Volume 43, Issue 2

There is a growing volume of research on task-based language use; however, the nature of “task proficiency” has not yet been clearly defined. In order to gain new insights, this study examines the relationship between the process of communication in an L2 and a task outcome by analysing lexical density, as obtained from the pattern of a concordance of L1 “private speech” (i.e., selfdirected speech). Lexical density is used to analyse the nature of interactive task performance. L1 private speech is a means of observing the way interlocutors make decisions on a moment-by-moment basis. Data were produced by pairs of Japanese college students during a map-completion task in English. The results clearly indicate that the pairs who achieved the best task results were, regardless of their English proficiency level, good at grasping the status of their task performance in both problematic and non-problematic situations. This requires reconceptualisation of L2 proficiency as an emergent property of dialogic processes.

This paper draws on data used in the pilot application of data-driven pedagogical strategies for dealing with non-nativeness in the writing of advanced FL learners of French to expose attendant practical problems and theoretical issues. The discussion focuses on the question of vagueness in academic writing and involves a three-way comparison of FL French data, NS target language data and NS mother tongue data. This contrastive approach entails assessing the relationship between speech and writing in the diagnosis of sources of non-nativeness, and the influence of both interlingual and intralingual transfer. It underscores the interrelatedness of discourse and psycholinguistic factors generally, and, more specifically, the likely psycholinguistic relevance to questions of non-nativeness and written phraseology of contrasts in cognitive and discourse constraints between speech and writing; it also points to limitations of classroom data likely to be used in pedagogical applications, and suggests that principled guidance from research is needed if these questions are to be satisfactorily dealt with in teaching.

An important problem for a language learner is identifying how properties of argument structure are realized morphosyntactically in the particular language they are learning. Speakers of some L1s overgeneralize the morphosyntactic reflexes of the movement of Theme objects in English to unaccusative intransitive verbs, using passive morphology in such cases. In contrast, it appears that the same L2 learners are less likely to do this with unergative verbs. The present paper addresses the question of whether L2 learners of English with typologically different L1s such as Japanese and Spanish will overgeneralize passive morphology to unaccusative verbs in the same way. The results show that both Japanese and Spanish learners of English differentiate unaccusatives from unergatives. However, the two groups differ in their treatment of unaccusatives with transitive alternants and intransitive alternants, suggesting influence of the morphological properties of the L1.