Social and cognitive aspects of SLA: the case of English agreements and disagreements

Abstract

This is a pragmatic acquisition study which focuses on changes in learners’ agreements and disagreements in an ELF (English as lingua franca) discourse setting. The study takes a sociocognitive perspective, investigating both social and cognitive facets of the language learning process, specifically subject positioning, attention to input, pragmatic performance and their interrelationship. Data for the study were collected longitudinally from four participants throughout one academic year; the corpus consists of authentic academic discussions, stimulated recalls, interviews and participants’ diaries. Results show that the three elements – attention to input, subject positioning and language ..