Bilingual children's total vocabulary in each of their languages is often smaller than that of monolinguals. In their seminal study, Bialystok et al. (2010. 'Receptive vocabulary differences in monolingual and bilingual children.' "Bilingualism: Language and Cognition" 13 (4): 525-531) divided children's vocabulary into 'home' and…

Many candidates undertaking high-stakes English language proficiency tests for academic enrolment do not achieve the results they need for reasons including linguistic unreadiness, test unpreparedness, illness, an unfavourable configuration of tasks, or administrative and marking errors. Owing to the importance of meeting goals or out of a belief…

Multi-word expressions are formulaic language universals with arbitrary and idiosyncratic collocations. Their usage and mastery are required of learners of a second language in achieving naturalness. However, despite the importance of multi-word expressions to mastering a second language, their syntactic architecture and colligational…

This article draws on data from a British Council-funded project which aimed both to compare global early English language learning (EELL) pedagogic practices in 2020 with those in 2010 and to investigate current EELL teaching and learning in primary schools. The project had an explicit focus on classroom language practice, that is, the languages…

This study aims to extend statistical learning (SL) research to multilinguals and provide an insight into what could facilitate word segmentation. We studied how the number of cues available in the input as well as the number of languages spoken influence SL and word segmentation. We used two SL tasks: one involving the tracking of transitional…

This study investigates whether there are different first-language-second-language (L1-L2) dependency resolutions by focusing on less-studied crosslinguistic variances in L2 acquisition of Chinese, a null-subject language, by speakers of English, a non-null-subject language. The overt subject pronoun of a Chinese main clause has free orientation…

Despite the extensive research on bilingual development, our understanding of how lexical competition unfolds in the bilingual mind remains limited. Previous studies have predominantly focused on crosslinguistic competition, neglecting the examination of the competition process within each language and the influence of diverse bilingual…

This study aims to compare the opinions of optional and compulsory preparatory class students about learning English and the target culture. Furthermore, students' reasons to learn English are examined in terms of independent variables (gender, going abroad and status of prep class). In the present study, data are gathered through a questionnaire…

This study investigates the immediate and sustained effects of a pre-departure study abroad training on the oral production of L2 Chinese formulaic language across a range of social and transactional interactions. Eighteen upper-intermediate learners of Chinese were assigned to either an instructed or non-instructed group to determine the efficacy…

The importance of input on language learning cannot be overstated. One method of providing input to learners at a level that is appropriate for them is called extensive reading, in which learners read an abundance of texts. In practice, for learners of English as a second or foreign language, these texts are often books that have been written and…

This study examines the effects of corpus use on learning L2 collocations. The primary aim of this study was to investigate how the information extracted from corpus data helped learners memorize and output collocations. The effects of corpus use were examined by comparing the effects of dictionary use. 55 intermediate EFL learners from a…

The present study explores the effects of structured input and traditional instruction on the acquisition of English causative passive forms using online measurements (eye-tracking). Previous empirical research investigating the effects of processing instruction through offline measurements (sentence and discourse) has overall shown positive…

Word knowledge and the speed of word processing in monolingual children and adults are influenced by word properties, such as the age of acquisition (AoA), imageability, and frequency. Understanding how different properties of words contribute to the ease of processing by bilingual children is a critical step for establishing models of childhood…

While most empirical studies have investigated the improvement of learners' L2 spoken proficiency via speaking-related interventions, the present study examined the same topic through a different modality: listening. Ninety-five first-year tertiary-level students of English as a second language (ESL) in Hong Kong participated in this three-month…

Despite substantial scholarship relating to word structure (Anderson, 2018), for English affixes the relationship between productivity, genre, and second language (L2) learning remains unclear. Analysis of the existing literature reveals that deadjectival noun suffixes (i.e., nouns derived from adjectives such as "appropriacy" or…