In vocabulary research there has been a shift from focusing on single words to considering multiword sequences, such as collocations. Despite the general consensus among language researchers that collocation is essential to effective language use in real-world communication, particularly oral communication, language-testing researchers have made…

The terms used to designate ordinary relational identities seem easy to learn and translate. However, these interpersonal identities reflect complex mental constructs that are very sensitive to the variables that interact in human communication, particularly cultural variation. This paper describes a pilot project developed at the University of…

The extent to which learners benefit from instruction may be largely dependent on their individual abilities. However, there is relatively little work on the interaction between instructional effectiveness in second language learning and learner individual factors. In this study, we investigated the relationship between instruction, individual…

Lieberman, Borovsky, Hatrak, and Mayberry (2015) used a modified version of the visual-world paradigm to examine the real-time processing of signs in American Sign Language. They examined the activation of phonological and semantic competitors in native signers and late-learning signers and concluded that their results provide evidence that the…

This study investigated conceptual representations changes in bilinguals. Participants were Indonesian-English bilinguals (dominant in Indonesian, with different levels of English proficiency) and a control group composed of English-dominant bilinguals. All completed a gender decision task, in which participants decided whether English words…

This study investigates the influence of the semantic heaviness of verbs (i.e., heavy or light verbs) and language proficiency on second language (L2) learners' use of constructional information in a sentence-sorting task and a corpus analysis. Previous studies employing a sentence-sorting task demonstrated that advanced L2 learners sorted English…

This Event Related Potentials (ERP) study investigates auditory processing of sentences with so-called code-switches in Russian learners of German. It has often been argued that switching between two languages results in extra processing cost, although it is not completely clear yet what exactly causes these costs. ERP presents a good method to…

Language acquisition is used for the process where a language is acquired as a result of natural and largely random exposure to language, whereas the term language learning refers to the exposure structured through language teaching. Children acquire language from 18 months to puberty. The child's grammar is semantically based. Children reflect…

Purpose: Most EFL textbooks suggest the use of vivid pictures and verbal explanations in teaching English prepositions. However, this word class appears in collocations, and rote-learning does not really help learners retain and use this word class successfully. Cognitive linguistics (CL) has implications for English language teaching as it rests…

The number of English learners continues to increase in the United States. Additionally, many English learners will experience language and learning disabilities. These students require specialized instruction by highly qualified educators. This article addresses the various cross-language strategies that can benefit English learners with…

This aim of this article is to contribute to the development of a socio-cultural model of emergent biliteracy that recognizes the dynamic interactions amongst two languages. The present field study took place in a French-German public Kindergarten class in Alsace, France, where students are in the initial process of learning to read in both…

The current study aims to investigate the discursive construction and navigation of agency in oral narratives of English learning by Chinese college English majors. Based on the theoretical framework integrating Bamberg et. al.'s theory of identity dilemma and Hallidayan systemic functional linguistics, the study has addressed two research…

This paper explores whether language typology plays any role in lexical availability and spelling accuracy in L2 English. Two groups of adult speakers were compared: a group of native speakers of a language typologically distant from English with a logographic writing system (Chinese; n = 13) vs. a group of native speakers of a language…

The current study investigated the distinction of L2 (second language) English article choice sensitivity in fifty-three L1-Korean L2-English learners in semantic contexts. In the context of English as a foreign language, the participants were divided into two groups based on grammatical ability as determined by their performance on a cloze test.…

The paper identifies the major problems of the Chinese-English dictionary in representing collocational information after an extensive survey of nine dictionaries popular among Chinese users. It is found that the Chinese-English dictionary only provides the collocation types of "v+n" and "v+n," but completely ignores those of…