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The present study investigates the role of concurrent and retrospective verbal report in exploring the cognitive processes of six pairs of advanced ESL learners engaged on a written discourse completion task eliciting status-unequal requests in English. Qualitative analysis of the concurrent data indicate that (i) social contextual aspects of the discourse situation influenced pragmalinguistic and sociolinguistic choices in the planning phase and (ii) language-related episodes (Swain, Merrill & Lapkin, Applied Linguistics 16: 371–391, 1995, Swain, Merrill & Lapkin, Focus on form through collaborative dialogue: Exploring task effects, Longman, 2001, Storch & Neomy, Language Awareness 17: 95–114, 2008) evidenced participants' negotiation of lexical and grammatical choices in planning the requests. Metalinguistic data from the retrospective interviews indicate that (i) participants thought in both L1 & L2: there was evidence that L1 was employed in planning the organisation of discourse and in lexical search strategies, and (ii) participants experienced difficulty with the methodological requirement of a one-turn response in the written task and in recalling their linguistic hypotheses in the concurrent phase. The paper suggests that combining a form of paired verbal report with a written elicitation instrument in interlanguage pragmatics research may provide insights into the cognitive processes underlying the sociocultural and sociolinguistic choices in advanced L2 learners' written speech act production and could be used more extensively in such research.

Hong Kong popular culture played an important role in the construction and consolidation of Hong Kong identity long before the handover to China. In the past few years leading up to the 10 th anniversary of the handover, both Hong Kong and China have undergone numerous changes which seem to be changing their relations. Whilst Hong Kong people had tended to distance and distinguish themselves from China and Mainland Chinese in pre-handover times, they now tend to feel closer to their motherland and their relations with Mainland Chinese also seem to be changing. These transformations can be exemplified by Hong Kong popular culture such as TV programs and films which have been studied in various disciplines. In particular, literature on Hong Kong movies can be found in fields such as film and cultural studies, semiotics and sociology. While language use in the Hong Kong cinema is regarded as one of the unique features that contributed to the formation of local Hong Kong identity (Teo, Senses of Cinema, 2000), the patterns of language use of characters in these films have been largely unexplored. Based on an analysis of film extracts from Hong Kong films, this study examines and compares the Hong Kongers' perceptions of their intergroup relations with Mainland Chinese from an applied linguistic perspective. In doing so, it analyses Hong Kongers' attitudes towards Mandarin before and after the handover to China in 1997 as reflected in the language exchange between Hong Kongers and mainlanders portrayed in film interactions. Findings indicate that Mandarin is becoming a dominant language, and the intergroup differences between Hong Kongers and Mainland Chinese are less emphasised.

The monolingualism of New Zealand has often been remarked on, but statutory and demographic changes in recent years suggest a shift away from the dominance of the English language. New Zealand now has two official languages, the indigenous Maori language and New Zealand Sign Language, and census data report a decreasing proportion of monolingual English speakers in the population. This paper describes a study investigating whether, as a result of these changes, languages other than English are now being heard in the public domain in New Zealand. It adopts a linguistic landscape approach but differs from other studies that have used this approach by adapting the standard binary categorisation of actors in the linguistic landscape in order to identify the differences in their contributions. Thus, Calvet's terms (1990, 1994) ‘in vitro’ and ‘in vivo’ are proposed as opposite ends of a continuum to reflect the dynamism within a linguistic landscape rather than as oppositional categories.

This paper examines the status-unequal requests of 89 advanced mixed-L1 learners and 87 British English native speakers elicited by a written discourse completion task. Significant differences were observed in all three dimensions analysed: internal and external modification, and perspective. The data demonstrate learners' overuse of zero marking in internal modification and overuse of preparators in supportive moves. External modification patterns also differed qualitatively in learners' provision of detailed content and in native speakers' employment of interpersonal orientation moves. Native speakers used significantly more requests employing impersonal perspective and in association with a range of mitigating, elliptical and formulaic devices. In this paper, we explore these quantitative & qualitative differences in patterns of speech act behaviour and consider the implications for learner development.