The aim of this article is to show the importance of basing foreign language teaching pedagogy on a cognitive theory of learning. The article draws on John Anderson's theory of learning and is illustrated by two longitudinal studies. Learning is seen to involve two main stages :at the initial stage a procedural rule giving a specific form to a function is constructed from declarative knowledge from different sources using general problem-solving procedures ; a second phase entails the automatisation of the procedural rule and its gradual modification through processes of generalisation and discrimination. An analysis of classroom practice leads us next to re-focus the problem of instructed language learning on the compatibility between the aims of the teacher, the cognitive activity of the learner and his communicative performance and needs in the target language.

The present work concerns the use of past reference and the possible connection between verticalization and syntactic complexity in advanced Italian interlanguage in dialogues with Swedish university students. Although the NNSs' (nonnative speakers) have reached a certain syntactic complexity and refer to the past in a way similar to that of native speakers of the target language, their fluency of speech is less advanced. The students therefore recur to scaffolding and verticalize their information about past events, relying on the proficient interlocutor's interaction. It is proposed that the above mentioned discrepancy might be due to different language processing skills utilized. Native speakers have access to procedural knowledge that is required in quick speech, while the acquisitional stages seem to use knowledge that is stored in long-term memory, that is declarative knowledge. Through exposure to language the NNSs' access to on-line speech production becomes more rapid and the procedural knowledge increases. Consequently it is important to sort out different language skills when defining the advanced levels.

Verbal lexicon has key functions at textual level. Competence in second language - and specially narrative competence, with which we are dealing here - can be influenced by lack of verbal lexicon, by partial acquisition or idiosyncratic acquisition of it. A textual and conceptual approach of some narrative productions in French and Spanish as first and second languages (FLM, ELM, FLE and ELE) will allow us to compare both cases in these two languages in order to make clear how oral narratives are built up at propositional level (mainly, the explicit reference to processes, space and temporality) and at suprapropositional level (cohesion and coherence). Finally, we will study the influence of real oral input in the learners' oral productions.

The paper deals with the acquisition and use of marked orders in postbasic German learners of Italian, mainly in a functional and textual perspective. We consider that grammar (in the case in point, the domain of information structure rules) is affected both by general pragmatic principles and by language-specific rules that the learner has to learn together with the target language. A cross-sectional analysis and a short longitudinal sketch reveal an acquisitional sequence of marked orders beginning with presentative structures, going on with cleft sentences and, rather late, dislocations. Results are discussed with regard to the impact of different factors (general and language-specific information organisation principles, syntactic complexity, source language, text type, etc. ).