The strategies adopted by native speakers of Dutch and Chinese speakers with different levels of proficiency in Dutch in the realization of degrees of focus enhancement were significantly different on six variables. The participants with higher proficiency did not outperform the learners with lower proficiency. The Chinese subjects appear to abstain from phonetic enhancement rather than transfe...

This study investigated the contribution of naming speed and phonemic awareness to teacher inattention ratings and word-level reading proficiency in 79 first grade children (43 boys, 36 girls). Participants completed the cognitive and reading measures midway through the school year. Teacher ratings of inattention were obtained for each child at the same time point. A path analysis revealed that...

This  paper  focuses  on  some  pragmatic  expressions  that  are  characteristic  of  informal  spoken English, their possible equivalents in some other languages, and their use by EFL learners from different  backgrounds.  These  expressions,  called  general  extenders  (e.g.  and  stuff,  or something), are shown to be different from discourse markers and to exhibit variation in form, funct...

Hedging academic claims has been recognized as one of integral pragmatic features of academic writing in which most EFL academic writers seem to face substantial problems. Explicit instruction has been proposed by some scholars as an effective approach to make EFL writers aware of the importance, different forms, and pragmatic functions of hedging devices some of which are polysemous and polypr...

The study focused on the relationship of English proficiency and math performance in a sample of high school students, including 47% English language learners (ELLs). Data sources included state math test scores, study-specific preand posttest scores, problem solving in an online math tutorial, and responses to a self-report assessment of mathematics selfconcept. English conversational and read...

This study investigates for the first time comprehension of rhetorical questions (RhQs) in bilingual children. RhQs are non-canonical questions, as they not used to request information, but express speaker’s belief that answer is already obvious. special pragmatic meaning often arises by means specific prosodic and lexical-syntactic cues. Being childhood learners, children have acquire concept ...

We study the logical properties that characterize pragmatic inferences and we show that classical understanding of notions such as entailment and defeasibility is not enough if one wants to explain infelicities that occur when a pragmatic inference is cancelled. We show that infelicities can be detected if a special kind of inference is considered , namely infelicitously defeasible inference. W...

This paper offers an analysis of metalinguistic comparatives such as more dumb than crazy in which they differ from ordinary comparatives in the scale on which they compare: ordinary comparatives use scales lexically determined by particular adjectives, but metalinguistic ones use a generallyavailable scale of imprecision or ‘pragmatic slack’. To implement this idea, I propose a novel compositi...

This paper presents results from investigations into the effect of allowing examinee autonomy in a computerized test of oral proficiency. It begins with a description of the computerized assessment, the Computerized Oral Proficiency Instrument (COPI), as operationalized in Spanish and Arabic. It then presents results from research on allowing examinee autonomy in the assessment. The talk will p...