Volume 59, Issue 1

The purpose of this systematic review is to synthesize the findings in the literature on the relative contribution of two types of linguistic knowledge (i. e., vocabulary and grammatical knowledge) to L2 reading comprehension; and to discuss the possible factors that might have led to the complexity and incongruity of the research findings. Nineteen studies were identified for this review through a systematic process of selection, and were analyzed in terms of the relationship of vocabulary and grammatical knowledge with L2 reading comprehension and their relative significance. The result of this review showed that there was no clear evidence supporting which type of linguistic knowledge is more contributive than the other; and the inconclusive findings might be attributed to the variations in the design of the studies. Two factors emerged, including participants’ language proficiency and construct definition, operationalization, and measurement. Some considerations for future research are suggested.

This study aimed at investigating the influence of learners’ previously acquired capitals on their response to the teacher’s attempts to trigger their attention. For this purpose, 403 EFL learners completed three different questionnaires. The results of Structural Equation Modeling showed that emotional capital was a positive predictor of interpersonal, intrapersonal, visual, musical, and kinesthetic joint attention styles. Similarly, social capital was a positive predictor of interpersonal, verbal, visual, and musical styles, and cultural capital was a positive predictor of logical and verbal styles. Moreover, the proposed model of L2 achievement based on the capitals and joint attention styles showed good fit to the data. It appears that learners’ socio-cultural and emotional backgrounds influence their response to the teacher’s initiation of joint attention. And their L2 achievement is enhanced when the teacher uses different joint attention modalities. In the end, pedagogical implications and areas for further research were provided.

This study investigated the manifestation of refusal of request speech act among Persian, English and Balouchi speakers with a focus on gender. The role of interlocutors’ social status was also studied in this regard. To this aim, 180 participants (60 persons in each language including 30 females and 30 males) took part in the study. The instrument was a discourse completion task with six real life situations. To analyze the data, descriptive statistics and Chi-square were employed. The findings revealed both similarities and differences in the realization of refusal of request speech act between males and females in the three languages.

High-proficient Swedish users of L2 French and Spanish were compared with native speakers of French, Spanish and Swedish with regard to how the syntactic peripheries in natural colloquial speech are structured. Two different though interrelated aspects were included: thus a cross-linguistic analysis comparing the three native speaker groups is combined with an analysis addressing the question of the upper limits of L2 acquisition. All left peripheral (LP) and right peripheral (RP) constituents of a corpus of 110,759 words were classified in a taxonomy relying both on syntactic and functional-pragmatic criteria. The cross-linguistic analysis showed that French and Spanish L1 speakers produced significantly longer LP sequences than the Swedish L1 speakers, who, in turn, put conspicuously more weight on the RP. Significant differences between the three languages were also found with regard to several LP and RP constituent categories. The L2 acquisition-oriented analysis showed that with few exceptions the high-proficient L2 users behaved like L1 users. Although a few interlanguage-related phenomena could be observed, no instances of any clear transfer from the speaker’s L1 appeared in either L2 speaker group.