Volume 51, Issue 1

The aim of this study is to point out the relationship between foreign language learning motivation and sign language use among hearing impaired Hungarians. In the article we concentrate on two main issues: first, to what extent hearing impaired people are motivated to learn foreign languages in a European context; second, to what extent sign language use in the classroom as well as outside school shapes their level of motivation. The participants in our research were 331 Deaf and hard of hearing people from all over Hungary. The instrument of data collection was a standardized questionnaire. Our results support the notion that sign language use helps foreign language learning. Based on the findings, we can conclude that there is indeed no justification for further neglecting the needs of Deaf and hard of hearing people as foreign language learners and that their claim for equal opportunities in language learning is substantiated.

For learners to communicate efficiently in the L2, they must avoid pragmatic failure. In many cases, teachers' praxis centres on the learner's performance in the L2 or his role as a speaker, which neglects the importance of his role as interpreter of utterances. Assuming that, as hearers, learners also have a responsibility to avoid pragmatic failure, this paper endorses the relevance-theoretic view of communication, its explanation about why misunderstandings arise, and the belief that the learner's sophistication in understanding is not the same as that of a native. Therefore, it argues that learners must be taught to be cautious optimistic hearers. As a result, learners will be able to reject interpretations of utterances, which, due to the linguistic or cultural incompetence of their native or non-native interlocutors in the L2 system, they are led to regard as relevant enough although their interlocutors may have expected them to arrive at a different interpretation.

The Aspect Hypothesis assumes that – in early interlanguages – the perfective past spreads from telic to atelic verbs because events occuring in the past are easier to be associated with predicates having an inherent endpoint in their lexico-conceptual representation. In this study it is questioned whether for initial L2ers knowing the general meaning of a verb entails knowing also its actional template and that learners have innate principles that drive them to distinguish telic and atelic verbs from scratch. Data from our experiment of prompted narrative suggest that L1 English, L2 Italian tutored learners – although having knowledge of some telic verbs of motion – prefer to use the underspecified <italic>andare</italic> `go' and to build telicity compositionally. The overuse of most frequent and “basic verbs” and the promotion of adjuncts to the rank of real arguments is a challenge for both the Aspect Hypothesis and the parametric view to the acquisition of the tense-aspect system in a second language.