Based on an analysis of the speech of long-termémigrés of German and Dutch origin, the present investigation discusses to what extent hesitation patterns in language attrition may be the result of the creation of an interlanguage system, on the one hand, or of language-internal attrition patterns on the other. We compare speech samples elicited by a film retelling task from Germanémigrés in Canada (n = 52) and the Netherlands (n = 50) and from Dutchémigrés in Canada (n = 45) to retellings produced by predominantly monolingual control groups in Germany (n = 53) and the Netherlands (n = 45). Findings show that the attriting groups overuse empty pauses, repetitions, and retractions, whereas the distribution of filled pauses appears to conform more closely to the second language norm. An investigation of the location at which disfluency markers appear within the sentence suggests that they are indicators of difficulties that the attriters experience largely in the context of lexical retrieval.Keywords disfluency in bilinguals; hesitation markers/hesitations; first language attrition; crosslinguistic effects; L2 influence on L1; bilingual development The research reported here was supported by NWO grant 275-70-005 and an internationalization grant from The Young Academy of the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences (DJA-KNAW). We are grateful to Esther de Leeuw, Barbara Köpke, Chris McCully, Aneta Pavlenko, and the anonymous reviewers for their careful reading and critical comments on earlier versions. We feel that the article has been substantially improved as a result of these excellent suggestions. Any remaining errors and shortcomings are ours.

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English for Academic Purposes (EAP) at Dalarna University, Sweden Ahern (2008) writes that the ability to remove the constraints of time and place is a major hallmark of computer-mediated communication (CMC) but that it also supports real-time synchronous forms of interaction. He suggests that "synchronous technologies create a strong network bond because each of the participants must be present at the same time in order to communicate" (Ahern, 2008, p. 99). Kenning (2010, p. 6), expanding on the work of Ciekanski and Chanier (2008, p. 173) would have us view the synchrony and asynchrony as a matter of degree where "face-to-face offers greater simultaneity than audio networks, audio than textchat and text chat than a shared word processor." At Dalarna University, Sweden, we offer modes of communication at many points of Kenning's continuum with a web-based learning platform, including asynchronous document exchange and collaborative writing tools, e-mail, recorded lectures in various formats, live streamed lectures with the possibility of text questions to the lecturer in real time, textchat, and our audiovisual seminars in Marratech™ or Adobe Connect™. Our online students live in many countries around the world and come to our online learning spaces from profoundly different physical realities, so the synchronous seminar is a shared experience that is quite separate from the physical environment in which the students find themselves.Many of our net-based English for Academic Purposes (EAP) students experience that their limited English language proficiency, compounded by technical difficulties and the constraints of the online spaces available, will sometimes cause problems in synchronous seminars. On the other hand, the rich environment of Marratech™, the desktop videoconferencing system used, offers multiple modes of communication (see Figure 1). The aim of this study is to examine the use of the multiple modes available in the seminar tool Marratech to support communication by students and teachers in a synchronous online learning environment. We describe the communication problems experienced in this kind of education and the compensatory strategies

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