A pragmatic analysis of children's interlanguage in EFL preschool contexts
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Ana Llinares García
Ana Llinares García is a Lecturer in the English Department, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. She specializes in second language acquisition and interlanguage pragmatics. Her doctoral and present research focus on young learners' oral production in bilingual classroom contexts. Her dissertation received a research prize from the Spanish Ministry of Education.
Abstract
This paper presents an analysis of very young EFL (English as a Foreign Language) learners' speech in both high- and low-immersion classroom contexts. The purpose of the study is twofold: to develop a taxonomy of the communicative functions used in the L2 (second language) by fiveyear-old learners of English; and to analyze the distribution of these functions in the different contexts. The taxonomy is based on the functions identified by Halliday (1975) and Painter (1999) in the L1 (first language) of the child. These authors' research is based on their observation of how children learn the mother tongue because they have the need to communicate (give personal information, ask other people to perform actions, and so forth). The present analysis reveals the extent to which the different functions are used by children, both in the L2 and the L1, in different immersion contexts, and concludes by emphasizing the importance of developing classroom tasks that encourage children to use the L2 for purposes similar to those found in mother-tongue interaction.
About the author
Ana Llinares García is a Lecturer in the English Department, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. She specializes in second language acquisition and interlanguage pragmatics. Her doctoral and present research focus on young learners' oral production in bilingual classroom contexts. Her dissertation received a research prize from the Spanish Ministry of Education.
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Artikel in diesem Heft
- Contextual enrichment of lexical units in utterance interpretation: Evidence from Chinese and English
- A pragmatic reading of Ahmed Yerima's proverbs in Yemoja, Attahiru, and Dry Leaves on Ukan Trees
- A pragmatic analysis of children's interlanguage in EFL preschool contexts
- Meaning merger: Pragmatic inference, defaults, and compositionality
- Interlanguage pragmatics: A response to Andrew Cohen's “Strategies for learning and performing L2 speech acts” published in Vol. 2, No. 3, of Intercultural Pragmatics
- Book reviews