It is now generally accepted that second language (L2) acquisition can take place as a result of learning how to communicate in the L2. It is less clear, however, whether the kind of communication that occurs in a classroom is sufficient to ensure development of full target language competence. This article examines the extent to which the opportunities for communication in an English as a Second Language (ESL) classroom result in the acquisition of one particular illocutionary act—requests. A total of 410 requests produced by two child learners over 15–21 months were examined. The results suggest that although considerable development took place over this period, both learners failed to develop either the full range of request types or a broad linguistic repertoire for performing those types that they did acquire. The learners also failed to develop the sociolinguistic competence needed to vary their choice of request to take account of different addressees. One explanation for these results is that although the classroom context fostered interpersonal and expressive needs in the two learners, it did not provide the conditions for real sociolinguistic needs.

Working memory capacity refers to the ability to store and process information simultaneously in real time and has been shown to correlate highly with first language (L1) reading skill. This study examines the sensitivity of second language (L2) working memory capacity to differences in reading skill among advanced L2 learners. The index of working memory capacity used was the reading span test (Daneman & Carpenter, 1980). Subjects with larger working memory capacities scored higher on measures of reading skill, in contrast with the lack of strong correlations between measures of passive short-term storage (memory for strings of random words or digits) and the same reading measures. This result is consistent with an interpretation of the reading span test as an index of working memory capacity, in which capacity is defined functionally in terms of a trade-off between active processing and storage. Issues involved in investigating working memory capacity are discussed and the role of capacity limitations in models of L2 comprehension is considered.

Learnability theory is an investigation of the cognitive principles that determine developmental stages and eventual success in language acquistion. The focus of this study is on the learning principles within learnability theory that account for developmental stages in adult second language acquisition. Three learning principles, cumulative development, continuity, and conservatism, predict a complex sequence of development in the acquisition of relative clauses and wh-questions in English. They predict an early no-prep stage, gradual development through two additional stages of greater embeddedness of the extracted noun, stranded before nonstranded prepositional structures, and the likelihood of resumption at early stages. These predictions are confirmed by data from previous studies and are further investigated in this study by means of elicited production data collected from 35 Japanese learners of English and 17 native speakers of English. The data show the expected stages of development and confirm the relevance of learning principles to a comprehensive theory of learnability in second language acquisition (SLA).

A frequently discussed hypothesis concerning the source of cross-linguistic communication difficulty in written discourse is conflicting organizational patterns (Kaplan, 1966, 1987). Extending the argument to oral discourse, Young (1982) argued that spoken English discourse produced by Chinese speakers evidenced a discourse-level topic-comment structure that native English speakers find difficult to follow. However, Tyler (1988) argued that the perception of incoherence might better be understood as the cumulative result of interacting miscues at the discourse level, that is, miscues in syntactic incorporation, lexical discourse markers, tense/aspect, and lexical The study reported here aims at testing these competing hypotheses. One hundred fifteen subjects rated four versions of the Chinese-produced English discourse presented in Young's study for comprehensibility. Results indicated that the effect of discourse miscues on comprehensibility was highly significant (F = 70, p <.0001). However, there was no significant effect for order of ideas (F = .47, p <.49).