The study of simultaneous interpreting presents a formidable challenge to the linguist and psychologist alike. Psycholinguistic models meant to shed light on the complexity of the process in question have been developed and refined by several scholars (Gerver, 1976, Moser, 1978, Levelt, 1989, de Boot, 1995). This paper is a discussion of one of the processes included in these current views of s...

Second language learners of English often experience difficulties in English lexical stress perception because of prosodic transfer of their first language (L1). It has thus been hypothesized that the problem of Chinese learners with English stress arises from tonal transfer. However, little research has been devoted to the investigation of the phonetic details of second language (L2) stress pe...

This study examines the relationship between both first language (L1) and second language (L2) reading attitudes, and learners' performance in L2 extensive reading. Four reading attitude variables were identified (Comfort, Anxiety, Value, Self-perception), both in L1 and L2, according to learners' responses to a questionnaire. Results of analyses using these four variables are summarised on two...

Bilingualism or multilingualism is not the aberration supposed by those speaking a 'big language' but rather the default situation for the majority of speech communities in the world today. Based on this perspective, the psycholinguistic foundations of second language acquisition are explored in the first part of this paper and it is argued that bilingual education in a monolingual society shou...

The study of simultaneous interpreting presents a formidable challenge to the linguist and psychologist alike. Psycholinguistic models meant to shed light on the complexity of the process in question have been developed and refined by several scholars (Gerver, 1976, Moser, 1978, Levelt, 1989, de Boot, 1995). This paper is a discussion of one of the processes included in these current views of s...

This paper reports on a preliminary study on second language (L2) learners’ interlanguage pragmatic (ILP) development in academic written discourse by examining how epistemic modality is used by non-native speaker (NNS) writers compared with NS writers in both native speaker (NS) and NNS corpus data. This study also investigates how NNS writers gradually develop interlanguage pragmatic competen...

This study investigated the effects of blog-mediated instruction on English-as-a-foreign language (EFL) learners’ writing performance and anxiety. In addition, it aimed to probe into the EFL learners’ attitudes towards blog-mediated writing instruction. The participants of the study included forty-six Iranian EFL learners from two intact university classes, who were randomly assigned to the Con...

Introduction How human brains acquire second languages (L2) is one of the fundamental questions in neuroscience and language science. However, it is unclear whether the first language (L1) has a cross-linguistic influence on the processing of L2. Methods Here, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging to compare brain activities during L2 word reading tasks of phonographic Japanese Kana bet...

l2 research has shown that instruction in l2 pragmatics is necessary. the current study evaluated the impact of explicit instruction on efl learner's awareness and production of three speech acts of request, apology, and complaint. it also probed whether learners’ language proficiency plays any role in incorporating pragmatic instruction into the l2 classroom. iranian undergraduate student...

SECOND LANGUAGE LEARNERS FACE A DUAL CHALLENGE IN VOCABULARY LEARNING: First, they must learn new names for the 100s of common objects that they encounter every day. Second, after some time, they discover that these names do not generalize according to the same rules used in their first language. Lexical categories frequently differ between languages (Malt et al., 1999), and successful language...