Skip to main content
eScholarship
Open Access Publications from the University of California

Issues in Applied Linguistics

Issues in Applied Linguistics bannerUCLA

About

ial is a refereed journal managed by scholars in the field of applied linguistics. Our aim is to publish outstanding research from faculty, independent researchers, and graduate students in the broad areas of second language acquisition, language socialization, language processing, language assessment, language pedagogy, language policy, making use of the following research methodologies (but not limited to): discourse analysis, conversation analysis, critical discourse analysis, critical race theory, and psychophysiology. ial publishes articles, book reviews, and interviews with notable scholars.

Articles

Tense-aspect Marking by L2 Learners of English and Native English Speakers: Inherent Lexical Aspect and Unitary vs. Repeated Situation Types

In second language acquisition studies, it has been observed that learners ' use of verb morphology is influenced by inherent lexical aspect. The purpose of this study is to go beyond inherent lexical aspect and in vestigate how the aspectual distinction between 'unitary and'repeated'situationtypes(Smith,1997)influenceslearners'andnativespeakers' useof verb morphology. The data ofthis study consist ofaudio-taped interviews ofeight subjects: three native English speakers, andfive learners whose native language is Mandarin Chinese. The results reveal that in relation to inherent lexical aspect, both learners and native speakers demonstrate similar skewed distributions of verb morphology in their speech. However, in relation to unitary vs. repeatedsituation types, learners and native speakers demonstrate different patterns in their use of progressive morphology: Native speakers tend to use progressive morphologyfor describing repeated situations, while learners use it to describe the ongoing, continuous nature of unitary situations. The findings suggest that learners' acquisitionalpatternsmaynotbedeterminedexclusivelybynativeinput. Theprototype account proposed by Shirai & Andersen (1995) provides a feasible explanation for the findings of this study.

The Organization of Second Language Classroom Repair

This paper presents an analysis of the repair mechanism in second language classroom talk. More specifically, the current paper focuses on how co-participants (i.e., the teacher and the learners) carry out repair operations on the trouble source produced by the learner in the second language instructed talk-in-interaction. The present findings show that participation frameworks (i.e., types of activities) play an important role in constructing repair sequences in the instructional context. When learners engage in role-playing activities with one another, a wide variety of repair sequences are manifested, such as self-initiated and self-completed, self-initiated and other-completed, and other-initiated and other- completed repair sequences.The collaborative nature of repair sequences is also manifested in learner role-playing activities, in which self-initiation of the trouble source by the learner is collaboratively completed withco-participants in the form of word search and try-marking. Other-initiated and other-completed repair in learner role-playing activities is manifested in the form of cluing, which is accompanied by the sequence of teacher's initiation, learner's response, and teacher's evaluation (i.e., IRE sequence). Teacher-fronted activities, on the other hand, in which a teacher asks a question to learner(s), are mainly characterized by other-initiated and other-completed repair structures in the form of IRE sequence and unmodulated"no." Furthermore, a close examination of learners' responses to the teacher's repair (e.g., recast) reveals the key role of activity types operating in L2 instructional discourse.