In this brief forum article, I draw from the disciplinary orientation of linguistic anthropology to discuss how a collection of linguistic and semiotic resources gets "enregistered" as the "language" for specific communicative activities. Enregisterment is an ongoing social and ideological process whereby a semiotic corpus gets…

Research has shown that bilingual individuals might encode autobiographical memories in either their first language (L1) or their second language (L2), depending on the language spoken at the time of the event. Although language mixing is a common occurrence among multilingual speakers, previous studies have largely overlooked mixed…

Technological advances have made the ability to translate no longer exclusively belong to humans. Today, machine translation has turned into a tool with superior performance to convert text between languages without the need for human intervention. One of the translation research foci is the studies of causative translation, especially from…

Knowledge of derivational affixes makes an important contribution to second language learners' success when reading. Yet while the effects of some learner variables (L2 proficiency, L1 background) have been investigated, there has been little research addressing the effects of varying characteristics of affixes on their acquisition. The goal of…

Research has identified a particularly useful lexicogrammatical resource that language learners need in order to develop academic literacy, that of grammatical metaphor (GM). GM enables the wordy expression characteristic of informal, spoken discourses to be reorganized into the cohesive and abstracted expression valued in academic texts. Although…

In this article, we highlight the important achievements of the editors and contributors in this special issue. We argue that this collection of studies on individual differences (IDs) advances the field in terms of theoretical diversification, methodological improvement, and pedagogical innovation. We also contend that a renewed interest in ID…

Despite the widely used word lists in English as a second or foreign language learning, few attempts have been made to create an academic spoken collocation list, which holds significant potential for enhancing learners' aural and oral abilities in academic communication. This study created a list of the most frequently used and pedagogically…

Autonomous learning strategies, supported by diverse media, have become essential tools for enhancing vocabulary acquisition. Among these, TED Talks stand out due to their accessibility, topical diversity, and authentic linguistic input. Although previous research has highlighted the educational value of TED Talks, limited attention has been given…

Learning vocabulary is a central but yet complex aspect of learning a language. Hence, researchers stress the importance of facilitating vocabulary development via a structured approach to target words and recycling. While teaching materials have the potential to provide this structure to all students in a classroom, few studies have investigated…

Machine translation (MT) practice and activity development in education are possible when students with diverse backgrounds contribute to helping define how MT can best be used for language learning. This study employed a questionnaire based on an adapted version of the technology acceptance model (TAM) to gain perspective on the perceptions,…

While evidence has accumulated to support the argument of shared computational mechanisms underlying language comprehension between humans and large language models (LLMs), few studies have examined this argument beyond native-speaker populations. This study examines whether and how alignment between LLMs and human brains captures the homogeneity…

While synonymy has been extensively studied, few studies have examined the ditransitive construction of synonyms across English varieties. Informed by construction grammar viewing pattern-meaning combinations as constructions and using a 1.9-billion-word corpus of texts from 20 countries, this article analyzes four different ways of expressing…

This study aims to evaluate the extent to which Taylor Swift's song lyrics incorporate vocabulary from the Oxford 3000 and 5000 word lists and to categorize these words based on CEFR levels. The goal is to narrow down the vast selection of songs available to EFL learners, focusing on the most essential vocabulary to enhance their learning…

This study aims to provide a comprehensive profile of collocational competence, a key component of one's overall linguistic competence. For the maximum of ecological validity, we elicited naturalistic oral/written production data from 84 Chinese intermediate EFL learners and performed a 2×2 fashion of analysis on their performance in each of the…

Syntactic complexity has long been used to gauge language learners' performance, proficiency, and development, offering language teachers valid recommendations for syllabus design and materials development. Progress in syntactic complexity research foreshadows the imperative of measuring syntactic features at a high level of granularity, which…