The correct use of connectives has great influence on language learners’ writing proficiency, while errors of connectives are common in foreign learners’ interlanguages. This study examines the types of errors that occur in native English-speaking learners’ Chinese writing, the possible causes for the errors, and the learners’ consequent learning strategies. The present research adopted corpora investigation, questionnaire survey, and focus-group interviews to examine the error types, causes of identified errors, and related learning strategies. Data analysis indicated that: (...) the main error types made by native English-speaking learners from high to low are misuse, overuse, mismatch, misplacement, and underuse of connectives; causes related to intralingual transfer greatly contributes to the presence of errors; and memory, social, and cognitive strategies were the most preferred, followed by metacognitive and compensation strategies, and then by effective strategies which were the least preferred. These findings showed that different strategies can be employed to cope with different errors in writing. The study further suggests that teachers and educators need to help native English-speaking learners find strategies that work best for them in terms of learning Chinese connectives. (shrink)

Inspired by the idea that emotion(s) and motion(s) constitute profoundly intertwined dimensions of physical and cultural embodiment reflected in language, this volume comprises nineteen contributions presenting exploratory and applicative accounts of (e)motion(s) situated across a range of topical research areas.

This paper describes some aspects of the mutual impact of languages in a bilingual situation where one language is dominant and the other subordinate. The influence of the two languages on each other is effected through the user, namely, the bilingual. When the bilingual is in the process of learning the second language, his mother tongue influences his mastery of the former, resulting in the process that has been variously referred to as mother tongue interference, approximation, or (...) interlanguage. However, the influence does not take place in one direction only; in other words, it is not only a case of the mother tongue influencing the second language. If the second language is a dominant language its impact on the bilingual's first language can have far reaching implications. (shrink)

This volume brings together for the first time a collection of studies that investigates how multilingual speakers construct emotions in their talk as a joint discursive practice. The contributions draw on the well established, converging traditions of conversation analysis, discursive psychology, and membership categorization analysis together with recent work on interactional storytelling, stylization, and multimodal analysis. By adopting a discursive approach to emotion in multilingual talk, the volume breaks with the dominant view of emotions as cognitive and intra-psychological phenomena and (...) their study through self-report. Through detailed analyses of original recorded data, the chapters examine how participants produce emotion-implicative actions, identities, stances, and morality through their interactional work in ordinary face-to-face conversation, computer-mediated interaction, institutional talk in medical, educational, and broadcast media settings, and in research interviews. The volume addresses itself to students and researchers interested in language and emotion, multilingual speakers and settings, pragmatics, and discourse analysis. (shrink)