Two experiments were conducted to determine whether explicit instruction focusing on metaphorical collocations would promote the incidental noticing of similar phrases by English learners during a subsequent reading task. Noticing was operationalized using the remember-know protocol and learning was measured on a fill-in-the-blanks test. In…

I provide an update on the state of the art of the research--the last one being Collentine (2003)--on the acquisition of the function of the subjunctive and mood selection, as well as the research's implications for pedagogy. The article considers what we currently know about the role of universal grammar, psycholinguistic perspectives on the…

Research on the acquisition of Spanish's two copulas, "ser" and "estar," provides an understanding of the interaction among syntax, semantics, pragmatics, morphology, and vocabulary during development (e.g., Geeslin, 2003a, 2003b; Gunterman, 1992; Ryan & Lafford, 1992). Recent research suggests that linguistic features in the surrounding discourse…

Foreign language (FL) education has been marked by a monolingual principle that has favoured "intralingual" methodologies. Bakhtin's view of language interillumination--that languages throw light on each other--challenges such language teaching practices radically. Using conversation analysis methods, this article examines transcripts of…

The present study investigates lexical inter- and intralingual influences in the oral production of 14 very advanced learners of French L3. Lexical deviances are divided into two main categories: formal influence and meaning-based influence. The results show that, as predicted with respect to advanced learners, meaning-based influence is the most…

Writing is one of the four skills in language learning and it should be paid more attention. In this regard, creating contexts which is value coherence in pragmatic level, and cohesion in semantic level is important. Knowledge about the discourse Markers (DMs), amongst other things, be used to improve writing skill. DMs are expression such as…

In recent years, L2 researchers from the sociocultural and cognitive linguistic perspectives have emphasized the importance of properly organized explicit and in-depth grammar instruction for second or foreign language learning. Such instruction is believed to lead learners to systematic understanding of the target features faster and more…

This study compares second-year Japanese university students' strategies to write kanji by hand with their strategies to produce the kanji characters on a computer, taking into account factors such as accuracy in writing, the amount of kanji used, the complexity of the kanji used, as well as how the characters used compare with the sequence…

There is evidence that semantic prosody, a novel linguistic theme, should attract much attention in ESL/EFL (English as a second/foreign language) vocabulary learning and teaching. Research suggests that inappropriate word choice arising from ignorance of semantic prosody is common among ESL/EFL learners (Wei, 2006; Xiao & McEnery, 2006). This…

This study examines evidence for the hypothesis (e.g., Muñoz, 2006) that an early starting age is not necessarily more beneficial to the successful learning of L2 inflectional morphology in strictly formal instructional settings. The present author investigated the quantitative and qualitative differences in the production and reception of 5…

This paper reports on part of the first phase of a longitudinal project investigating the development of academic language in English as the Language of Teaching and Learning (LoLT) by Foundation phase learners in two different educational contexts. In the first context, the learners were all English additional language (EAL) learners taught by…

This article aims to establish the effects of masked priming by translation equivalents in Spanish-English bilinguals with a high-intermediate level of proficiency in their second language. Its findings serve as evidence to support the hypothesis that semantic representations mediate the mental association among non-cognates from a speaker's first…

This study aims at providing a comprehensive account of the types of errors produced by Arab students of English as a second language based on a multiple classificatory taxonomy developed for this purpose. The corpus providing the database for the study consists of three parts: (i) short tape-recorded interviews, (ii) translated sentences and…

This study investigates how categorial (word class) semantics influences cross-linguistic interactions when reading in L2. Previous homograph studies paid little attention to the possible influence of different word classes in the stimulus material on cross-linguistic activation. The present study examines the word recognition performance of…

There is growing interest in language barriers in health care (LBHC)--interest, that is, in how the quality of health care service delivery might be compromised when patients and health care providers do not share the same first language. This article discusses LBHC as an emerging research area that provides valuable opportunities for researchers…