Kathleen Bardovi-Harlig

This book is about the acquisition of temporal expression in a second language. Temporal expression has come into its own as an arena of research in adult second language acquisition. The investigation of temporal expression includes all linguistic means of reference to time. The study of tense-apart morphology has been the focus of many descriptive and pedagogical accounts of language. Although the pedagogy of tense and aspect has received a great deal of attention, the acquisition of tense aspect systems has received relatively little attention in comparison. Interest in this neglected aspect has been growing, and gradually the investigation of the relationship between instruction and acquisition of tense-aspect, increasing the prospects of an acquisitionally informed pedagogy. The book has seven chapters:" The Acquisition of Time Talk in Second Language Acquisition";" Meaning-Oriented Studies of Temporality";" The Emergence of Verbal Morphology";" The Aspect Hypothesis";" The Role of Discourse";" The Influence of Instruction"; and" Past, Present, and Future." Numerous tables, figures, and charts appear throughout the text. Extensive references and an index are included.(KFT)

G. Kasper and R. Schmidt (1996) have argued that the field of investigation known as interlanguage pragmatics has been essentially modelled on cross‐cultural pragmatics. Taking Kasper and Schmidt's argument one step further, this article shows how interlanguage itself has been ignored in research on interlanguage pragmatics. Research has not established that pragmatic competence is independent of grammatical competence. Although grammatical competence may not be a sufficient condition for pragmatic development, it may be a necessary condition. I outline a research agenda in which the study of interlanguage becomes more central to the study of interlanguage pragmatics.

This paper is a longitudinal study of the acquisition of pragmatic competence. Advanced adult nonnative speakers of English were taped in advising sessions over the course of a semester. Two speech acts, suggestions and rejections, were analyzed according to their frequency, form, and successfulness and compared with similar data gathered for native speakers. The nonnative speakers showed change toward the native speaker norms in their ability to employ appropriate speech acts, moving toward using more suggestions and fewer rejections, and became more successful negotiators. However, they changed less in their ability to employ appropriate forms of the speech acts, continuing to use fewer mitigators than the native speakers. Furthermore, unlike native speakers, they also used aggravators. We claim that these results may be explained by the availability of input: Learners receive positive and negative …

This paper examines the notion of status in institutional discourse and identifies congruence as a factor in determining the success of native speaker (NS) and nonnative speaker (NNS) interactions in that context. Thirty‐two academic advising sessions between faculty advisors and both native and highly proficient nonnative graduate students were examined. Whereas both NSs and NNSs show variable success in negotiating noncongruent (status‐challenging) speech acts such as suggestions, NNSs are generally less successful because of the absence of status‐preserving strategies that minimize the force of noncongruent speech acts. These strategies allow students to take out‐of‐status turns without jeopardizing their relationship with their advisors. Because of the advanced level of the NNSs, lack of success is not attributable to lack of linguistic competence but to lack of context‐specific pragmatic competence …

This article presents the results of a study investigating the acquisition of the simple past tense, identifies areas of difficulty, and presents an acquisitionally based approach to instruction for the problematic areas. The study, a cross‐sectional investigation of 182 adult learners of English as a second language at six levels of proficiency, showed that the acquisition of the past tense in English is not a unitary phenomenon, but that it proceeds in stages. These stages are determined by the meaning of verbs as they relate to the expression of action and time, what we will term lexical aspect. These findings show that the acquisition of tense by classroom language learners follows the same sequences of development (with instruction) that have been observed in the acquisition of adult learners and in children without instruction. In early stages, learners often do not use the past tense where it is preferred by native speakers …

Discussion of the role of pragmatics research in language teaching looks at the role such research should play in the language classroom, and the role of researcher, teacher, and teacher educator in making that connection. It is noted that pragmatics research has discovered a number of differences in the ways in which first-and second-language learners acquire the target language: differences in speech acts used, in forms of speech acts, in choice of semantic formulas, and in the content of semantic formulas. Research has also revealed the importance of input and its sources, and cross-cultural and interlanguage pragmatics research has begun to help in development of pedagogically appropriate materials. It is argued that a speech act framework is useful for translating pragmatics research into classroom practice that helps learners attend to interactions and reactions and consider the effects of one choice of words over another. Learner-centered teaching methods are viewed as useful in this effort. Suggestions are offered on the selection of speech acts on which to focus in the second language classroom and techniques for presenting new speech act information, drawing on results of research. Contains 44 references.(MSE)

Two hypotheses regarding the distribution of emergent tense-aspect morphology in SLA have been proposed: the aspect hypothesis, which claims the distribution of interlanguage verbal morphology is determined by lexical aspectual class, and the discourse hypothesis, which claims it is determined by narrative structure. Recent studies have tested and supported both hypotheses individually. This study expands the investigation to include an analysis of both narrative structure and lexical aspectual class in a single corpus comprising 74 narratives (37 oral and written pairs) produced by adult learners of English as a second language at various proficiency levels. The results suggest that both hypotheses are necessary to account for the distribution of verbal morphology in interlanguage.

The present study examines the relationship between syntactic development, or complexity, and overall accuracy evidenced in the written English of advanced adult foreign language learners. Similar acquisition profiles were found to exist for 30 learners across five language groups: Arabic, Chinese, Korean, Malay, and Spanish. Syntactic complexity, measured in number of clauses per T-unit, is found to be similar in all five groups. These advanced foreign language learners, who show similar patterns of error distribution, all show relative strength in syntax, what Newport, Gleitman, and Gleitman (1977) call a universal design feature of language, but relative weakness in morphology, which is always a language-specific system.

The task of all language learners is to match form and meaning. This study investigates the associations of form and meaning in the developing tense and aspect systems of adult learners of English as a second language. A cross-sectional study of 135 learners at six levels of proficiency was conducted using a cloze passage and compositions on the same topic. The interlanguage tense and aspect systems can be characterized as showing high formal accuracy, but relatively lower appropriate use across all levels. During the period when appropriate use lags behind formal accuracy, learners seem to associate form and meaning through alternative interim hypotheses related to lexical aspect and discourse function.

Pragmatics—the rules of how to say what to whom, when, and in what context—is often not included in second or foreign language classrooms, leaving learners without preparation for everyday interactions in the target language. This entry reviews potential obstacles to teaching pragmatics and suggests ways to overcome them. One major obstacle is that information about pragmatics is rarely found in commercial textbooks, either as input (as examples or models) or as explanations of language use or what might be expected in the target culture. However, some materials have been developed for teaching pragmatics, but they are still largely limited to the professional development literature. This entry concludes by suggesting what teachers can do to develop materials and activities and how they can be shared with other teachers in order to promote curricular innovation.

This paper investigates the nature of input available to learners in the institutional setting of the academic advising session. The advisory session, an unequal status encounter that by nature is a private speech event and cannot be observed by other learners, provides a starting point for the investigation of real and perceived availability of input. Evidence for the realization of speech acts as well as appropriate content and form, positive evidence from peers and status unequals, the effect of stereotypes, and limitations of a learner's pragmatic and grammatical competence are factors that may influence the course of development of interlanguage pragmatics in the institutional setting.

This paper examines the acquisition of a typologically marked construction, preposition stranding, and its unmarked counterpart, preposition pied piping, by learners of English as a second language. Acquisition data from 95 college‐age learners show unequivocally that preposition stranding (the marked form) is acquired before preposition pied piping (the unmarked form). This apparent counterexample to the markedness hypothesis, which predicts that unmarked forms should be acquired before marked forms, suggests that a second factor, salience, also plays a role in determining acquisition order.

This article surveys the development of second language acquisition research in the area of tense and aspect. Research in the area has grown from the incidental investigation of tense-aspect morphology as part of the morpheme-order studies to investigations of the construction of interlanguage temporal semantics. Going beyond verbal morphology, many studies investigate a full range of temporal expression, including the use of pragmatic and lexical means. Much recent research also draws on theories of inherent, or lexical, aspect. An emphasis on the relation of form and meaning characterizes both the form-oriented approach and the semantic-oriented approach, the competing research paradigms that currently guide our work. The increase in scholarly activity in this domain of second language acquisition, as reflected not only in the number of studies undertaken but in the number of target …

A number of studies on the acquisition of tense and aspect by learners of a second language point to the hypothesis that narrative structure influences the distribution of tense/aspect forms in interlanguage. However, the studies have reported conflicting profiles of tense/aspect use. This study suggests that much of the variation that has been previously reported stems from the level of proficiency of the learners. This crosssectional study examines 37 written and oral narrative pairs produced in a film retell task by adult learners of English as a second language. The analysis approaches the texts from two perspectives, from the perspective of acquisition, taking narrative structure (specifically grounding) as an environment for acquisition of tense/aspect, and from the perspective of the narrative itself, characterizing the foreground and background by the tense/aspect forms used. The study finds a developmental pattern in …