Demonstratives form a vital part of the English system of noun reference, but compared to other forms of reference such as articles and pronouns, their acquisition by second language learners has been researched relatively little. Using the Givenness Hierarchy (Gundel et al. 1993. Language 69. 274–307) as a theoretical backdrop for discussing the research on native English speakers’ use of demonstratives, this review explains the unique position that demonstratives hold as part of the reference system of English. The review then covers the relatively small body of research concerning English language learners’ (ELLs) acquisition and use of demonstratives, mainly in written expository essays and oral narratives. It also illustrates how ELLs would benefit from being taught the discourse uses of demonstratives early in their language education, a topic that is not currently addressed sufficiently in many English‐as‐a‐second‐language textbooks.
The most succinct summary of the applied linguistics and teaching career of Elaine Tarone (1945– ) is the title of one of her early books:
Focus on the Language Learner
. Her research and teaching career has focused on second language (L2) learners as social beings in a variety of contexts and has emphasized the effects of those contexts on both the learners' use of language and the manners in which they learn it. She is one of the leading theorists of variationist second language acquisition (SLA), which has as its fundamental premise that the form of second language learners' utterances can vary dramatically depending on the learners' perceptions of social contextual variables such as the interlocutor, task, or topic. In a variationist perspective of SLA, variability in a learner's interlanguage (IL) (e.g.,
I study grammars
vs.
I study grammar
) is not viewed as “noise” in the researcher's data or necessarily as errors for a teacher to correct; instead, variability is considered to be a potential source of new language forms appearing in the learner's IL and an indicator of transition in the language development process.
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