University of Hawai'i at M a anoaThis study investigates the avoidance of English phrasal verbs by Chinese learners. Six groups of Chinese learners (intermediate and advanced; a total of 70) took one of 3 tests (multiple-choice, translation, or recall), which included literal and figurative phrasal verbs, while 15 native speakers took the multiple-choice test. The results show that 3 factors (proficiency level, phrasalverb type, and test type) affect learners' avoidance of phrasal verbs. The authors speculate that the differences between first and second languages and the semantic difficulty of phrasal verbs may be reasons for the learners' avoidance. Incorporating the findings of 3 previous studies, this study claims that learners' phrasal-verb avoidance behavior is a manifestation of interlanguage development.

No abstract

The effects of data-gathering methods on pragmatic data have been well documented, yet an inquiry into the interactive effects of assessment tasks with pragmatic instruction has received scant attention. This study investigated the interaction between two assessment tasks (e-mail and phone) and two types of pragmatic instruction (explicit and implicit). Forty-nine Spanish learners of English engaged in these two tasks as pre-and posttests. The explicit group received 12 hours of metapragmatic information on head acts and hedges in suggestions while the implicit group was the recipient of recast and input enhancement activities. The results showed that postinstructional improvement of the explicit condition was significantly more than that of the implicit condition in the phone task, although improvements of these two conditions were on par in the e-mail task. This task-induced variability might have been causedby an interaction between the feature of the two types of knowledge (i.e., monitoring capability) and an access to the knowledge bases (i.e., the role of attention to appropriateness and accuracy) in the two tasks.

This study examined the applicability of recasting to the acquisition of pragmatics. English in learning eight pragmalinguistic conventions of request. Both the pragmatic re-Head Acts (core requesting utterances), whereas the latter did not. Discourse completion tests showed that the pragmatic recast group performed better than the control group on measures of both pragmatic appropriateness and grammatical accuracy, with effect sizes of appropriateness and grammatical accuracy. The study highlighted the ways recasts can be implemented at the pragmatic level and demonstrated that pragmalinguistic recasting is a sound pedagogical option.

No abstract