Using Spencer-Oatey’s (2004, 2008) Rapport Management approach, this study was conducted to elicit the reprimanding response behavior of native Persian speakers and EFL Learners. The participants of this study were 30 native Persian speakers and 60 EFL learners. To fulfill the purposes of this study, a six-binary situation Interactive Discourse Completion (IDCT) Task was utilized. Emotion Liker...

This study examines the relationships among the three essential language-related components -motivation, confidence, and ability -following a series of live videoconference interactions between Taiwanese EFL students and a native speaker. 227 students enrolled in the five advanced conversation classes at a private technical university in central Taiwan participated in this study. Based on quant...

People are constrained by their culture and social life when telling stories. A second language learner then cannot be expected to tell stories in the target language without cross-cultural effects that influence the way of narration. The present study examined the role of the first language (L1) and second language (L2) in the organization of narratives by focusing on Persian speakers’ and EFL...

The paper reports an experimental study on the learning of stress placement rules of Chinese EFL learners. The F0 slope of stress assignment rules in English by 30 Chinese EFL learners were compared with that of native speakers. The learners had an average of 5-minute instruction with a tenminute practice period. The stimulus words, sentences, and paragraph contrast the compound stress rule and...

Although is a frequently used subordinating conjunction in English. However, non-nativeness is often observed in Chinese EFL learners’ although output during pedagogical practice. This paper aims at exploring the characteristics of Chinese EFL learners’ although employment in Chinese EFL learners’ writing. The study is a corpus-based analysis launched under the analytical framework of contrasti...

Focus is of communication function in discourse. How it is realized by native speakers has long been in vigorous discussion. However, studies on focus concerning language learners are few, with the ones taking dialects into account even fewer. This study takes eight Zhenjiang dialect speakers as the subjects and investigates if their phonetic and phonological realization of narrow focus in Engl...

Pragmatic competence is one essential component of communicative competence; however, it has been quite neglected until recent years. Among all, the knowledge and ability to use discourse markers (DMs) cannot be overemphasized because they often facilitate cross-cultural communications. Due to the culture-bound nature, DMs (e.g., “well”, “y’know”) are often used quite differently across culture...