Volume 8, Issue 1 -

Due to the dominance of English as the international language of scientific communication, second language (L2) academic writers with different first languages (L1s) need to enhance their L2 pragmatic competence and make rhetorical and stylistic accommodations to publish their academic work in English-medium journals. Hedging strategies, among other things, are one of the important indicators of L2 pragmatic competence in academic writing. With Crompton’s taxonomy of hedges as the conceptual framework and by referring to the interview findings, we built two purpose-driven corpora and analysed the use of the hedging devices in the conclusion section of applied linguistics research articles written in English by Chinese and Anglophone scholars from intercultural perspectives. We attempted to answer an overarching question: “To what extent did the two groups of academic writers differ in hedging?” Results indicate that: 1) overall, Anglophone academic English writers used more hedges than their Chinese counterparts; 2) Chinese and Anglophone writers did not show statistically significant differences in the frequency of using most of the categories of hedges except for only one subcategory (namely, the “I/we+non-factive verb” structure); 3) both groups showed a similar pattern in the choice of various categories of hedges; 4) there were differences in linguistic expressions between the two groups in the use of hedging. These results are discussed in relation to intercultural rhetoric and L2 academic writer pragmatic competence.

Individual users of English as a first or second language are assumed to possess or aspire to a monolithic grammar, an internally consistent set of rules which represents the idealized norms or conventions of native speakers. This position reflects a deficit view of L2 learning and usage, and is at odds with usage-based approaches to language development and research findings on idiolectal variation. This study problematizes the assumption of monolithic ontologies of grammar for TESOL by exploring a fragment of genre-specific lexico-grammatical knowledge (the can you/could you V construction alternation in requests) in a single non-native user of English, post-instruction. A corpus sample of the individual’s output was compared with the input he was exposed to and broader norms for the genre. The analysis confirms findings in usage-based linguistics which demonstrate that an individual’s lexico-grammatical knowledge constitutes an inventory of constructions shaped in large part by distributional patterns in the input. But it also provides evidence for idiosyncratic preferences resulting from exemplar-based inertia in production, suggesting that input is not the sole factor. Results are discussed in the context of a “plurilithic” ontology of grammar and the challenges this represents for pedagogy and teacher development.

By integrating the social context model of L2 acquisition with the pyramid model of willingness to communicate in L2, this study examined aspects of the psychological process underlying willingness to communicate (WTC) in Slovak among young Hungarian speakers in Southern Slovakia. The data was collected among Hungarian-speaking secondary school students ( N =310). The results indicated that frequent and pleasant contact with Slovak speakers was related to higher proficiency in Slovak and lower anxiety to use Slovak, and these increased the willingness to communicate in Slovak. However, it was also demonstrated that accent stigmatization moderated the relationship between perceived L2 proficiency and L2 use anxiety. Anxiety was more closely related to proficiency among those who perceived less accent stigmatization than among those who perceived more stigma because of their Hungarian accent. The theoretical implications of these findings for the role of the intergroup context in developing accent stigmatization, and the link between accent stigmatization, L2 use anxiety and willingness to communicate in the majority language are discussed.

This article examines the appearance of the “pendulum effect” in the CLIL research arena and makes a case for a balanced, disinterested, and methodologically sound approach to continue driving the CLIL agenda forward. It is written as a response to the steady stream of criticism to which CLIL research has recently been subjected and which is primarily embodied by Bruton (Is CLIL so beneficial, or just selective? Re-evaluating some of the Research. System 39. 523–532 (2011b), CLIL: Some of the reasons why... and why not. System 41. 587–597 (2013), CLIL: Detail matters in the whole picture. More than a reply to J. Hüttner and U. Smit (2014). System 53. 119–128 (2015)) and Paran (Content and language integrated learning: Panacea or policy borrowing myth? Applied Linguistics Review 4(2). 317–342 (2013), on whose articles it focuses in order to redress the balance on the chief three fronts which these authors explore: CLIL characterization, implementation, and investigation. Within each one, it counters incorrect data and biased interpretations, updates obsolete information which renders certain arguments invalid, and identifies and provides solutions to the main caveats in the CLIL research hitherto conducted. The ultimate aim is to illustrate how we should neither harbor an excessively optimistic view on the way CLIL is playing out nor maintain an overly dismal outlook on the feasibility of its implementation, and to carve out a future research agenda in order to bring the pendulum to a standstill through solid, unskewed, and unbiased CLIL research.

Language pedagogy designers are faced with the challenge of engineering learning experiences that are in harmony with how second and foreign languages (L2s) are developed. In the field of L2 pragmatics learning and teaching, this challenge has sparked a considerable amount of research on instructional methods, facilitative interventions, and input enhancements. To a lesser degree, researchers have also investigated L2 pragmatic learning progressions that might inform L2 instruction. This review paper canvasses empirical research into the acquisitional sequences of interlanguage pragmatics (ILP) in adult L2 learners conducted after 2002, the year in which Kasper and Rose’s seminal book, Pragmatic Development in a Second Language , was published. The paper synthesizes the findings of 16 systematically identified empirical studies. Based on this synthesis of findings, new insights and tendencies in L2 pragmatic development are discussed, and areas in need of further research are identified.

This study establishes the multilingual turn as part of a critical movement in education. It highlights the importance we ought to attach to how we understand the concepts of language, the learners and language learning and related terms, as such assumptions determine what language teachers and learners do in the classroom. A thematic decomposition analysis of 21 chapters, contained in two books both with phrase the multilingual turn in their title (Conteh and Meier 2014, The multilingual turn in languages education: Opportunities and challenges . Bristol: Multilingual Matters; May 2014a, The multilingual turn: Implications for SLA, TESOL and Bilingual education . New York: Routledge), confirms that new critical understandings of these concepts have developed in recent years. While there is not total accord, my findings showed that authors, associated with the multilingual turn, conceive languages as a resource for learning and as associated with status and power; the learners as diverse multilingual and social practitioners; and learning as a multilingual social practice based on theoretical pluralism, consistently guided by critical perspectives. While theoretically relatively well established, the multilingual turn faces important challenges that hamper its translation into mainstream practice, namely popularly accepted monolingual norms and a lack of guidance for teachers. The findings combined with previous research inform a framework to reflect on practice, which may, in the long term, help address the challenges identified.