Issues in Applied Linguistics

This paper investigates NS perceptions of the coherence and comprehensibility of NNS writing and talk which lacks or misuses grammatical cohesive devices. NS readers of NNS texts with missing cohesive devices assumed coherence and actually imposed coherence on the text by adding grammatical cohesive devices which were missing in the original making implicit semantic relationships explicit. Knowledge of narrative structure and of the world assisted the readers to recover these implicit semantic relationships. NSs also ass tuned coherence and worked to find relationships in the text even where there was potential miscommunication caused by using the wrong cohesive device or by failure to establish a referent. Communication was not usually impaired when the underlying semantic relationship was clear from the discourse context orfrom background knowledge, although NSs had to work hard to understand some texts. Miscomprehension resulted when underlying semantic relationships were not retrievable from other sources.

This paper is a follow-up study on the issue of L2 inner speech as it manifests in mental rehearsal among advanced L2 learners. The purpose of the study was to find out to what extent advanced L2 learners experience inner speech as mental rehearsal and to identify some of the characteristics and functions of such inner speech. Results show that advanced L2 learners experience inner speech in the second language to a great extent and that the frequency of L2 inner speech increases with proficiency. Advanced L2 learners, however, report using less inner speech than lower level learners for certain aspects of rehearsal, such as planning texts, self- and other-evaluation, storage and retrieval, self-instruction, and language play. It is argued that inner speech in the L2 is a developmental phenomenon associated with spontaneous rehearsal in the early stages ofL2 acquisition and with verbal thinking in the more advanced stages.

In the literature on the acquisition of English articles based on Huebner's (1983) model, Thomas (1989) suggested that data on the use of articles in the generic context is critical in deciding whether L2 learners associate the definite article with thefeature Specific Referent, [+SRJ, or Assumed Known to the Hearer, [+HK], as suggested by earlier studies (Huebner, 1983; Master, 1987; Thomas, 1989). This paper discusses the results ofa cross- sectional study, undertaken in 1996, which examined the phenomenon of referentiality in the acquisition of English as a foreign language by francophone English major college students in Burkina Faso. The researchfocused on the acquisition ofthe article system. The study involved 177 undergraduate and graduate students at the University of Ouagadougou with at least 7 years of English instruction. A cloze test of 107 items was used to collect the data. Demographic information was also collected using a 16-item questionnaire. The result does not give support to Thomas ' (1989) view that L2 learners associate the definite article with [+HK] context since the L3 leaners in this study associate the zero article with [+HK] feature.