The purpose of the present study is to examine the effect of instruction on pragmatic development in second language (L2) writing. Wishnoff (1999) investigated the effect of instruction on L2 pragmatic acquisition in writing with a particular focus on the functions of hedges, such as modal verbs, modal adverbs, and lexical verbs. The result shows that there are two main effects and an interactional effect. This research particularly focuses on the development of modal words which function as aggravating and mitigating the argument in academic writing. The participants for this research were undergraduate students who were taking an ESL writing course as a requirement. In the immediate-post test, students in the experimental group, who received explicit instruction on modality, use significantly outperformed the students in the control group, who received zero treatment. However, the durability of the instructional effect and the effect of different types of instruction (explicit/implicit/zero treatment) still remain to be explored in further studies.

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The canonical Subject-Verb order with intransitive verbs is sometimes regarded as ungrammatical and avoided in production by L2 learners of English (Hirakawa, 1995; Kellerman, 1978; Yip, 1995). Assuming that the phenomenon was limited to verbs that alternate in transitivity, Kellerman (1979) suggested a pragmatic account based on McCawley's (1978) theory of conversational implicature pertinent to such verbs. His account, however, not only has theoretical problems but also fails to capture the phenomenon in its entirety in the face of new data that show it affects non-alternating verbs as well. Despite the apparent resemblance, the phenomenon cannot be squarely equated with the extensively researched Avoidance, either (cf. Kamimoto, et al, 1992; Kleinmann, 1977; Schachter, 1974; Seliger, 1989). This paper argues that the phenomenon in question is a reflection of learning problems inherent in the non-native acquisition of English intransitive verbs and should be investigated in relation to other L2 phenomena such as the well-known overpassivization of unaccusatives (Balcom, 1997; Hirakawa, 1995; Oshita, 2000b; Yip 1995; Zobl, 1989).

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This paper examines the relationship between the acquisition of subject-orientation (SO) and long-distance (LD) binding of the Japanese anaphor zibun (“self”) by English-speaking children acquiring Japanese as a second language (L2). These factors address the learnability problem of L2 acquisition. Zibun allows LD binding as well as local binding, which means that zibun does not always take its antecedent within its relevant local domain. Another property of zibun is that it is a subject-oriented anaphor, which requires the antecedent of zibun to be a subject. In contrast, the English anaphoric forms, such as himself do not allow LD binding and are not subject-oriented. Thus, if the initial state of an L2 learner's Japanese is influenced by his Ll (English), and he has access only to positive evidence, he will acquire LD binding in zibun with little difficulty, but he will have trouble acquiring [+SO] in zibun , because some form of evidence is needed to tell him that [-SO] is not allowed for zibun . This paper addresses this issue based on longitudinally collected L2 data from 12 English native-speaking children living in Japan. The results show that the L2 Japanese learners resemble L1 learners of Japanese in their acquisition of zibun despite the fact that they have already acquired English as an L1. One possible explanation for the absence of L1 influence is that the L2 learners fail to associate the L2 form zibun with corresponding reflexives in the L1 because they exhibit very different grammatical behaviors. Consequently, L2 learners follow the same acquisition path that L1 learners do.

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