION OF TENSE-ASPECT MORPHOLOGY. Rafael Salaberry and Yasuhiro Shirai (Eds.). Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2002. Pp. x + 489. $110.00 cloth.This volume originated from a colloquium on the second language (L2) acquisition of tense and aspect organized by Salaberry and Shirai at the Annual Meeting of the American Association of Applied Linguistics in 1999. It contains revised versions of a selection of the colloquium papers and additional invited contributions for a total of 15 chapters authored by 16 contributors, many of whom have already made important contributions to our understanding of this area of SLA. Six L2s are investigated: English, Italian, French, Spanish, Mandarin Chinese, and Japanese.

DEVELOPING PROFESSIONAL-LEVEL LANGUAGE PROFICIENCY. Betty Lou Leaver and Boris Shekhtman (Eds.) . New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Pp. xiv + 308. $65.00 cloth, $24.00 paper. In the face of a vast array of non-English culture and language media, increases in diaspora populations in the United States and elsewhere, the importance of global circuits of capital (and hence global communicative practices), and the increasing penetration of world events into the lives of Americans (with its implications for national security), one would surmise that developing professional-level additional language expertise would not be the exception that it is in the United States. Lambert ( 2001 ) described the low percentage of American students who study a foreign language at the advanced level and estimated that only 3% of those studying commonly taught languages such as Spanish or French enroll in advanced-level courses. Although support for less commonly taught languages (LCTL) such as Arabic have recently increased, students enrolled in LCTL programs are presumably even fewer in number. It is also clear that advanced-level coursework occupies only a fraction of most language programs' overall investment of resources. In a fiscal climate that makes the academy increasingly accountable to private sector logic, few interested students make developing advanced language programs a nonutilitarian choice.

FREQUENCY AND THE EMERGENCE OF LINGUISTIC STRUCTURE. Joan L. Bybee and Paul Hopper (Eds.). Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2001. Pp. vi + 492. $46.95 paper.PROBABILISTIC LINGUISITICS. Rens Bod, Jennifer Hay, and Stefanie Jannedy (Eds.). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003. Pp. xii + 451. $35.00 paper.

TASK-BASED LANGUAGE LEARNING AND TEACHING. Rod Ellis . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Pp. x + 387. $24.95 paper. This book is part of the Oxford University Press series in Applied Linguistics . In the preface, Ellis explains that his goal was to produce a book that “attempts to examine ‘task’ from a variety of perspectives,” noting he was striving in particular for “a rounded, balanced account of how tasks have figured in both SLA and language pedagogy” (p. ix). As Ellis also notes, the book is not a “how to” guide for the teacher or researcher but rather a text that informs about current research and practice on task-based second language research and teaching.

This paper reports a paired-groups experimental study, which tests the Interaction Hypothesis in a computer-mediated communicative environment. Pairs of intermediate-level nonnative speakers of English (n = 24) interacted with one another in a synchronous mode over a local area network while attempting to jointly complete jigsaw and decision-making tasks that were seeded with largely unknown target lexical items. The data suggest that learners often engage in negotiated interaction when presented with unknown lexical items during the course of task completion. Results also show that previously unknown lexical items that were negotiated were retained significantly better as measured by immediate and delayed recognition (receptive) and object labeling (productive) posttests than those items where preemptive input alone was provided and where target items were not engaged. The results are interpreted as being supportive for the interactionist perspective on SLA, especially the importance of attention, as they provide evidence of a more direct link between negotiated interaction and acquisition.I would like to thank the following people for their input and interaction with various aspects of this work: Roby Ariew, Sue Gass, Greta Gorsuch, Jun Liu, and Mary Wildner-Bassett. I would also like to thank the five anonymous SSLA reviewers whose insightful comments certainly helped strengthen this article. Finally, I would like to thank the participants in the study, to whom I am greatly indebted.

Context of learning, such as whether a learner studies a second language (L2) in a formal classroom—“at home” or abroad—may be a key factor in developing grammatical and lexical abilities. Yet, little empirical data is available comparing the effects of study abroad (SA) and formal instruction “at home” (AH) experiences on such development (Freed, 1995). The scant research that exists presents conflicting results (DeKeyser, 1986, 1991; Isabelli, 2002; Lennon, 1990; Regan, 1995; Ryan & Lafford, 1992; Schell, 2001). This paper provides a multivariate analysis (see Biber, 1988) of the effects of learning context on grammatical and lexical abilities in oral conversational discourse. The data compare the abilities of two groups before and after studying Spanish as an L2 for approximately one semester (N = 46): (a) a SA group in Alicante, Spain, and (b) a formal-classroom AH group at an American university. The corpus comprises oral segments produced by the learners in an Oral Proficiency Interview before and after the experimental period. In a corpus-based analysis, each segment was transcribed and tagged for various lexical and grammatical features. In two discriminant analyses, I identified various grammatical and lexical features that differentiated the two groups in terms of program gains. The results indicated that the AH context facilitated more development on discrete grammatical and lexical features. However, quantitative discourse analyses of the corpus revealed that the SA group achieved better narrative abilities and could produce language that was more semantically dense. The data are explained in consideration of the SA group's improved fluency and sociolinguistic pressures that distinguished its learning conditions.I would like to express my gratitude to the Council on International Educational Exchange, Barbara F. Freed, and Norman Segalowitz, whose sponsorship and support for the experiment reported here made this article possible. I also would like to thank Barbara F. Freed, Barbara Lafford, Norman Segalowitz, and the two anonymous SSLA reviewers for the valuable feedback on earlier versions of this article. Special thanks is due to Nicole Lazar for her expertise in planning and interpreting the statistical procedures reported in this article.

Studies in SLA have debated the importance of context of learning in the process of developing linguistic skills in a second language (L2). The present paper examines whether study abroad, as it provides opportunities for authentic L2 context, facilitates the acquisition of Spanish phonology. The corpus of this investigation is composed of speech samples from 46 students of Spanish: 26 studying abroad in Spain and 20 in a regular classroom environment in the United States. The students read a paragraph with 60 target words including segments such as word-initial stops (i.e., [p t k]),Throughout the article a phonetic representation of all sounds following the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is presented. Phonetic (instead of phonological) representations avoid making assumptions about underlying L2 representations. intervocalic fricatives (i.e., [ ]), word-final laterals (i.e., [l]), and palatal nasals (i.e., ). The findings reveal the following patterns for both regular classroom and study abroad students across time: (a) similar gain in the case of voiced initial stops and word-final laterals, (b) lack of gain in the case of intervocalic fricatives, and (c) high levels of accuracy in the case of the palatal nasal in the pretest. Concerning the external data, the following factor groups predicted phonological gain among all learners: years of formal language instruction, reported use of Spanish before the semester, reported use of Spanish outside the classroom during the semester (days), reported use of Spanish outside the classroom during the semester (hours), gender, entrance Oral Proficiency Interview, exit Oral Proficiency Interview, and level at which formal instruction began.

This study investigates the effect of the context of learning—“at home” (AH) classroom versus study abroad (SA)—on the number and types of communication strategies (CSs) used by learners of Spanish as a second language. Oral data from 46 learners—20 AH and 26 SA—were analyzed before and after the treatment period, to discern the effect of various factors on the learners' levels and choice of CS usage: type of CS category (L1 or L2 based, direct or interactional, and problem-orientedness [resource deficit, other performance, and self-performance]) and measures of language use. Posttest results showed a significant effect for context for CS categories and language use: Students in the SA context consistently used fewer CSs than their classroom counterparts, and their CS use correlated negatively with higher use of Spanish outside the classroom and with the host family. It is posited that the pragmatic exigencies of the AH and SA contexts may account for these findings.This research would not have been possible without the support of the Council on International Educational Exchange (CIEE), which sponsored this team project, headed by Barbara F. Freed and Norman Segalowitz, to study the effects of the SA experience on L2 learners. I am very grateful to the members of the CIEE project team: Joe Collentine, Barbara Freed, Norman Segalowitz, and Manuel Diaz-Campos, for their insightful commentary on earlier versions of this work. Special appreciation also goes to Nicole Lazar for her expert assistance with the methodology and data analysis sections of this paper. My sincere appreciation also goes to Julie Sykes, Rosalind Freeman, and Sharma Martineau, graduate students in Spanish SLA and applied linguistics at Arizona State University, for their assistance with the partial transcription and the coding of the CS data.

What characterizes the competence of multilinguals as compared to that of bilinguals? Is their metalinguistic awareness more developed? Do they find the acquisition of a fourth or fifth language easier? Cenoz, Hufeisen, and Jessner have assembled revised papers from the 1999 International Conference on Trilingualism and Third Language Acquisition in Innsbruck to present theoretical and practical dimensions of an unexplored domain, still grounded in bilingualism studies.

It was only about a year ago, in a reckless moment of shelf-purging, that I reluctantly placed my original offset copy (circa 1975) of The Good Language Learner into the paper-recycling bin. Many of us fondly remember that big orange-covered prepublication volume, dog-eared, battered, and stuck together with tape. Now, almost two decades after the first publication of The Good Language Learner (Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, 1978) this reissue appears as part of Multilingual Matters' “Modern Languages in Practice” series. It is the first time this series has featured a reprint of “classic” (p. vii) volumes of interest to foreign language researchers and teachers.

The age issue has been with us for some time, and Singleton and Lengyel's six-paper volume indicates it will accompany us into the next millennium. In the L1A = L2A spirit of the 1970s, nonlinguistic accounts for age differences were offered. Yet if factors such as anxiety or ego permeability are responsible for lack of L2 success after a certain age, studies of postpuberty failure either point to the difficulty of reducing affective factors to prepuberty levels or, alternatively, offer support for a neurobiologically based Critical Period. These studies notwithstanding, it is helpful to return to the original question: Is the outcome of adult L2 acquisition always failure?

This volume is very much in the North American tradition; it is an edited collection of papers originally presented at a conference (the Twenty-Second University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee Linguistics Symposium on Second Language Acquisition). The book represents both the strengths and weaknesses of its origins.

Language Contact, Language Conflict treats the increasingly common phenomenon of language contact and the subsequent cultural influences that contact can entail. The collection of papers is the result of a symposium held in Duisburg in March 1992 and is divided into two sections: (a) theoretical linguistic issues and (b) case studies from throughout the world. In the foreword, Hymes admits his skepticism toward the search for universals in linguistics, cognition, and human nature when “so much of anger as of joy is in the details” and, therefore, to preserve humanity, “the complex, emergent configurations of particular languages and ways of life are what need to be understood and shared” (foreword, no page number).

The edited volume of the Proceedings of the 1994 Child Language Seminar has a scope both broad and ambitious. Not all participants have contributed to the volume and only one featured guest speaker's paper, A. Radford's “The nature of children's initial clauses” (co-presented with H. Clahsen) is included, so we only get a tantalizing glimpse of the conference.

In this paper a theoretical model of dyadic native-nonnative speaker (NS-NNS) discourse is proposed in which discourse is described in terms of three features: interactional contingency, the goal orientation of participants, and dominance. The model is then used to study the discourse of 30 dyadic oral interviews of the Cambridge First Certificate in English examination. Results demonstrate the effectiveness of the model in abstracting the structure of oral interview discourse. They show that the discourse of oral proficiency interviews is characterized by greater reactiveness by NNS candidates and greater orientation toward goals by NS examiners. Variation in the structure of the discourse is also investigated in this study. This is shown to be related to the examiner, the theme of the interview, the task in which the participants are engaged, and the gender of examiner and candidate.

The amount of influence that a learner's native language has on the acquisition of a second language is an issue which has received considerable attention in research on second language acquisition. The thesis of this paper is that, within the context of the Interlanguage Hypothesis (Selinker 1972) and the Markedness Differential Hypothesis (Eckman 1977), some important properties of a learner's interlanguage (IL) can be predicted.More specifically, it is shown that speakers of Cantonese and Japanese internalize different IL rules in attempting to deal with English word-final voice contrasts. Whereas speakers of Cantonese devoice word-final obstruents in the target language, Japanese speakers insert a word-final schwa after the voiced obstruent. However, each of these rules can be correlated with facts about the phonology of the native language, supporting the conclusion that some important aspects of ILs can be predicted on the basis of a comparison of the native and target languages.

This paper summarizes some characteristics of Navajo and Western Apache speakers' tense switching in English and some observations on native English speakers' tense switching. It is suggested to teachers who have Southwestern Indian students in their classes to avoid restricting students to one particular tense in an artificial manner and to approach interlingual tense switching within a contrastive framework.

In a recent study of 190 university-level advanced ESL students from 8 first-language backgrounds, significant differences were found between several groups in their proficiency in processing spatial/chronological and hierarchical information in written discourse. This paper summarizes the study, presents the results and suggests possible variables which may contribute to first-language differences in acquiring English.

After an introductory discussion of the concepts of vocabulary knowledge continua and foreign-language learners' mental lexicons, the paper presents the results of a longitudinal pilot study whose aim was to make preliminary insights into vocabulary development as it takes place in an ordinary foreign-language classroom setting involving elementary-level Swedish-speaking learners of English. The results are discussed in terms of vocabulary growth in general, the learners' accessibility to words under time pressure, the relationship between “old,” well-known words and newly learned words, and finally, the stability of the learners' immediate access to words.

The paper examines the influence of the formal classroom as a learning environment on the discourse behaviour of advanced German students of English in conversations with English native speakers. It is proposed that FL teaching as a causal factor in the formation of IL-specific rules can operate either directly, in presenting the learner with FL material which deviates from target norms, or indirectly, by triggering off psycholinguistic processes which in turn lead to IL-specific rule formation. These are referred to as primary and secondary teaching induction, respectively. On a more concrete level, the impact of two constituents of FL teaching on IL discourse is discussed:(1) the textbook and other teaching materials;(2) classroom specific discourse norms.The influence of the first factor type manifests itself primarily in (a) the use of an inappropriately formal register, (b) an inappropriate use of modal verbs. The second factor type is found to result in (a) rising intonation with non-interrogative function, (b) inappropriate propositional explicitness of speech act realizations and discourse functions, (c) “complete sentence” responses, (d) a lack of marking for expressive and relational functions (“speech act modality”).In conclusion of the data analysis, a classroom specific pidgin will be hypothesized which, when transferred to non-classroom settings, leads to pragmatically inappropriate communicative behaviour.On a more general level, it will be postulated that second language acquisition hypotheses should be formulated with reference to specific types of acquisition/learning contexts.

The description of second language acquisition by adult immigrants in a natural setting raises specific methodological questions. This paper attempts to clarify some of these problems using the European Project data (Perdue, 1982) in three different areas: (1) the acquisition and use of the over-generalized marker (c'est in target French); (2) the acquisition of reference to time; and (3) the acquisition of reference to space by adult Spanish speakers in France.

This paper examines the expression of temporality in the basilang speech (the earliest stage of second language development) of five subjects. Temporality is studied from three perspectives: morphology, semantics, and pragmatics. The first analysis determined the subjects' degree of target-like use of English morphology and demonstrated that these basilang speakers generally lack verb phrase morphology and do not have a tense system. The second analysis examined the subjects' utterances in terms of sentence-level semantics, classifying utterances according to (universal) categories such as completive versus non-completive action, habitual versus continuous action, and action versus states. The analysis showed that none of the subjects studied made tense or aspectual distinctions and that temporal marking was not accomplished by the form of the verb. The third analysis examined how temporal reference was made by the adverbials (now, tomorrow, always, prepositional phrases), serialization (the fixing of a temporal reference point and allowing the sequence of utterances to reflect the actual temporal order of reported events), calendric reference (dates, days of the week, months, and numbers), and implicit reference (temporal reference inferred from a particular context or situation). This taxonomy captured the expression of time at the basilang level of interlanguage development much better than the previous two analyses.

In this paper empirical data are presented that demonstrate significant differences in the manner in which two commonly used experimental tasks evaluate developing linguistic competence in adult second language (L2) learners. Results indicate that production tests principally evaluate a learner's developing structural competence in the L2. On the other hand, comprehension tests provide a less direct measure of structural competence and are significantly influenced by pragmatic context.Fifty-one adult Spanish speakers at three levels of ESL ability were tested in both their elicited imitation (production) and act-out (comprehension) of complex sentences that were structurally identical. The stimuli varied in terms of the pre- and post-posing of a subordinate adverbial when clause and in terms of the direction of pronoun anaphora (forward and backward). Results from the production test indicate a significant effect of directionality, i.e., a preference for forward pronouns in post-posed clauses at the intermediate level. Results from the comprehension test did not show a significant directionality constraint at any level. They did, however, demonstrate a significant effect due to the use of a biasing pragmatic lead. Such findings are comparable to those found in early first language acquisition (Lust, Loveland, & Kornet, 1980). Implications of these findings for experimental methodology are discussed.