This article examines the types of speech acts produced by intermediate Spanish learners as well as their selection of pragmalinguistic forms to communicate these acts. In contrast to much of the research on speech acts and pragmatics in interlanguage which has emphasized learner errors in comparison to native speakers, this study primarily examines what learners are able to produce, and it doe...

The process of globalization entails the acquisition of a construct, cultural intelligence, with which EFL students can function appropriately in intercultural situations. This study was, first, intended to find the relationship between cultural intelligence and the use of expressions of gratitude by Iranian EFL learners. Second, it sought to determine whether there were any significant differe...

Unlike many aspects of human language, pragmatics involves a systematic many-to-many mapping between form and meaning. This renders the computational problems of encoding and decoding meaning especially challenging, both for humans in normal conversation and for artificial dialogue systems that need to understand their users’ input. A particularly striking example of this difficulty is the reco...

The Reporting on Palm Oil Issues in Online Newspaper Headlines: A Pragmatic Analysis ABSTRACT Over a decade, the production of palm oil by Malaysia faces challenges from European Union countries. They accused that has caused hazard to environment, extinction orang utan and exploitation labourers. In return, Malaysian newspapers have written many articles clearing accusations. This study aims an...

Second language (L2) learners tend to speak slower at every level of linguistic analysis, often in an uneven tempo, with longer pauses at the start and before some words and constructions, than is typical of native speech. As noted by Zhang & Elder [1], native listeners focus on phonological fluency in making judgments about L2 proficiency. Improved understanding of how fluency grows with progr...

This work reports on the construction of a rated database of spontaneous speech produced by second language (L2) learners of English. Spontaneous speech was collected from 28 L2 speakers representing six language backgrounds and five different proficiency levels. Speech was elicited using formats similar to that of the TOEFL iBT and the Speaking Proficiency English Assessment Kit (SPEAK) test. ...

This study investigates whether working memory capacity (WMC) varies across languages and in the course of L2 speech proficiency levels. Following suggestions in Finardi and Weissheimer (2009) and Prebianca (2010), who found that WMC varied as a function of L2 speech proficiency, the present study assessed three proficiency levels (elementary, intermediate and advanced) and two languages (L1-Po...

This  study  examined  the  effects  of  individual  difference  (ID)  factors  on  changing  pragmatic abilities  among  L2  learners  of  English.  Participants  were  48  Japanese  EFL  students  in  an English-medium  university  in  Japan.  They  completed  a  pragmatic  speaking  test  (k=12)  that assessed  their  ability  to  produce  two  speech  acts:  requests  and  opinions,  in  hi...