This paper analyzes the nature of linguistic interactions between host communities and international tourists. The tourism-based context provides an excellent platform from which to describe the sociolinguistic influences that American tourists have had on Mexican communities. Specifically, the language use of local vendors in Puerto Peñasco/Rocky Point, Mexico, is described in terms of the various linguistic characteristics that constitute their particular dialect of English. Not only does this work emphasize the sociocultural foundation of language acquisition, it also illustrates the type of language that is learned in economically motivated situations. The results also emphasize how the growing ubiquity of (American) English in tourism contexts establishes distinct attitudes towards the United States and those who live there.

Prior research in L2 reading has shown that adult ESL readers tend to lack in the use of reading strategies, failing to utilize contextual clues or their background knowledge base. In addition, studies demonstrated that when the adult readers who are highly competent in L1 reading read in L2, they become inefficient, "text-bound" readers, failing to utilize their effective reading strategies in L1. The present study investigated adult L2 readers' processes of reading in relation to their perceived view of L2 reading, in an attempt to explore the underlying factors related to "text-bound" processing in L2 reading. Two specific research questions were raised for investigation: (1) what is the relationship between an L2 reader's perceptions about L2 reading and his or her reading processes in L2?; (2) what is the relationship between an L2 reader's perceptions about reading (both in L1 and L2) and his or her transfer of reading strategies from L1 to L2 reading? A significant correlation between the perception and actual processing pattern was hypothesized for both questions within the three theories of reading: the metacognitive, the psycholinguistic, and the schema/interactive theory. These three theories of reading provided the theoretical bases for the study. The study consisted of two phases. In the first phase, a survey was conducted with 139 adult ESL readers who responded to a questionnaire developed to tap L2 readers' perceptions about reading and their actual processes while reading magazines in English. Their responses were statistically analyzed to test the research hypotheses. In the second phase, a case study method was utilized for further exploration with six readers chosen from the survey's respondents. Two meetings with the researcher were held with each of the six subjects to further probe their perceptions about L2 reading, and their actual reading processes while they read an article from a chosen magazine. The results indicated that the more linguistic perceptions an adult L2 reader has, the more text-based processing he or she employs. It was also found that the greater the difference perceived by the reader between L2 and L1 reading, the greater the difference between his or her interaction and transaction with L2 text compared to L1 text.

Over the course of the last few decades the debate over culture and its relationship to language has remained heated and one can argue, unresolved. It has been underscored that it is not necessarily the question of culture teaching per-se but rather the methods and content of such teaching that remain controversial. Today's world demands that learners are not simply linguistically but also interculturally competent. It has been argued that high levels of intercultural awareness can be achieved with the help of experiential lessons taught in a formal setting that focus on the exploration of self as a cultural being.In this study, three groups of the intermediate learners of German and Russian were invited to participate in a number of cultural lessons based on either culture box highlights or experiential activities. The pre-posttests measured changes in learners' cognitive, behavioral and affective measures of intercultural competence. Results revealed that experiential activities tend to better facilitate the development of learners' intercultural skills and attitudes. Students written responses to critical incidents were analyzed with the Developmental Model of Intercultural Sensitivity (Bennett, 1993) to assess changes in learners' perspectives and intercultural disposition over the course of the semester. Additionally, learners' experiences with foreign and local cultures were quantified and correlated with cognitive, behavioral and affective measures of intercultural competence. Results showed that not all measures of intercultural competence may be broadened by the individuals' firsthand experiences with other cultures. The relevance of one's previous experiences with `sub-cultures' (states, cities, towns, and communities), i.e. his `mobility' must also be acknowledged.

Since it was introduced in Forster and Davis (1984), masked priming has been widely adopted in the psycholinguistic research on visual word recognition, but there has been little consensus on its actual mechanisms, i.e. how it occurs and how it should be interpreted. This dissertation addresses two different interpretations of masked priming, one based on the Interactive Activation Model (McClelland & Rumelhart, 1981), in which priming is seen as a result of persisting activation from the prime, the other based on the Entry Opening Model (Forster & Davis, 1984), which sees priming as a savings effect. Five experiments are reported testing contrasting hypotheses about the role of prime duration and prime-target asynchrony (SOA) in masked priming using both identity and form priming. Overall, this dissertation lends support to the Entry Opening Model, demonstrating that masked priming is essentially a savings effect, and that as such, it is determined by the SOA, not the prime duration per se.

Through an English for Specific Purposes (ESP): Communication in Nursing online course, the present study examines the efficacy of synchronous voice-based and text-based chats as instructional and communicative modes in learning to use open questions for probing in therapeutic dialogues by non-native speaking (NNS) participants, students of a nursing college at a major university in the Philippines. The study draws on a plethora of research findings in online education, ESP online course designs, text-based vs. voice-based synchronous chats and their place in learning online, efficacy and application of text and voice-based communicative practices in online courses designed for NNS students, issues related to medical discourse, humanization, and patient-centeredness of communicative encounters (e.g., between a nurse/provider and a patient/client). The study examines the following questions: (1) which interactional mode - voice or text - provides for better learning of probing questions by NNS medical professionals through noticing of their use in therapeutic dialogues and situations typical for everyday healthcare-related communicative settings in an online course; (2) what evidence is there to suggest that the skill to use open questions for probing in role-plays of therapeutic dialogues by NNS medical professionals developed through text-based practices in an online course might transfer to their speech and vice versa; (3) which interactional mode - voice or text - is perceived by the online-course participants as more effective for learning to use probing questions in therapeutic dialogues and healthcare-related communicative encounters. The results of the analyses supported many of the hypotheses for both research conditions. More specifically, they supported the predicted efficacy of both forms of online instruction and communication - voice-based and text-based - in learning probing techniques by the online course participants; furthermore, a possibility of the two-way language-skill transfer modes - from text-to-speech and from speech-to-text - was suggested in learning second language online through application of synchronous chat sessions. Although more research is necessary in the above-mentioned areas of language learning in the context of online education, the research findings of the present research study are highly suggestive of effective implementation of voice-based and text-based synchronous chats in ESP online course designs for NNS speaking students.

This thesis examines the L2 acquisition and L1 attrition of aspectual properties in Spanish. Specifically, it investigates preterite versus imperfect distinctions and the ongoing value of the Spanish present tense among English-speaking L2 learners and long-term Spanish immigrants. In contrast to previous research which explains L2 learners’ difficulties as a result of either maturational constraints or morphosyntactic development, this study provides a supplementary explanation focusing on L1 transfer of the semantic patterns of tense morphemes. The study proceeds by comparing data from L2 learners with that of long-term Spanish immigrants. Unlike what is argued for L2 acquisition difficulties, the difficulties immigrants may have with tense and aspect cannot stem solely from impairment reasons. These immigrants acquired the L2 as adults. Therefore, to the extent that L2 learners share similar patterns of errors with adult immigrants, L2 speakers’ difficulties cannot be unequivocally linked to causes related to impairment. Instead, following a selectional approach to aspectual variation (De Swart, 1998), it is argued that transfer of the selectional patterns of tense morphemes offers a more encompassing explanation of the difficulties L2 speakers face with tense and aspect. Data collection involved two truth-value judgment tasks, two acceptability judgment tasks and two elicited production tasks. Twenty long-term immigrants, twenty English-speaking L2 learners of Spanish, and twenty native speakers of Spanish serving as control participants took part in the study. Results show incorrect activation of aspectual patterns by both experimental groups and similar patterns of difficulties in some of the conditions under investigation. I conclude that transfer from the other language offers a more adequate explanation of the difficulties L2 learners face

<p>This research used diary studies and interviews with five Japanese learners of English to investigate the different affective, cognitive and social factors that affected their learning of English in Cape Town between 2004 and 2005. The findings of this study corroborate arguments put forward by Gardner that factors such as learning goals, learning strategy, attitude, motivation, anxiety, self-confidence and cultural beliefs about communication affect the acquisition of a second language and correlate with one another.</p>

The study of clitic clusters and the restrictions that surface when two or more clitics are combined have long intrigued linguists and, as such, clitic phenomena are at the core of an ever-growing body of research in linguistic theory. However, three aspects remain largely unexplored when it comes to clitic cluster constraints, namely the evolution of these restrictions through time, the perception and processing of different clitic combinations, both acceptable and unacceptable, by native speakers and the acquisition of such combinations by non-native speakers. This dissertation, which focuses on 1st and 2nd person clitic clusters in Spanish, aims to shed new light on clitic phenomena with a new analysis and new data from all these perspectives. Specifically, I study the effects that case and marked features have on Spanish clitic combinations, both synchronically and diachronically. In addition, I explore the effects of clitic combination restrictions in language processing and analyze the learnability issues derived from such restrictions in three groups of speakers of Spanish as a second language whose L1s are English, French and Romanian, respectively. At a particular level, this dissertation is a study of clitic cluster constraints from different perspectives, both traditional and new, namely linguistic theory, diachrony, language processing and language acquisition. At a general level, it constitutes an attempt to explore the ways in which linguistic theory can guide applied research and, conversely, the ways in which experimental data may contribute to linguistic theory.

The study investigated similarities and differences between refusal strategies conducted by British native speakers of English (NSE) and Javanese learners of English (JLE). The data were elicited, using discourse completion tasks (DCT), from 20 NSE and 50 JLE. Comparative data concerning refusal strategies in Javanese were elicited from 35 native speakers of Javanese (NJ) to provide a baseline for investigating the extent to which differences between JLE and NSE could be explained by the influence of L1 pragmatics. The refusal strategies were classified based on modified refusal taxonomy by Beebe et al. (1990) and were analysed into sociopragmatic and pragmalinguistic strategies. Z test and Chi Square (χ2) were applied to test the statistical significance of differences between JLE and NSE usage. The study found that all three groups employed broadly similar sequential orders, frequencies of occurrences, and contents of both semantic formulae and adjuncts. Some differences were found, however, in which the strategies of the two Javanese groups (JLE and NJ) were more alike than either was to NSE. These findings suggest that distinctive JLE usages (i.e. different from NSE) are either due to the influence of L1 (negative pragmatic transfer) or simply deviation (idiosyncratic usage). The former occurred mainly in the utilization of politeness strategies by the Javanese groups. The salient elements of Javanese cultural values and their relation to the expression of politeness are discussed in some detail, and are shown to be reflected in the English of Javanese learners. The latter (deviations) appeared to arise from a conflict between JLE speakers’ notions of “correct” grammar and word meanings, on the one hand, and the pragmalinguistic demands of the interaction, on the other hand.

The present thesis investigates to what extent contemporary ELT textbooks include reading materials as well as what types of texts are being used and what reading strategies they seemingly promote. Additionally, the study analyzes whether there is a noticeable discrepancy in teaching materials designed for the vocational and university preparatory and considers whether the design of the current textbook is representative of the current view of reading as a teaching tool as reflected in official policy documents. Through the means of a content analysis of a total of six in use ELT textbooks, the study discovers that few ELT textbooks include a satisfactory amount of reading materials and that there is a significant discrepancy between teaching materials intended for the separate orientations of upper secondary school in Sweden. It is also discovered that the set of textbooks largely reflect the current view of language teaching. The study concludes that the current practice of language teaching is ill-suited to counter the development of declining reading literacy and suggests an alternative methodology in extensive reading.