ITL - International Journal of Applied Linguistics - Volume 119, Issue 1, 1998

The analysis of a number of linguistic variables reflecting formality in the advanced oral French interlanguage of 27 Dutch-speaking students showed significant differences between male and female speakers. Female speakers were found to opt for a much more implicit and deictical speech style, especially in an informal situation. As the situation became more formal, the differences between male and female speakers weakened. The same variation was found in a corpus of native Dutch.

The pro-drop parameter and second language acquisition

In this paper the behaviour of the different properties related to the pro-drop parameter have been analyzed : (1) null subjects, (2) expletive pronouns, (3) The inflectional system, (4) free subject-verb inversion and (5) that-trace effect. Native speakers of Spanish learning English were tested to see how they activate the pro-drop parameter in second language acquisition. It was found that Spanish speakers carry over the parameter from the first to the second language, until some aspects of the auxiliary system make them readjust the parameter to the value of the L2. It was also proposed that two of the characteristics traditionally associated with the parameter, free subject-verb inversion and the that-trace effect come from different movement rules and are, therefore, not part of the pro-drop parameter.

The present study examines the relationship between direct grammatical teaching of the past tense system of standard Italian and the use of some implicational features which, without being the object of direct instruction, are normally found within the same structure and context of the instructed ones. The subjects of the experiment were 60 tertiary learners of L2 Italian from a variety of Italian regional dialect background (age 18-25), receiving a period of intensive instruction on the use of the past tense system of standard Italian. The incidence of use of implicational features was measured on the basis of a written test prior to a three week period of intensive instructional treatment, followed by immediate and delayed written posttests. Similar monitoring was carried out with a control group of 40 comparable learners, who had not received direct instruction. The results of the study support the hypothesis that explicit and intensive form-focused instruction, when combined with continuous meaning-focused practice of instructed features, encourages an increased and more accurate use of other features that are closely related to the targeted ones.

It is often observed that minority children's lexical proficiency in the majority language lags behind that of majority children. This observations is substantiated by scores on vocabulary tests. However, in these (traditional) tests words are generally treated as having one meaning, while most words are polysemous, i.e. they have multiple meanings. A new test was designed to measure the knowledge of multiple word meanings of minority and majority children. Results pointed to a rather high correlation between the scores on a traditional vocabulary test and the newly developed test for the minority children. Furthermore, the minority children scored lower on the new test than the majority children, which suggests that they not only have a lexical deficit in their second language with respect to the number of words known, but also with respect to the number of meanings attached to each word.

This paper debates the nature and the source of 'influence' on normative writing. In particular, it investigates the influential factor among language proficiency and cultural awareness on the rhetorical performance of ESL learners.

The study of learners' pragmatic and discourse knowledge, also known as "interlanguage pragmatics", is now an important preoccupation of second-language acquisition (SLA) research. Spurred by this growing interest in interlanguage pragmatics and with a view to contributing to this field of research I conducted a study of requests in English produced by English as a second language (ESL) university students in their daily interaction mainly with lecturers. I collected the data for this study by means of observation and by recording "golden episodes of requesting behaviour in students' spontaneous speech. For comparative purposes, I elicited additional data by means of a discourse-completion task (DCT). One finding is that the students' knowledge of contextual use of requesting strategies in English is inadequate because their requests are of (very) limited range and inappropriate in context. The in-appropriacy of the requests was confirmed by native speakers' judgments. One explanation of the inadequacy of the students' pragmatic knowledge is the lack of exposure to the whole gamut of requesting devices. Another may have a strategic dimension. Also important is the explanation of transfer from the first language/s (Ll/s) : learners may be simply carrying over into English structures translated from their L1. From a pedagogical point of view, it is suggested that discourse and pragmatic knowledge be systematically taught to avoid miscommunication and negative reactions from native and competent non-native speakers of English. The suggestion of teaching pragmatic knowledge seems to be supported by the finding about one subject who, after exposure to a variety of requesting expressions, seemed to modify the pattern of her requests.