Motivated by the conflicting views regarding the use of the dictionary in translation tests and examinations this study was intended to verify the dictionary-free vs dictionary-based translation hypotheses. The subjects were 135 Arabic-speaking male and female EFL third-year university students. A group consisting of 62 students translated a text…

Previous analyses of the Spanish deictic verbs "venir" "to come", "ir" "to go", traer "to bring" and "llevar" "to take" have drawn upon Fillmore's (1975) series of lectures on deixis in noting that speakers of Spanish forbid the use of the verbs "venir" and…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the categories of preposition errors made by EFL learners of elementary and intermediate proficiency levels by comparing the rate of preposition errors (addition, omission, substitution) to their total preposition uses in their essays, and by comparing the overall preposition usage of learners of both…

The current study investigated the possibility that language switches could be relatively automatically triggered by context. "Single-word switches," in which bilinguals switched languages on a single word in midsentence and then immediately switched back, were contrasted with more complete "whole-language switches," in which…

This study investigates the psychological effect of a wrong question with wrong items on answering to the next question in a test of structure. Forty students selected through stratified random sampling are given 15 questions of a standardized test namely a TOEFL structure test in which questions number 7 and number 11 are wrong and their answers…

The aim of the present study is to compare the writing products of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) university students using accuracy and grammatical complexity as measures. It also aims at examining the development of the morphological, syntactic, lexical, spelling, and punctuation errors committed by these learners when writing in English.…

Based on Selinker's hypothesis of five psycholinguistic processes shaping interlanguage (1972), the paper focuses attention on the Russian L2-learners' overreliance on the L1 as the main factor hindering their development. The research problem is, therefore, the high incidence of L1 transfer in the spoken and written English language output of…

This exploratory study analyzes the digital literacy practices that resulted from learner-learner interactions within a virtual environment when collaboratively reading eighteen Spanish poems via a digital annotation tool over a four-week period in a college-level Hispanic literature course. Using an ecological theoretical perspective and…

This article examines the effect of phonological context (singleton vs. clustered consonants) on full phoneme segmentation in Hebrew first language (L1) and in English second language (L2) among typically reading adults (TR) and adults with reading disability (RD) (n = 30 per group), using quantitative analysis and a fine-grained analysis of…

This study sought to investigate the attitudes of Saudi EFL students towards corrective feedback (henceforth CF) on classroom oral errors. The subjects were 3200 (1223 male and 1977 female) students enrolled in an intensive English language programme in the preparatory year at the University of Ha'il. A questionnaire was the main instrument. This…

The present study assessed intra- and cross-lingual neighborhood effects, using both a generalized lexical decision task and an analysis of a large-scale bilingual eye-tracking corpus (Cop, Dirix, Drieghe, & Duyck, 2016). Using new neighborhood density and frequency measures, the general lexical decision task yielded an inhibitory…

This study investigates the use of the Spanish subjunctive in bilingual children with and without specific language impairments (SLI). Using an elicitation task, we examine: (i) the potential of the subjunctive as a grammatical marker of SLI in Spanish-English bilingual children, (ii) the extent to which degree of bilingualism affects performance,…

While there is a plethora of research on pronunciation problems of EFL learners with different L1 backgrounds, published empirical studies on syllabification errors of Iraqi Kurdish EFL learners are scarce. Therefore, to contribute to this line of research, the present study set out to investigate difficulties of this group of learners in the…

Recent research has shown that speakers are sensitive to non-contrastive phonetic detail present in nonnative speech (e.g. Escudero et al. 2012; Wilson et al. 2014). Difficulties in interpreting and implementing unfamiliar phonetic variation can lead nonnative speakers to modify second language forms by vowel epenthesis and other changes. These…

Feedback, or information given to learners regarding their performance, is found to facilitate second language (L2) learning. Research also suggests that the timing of feedback (whether it is provided immediately or after a delay) may affect learning. The purpose of the present study was to identify the optimal feedback timing for L2 vocabulary…