The study is aimed at exploring Master's students' sense-making of various second language (L2) texts and its correlation with interpretation depth and the students' intercultural competence. The significance of this research lies in the fact that it provides an insight on culture-specific issues challenging for advanced and proficient Ukrainian…

The present study aimed to catalogue and compare usage patterns of verb-particle constructions (VPCs) in Modern Standard Arabic and English by native and learner writers. Building upon an analysis of a multi-genre monolingual Arabic corpus, use of both Arabic and English VPCs was explored in a bilingual L1 (first language) Arabic L2 (second…

This study examined the oral language use and classroom involvement of 1,124 preschool children in the United States, focusing on three home languages: English, Spanish, and Burmese. Two-way ANOVA analysis revealed distinct patterns among the language groups. Burmese-speaking children were more likely to listen to teachers and engage in academic…

Recent communicative teaching approaches view learning English as a Foreign Language (EFL) as involving more than knowledge of grammar structures. Students are expected to develop communicative skills which allow them to interact inside and outside the language classroom. To this end, learning idioms plays a significant role because these…

It is common to have good declarative but poor procedural knowledge of a foreign language, especially for classroom learners. To study this gap in a constrained manner, we asked Chinese learners of English to repeat, correct and produce indirect speech. The indirect speech construction was selected in the present study because it is known to be a…

While metadiscourse use has been well-attended in second language (L2) writing research, relatively less effort has been made in documenting changing patterns of metadiscourse use among L2 writers. The present study addressed this gap by probing a diachronic change of interactive metadiscourse in research articles published in "English…

This dissertation investigates language-specific acoustic and aerodynamic phenomena in language contact situations. Whereas most work on second language and bilingual phonology has focused on individual consonants and vowels, this project examines patterns of coarticulation in the two languages of Spanish-English and French-English bilingual…

This work investigates the acquisition of Spanish dative alternation (DA) in the production of English-Spanish bilingual and Spanish monolingual children. We explore whether "a/para"-datives and dative clitic doubled (DCLD) structures are syntactically derived from one another or, whether they are different structures. We also examine…

Bilinguals have been shown to differ from monolinguals especially in the realization and interpretation of phenomena that operate at the syntax/discourse interface. Hungarian has a well-known interface structure--identificational focus--which has been widely studied in the theoretical literature but never with bilinguals. The present article fills…

Expression of motion shows systematic inter-typological variability between language types, particularly with respect to manner and path components of motion: speakers of satellite-framed languages (S-language; e.g. German) frequently conflate manner and path into a single clause, while verb-framed language speakers (V-language; e.g. Spanish)…

Children are known to be fast learners due to their neural plasticity. Learning a non-native language (L2) requires the mastering of new production patterns. In classroom settings, learners are not only exposed to the acoustic input, but also to the unfamiliar grapheme-phoneme correspondences of the L2 orthography. We tested how 9-10-year-old…

Grammar competition has been proposed as a model for second language (L2) acquisition. Variational Learning provides a framework within which to investigate the idea of grammar competition as the model requires a marriage of quantitative properties of the input with Universal Grammar. A diachronic variational model of grammar competition is…

Acquisition of oral English verb morphology presents difficulties for bilinguals, learners of EFL and English-speaking monolingual children with specific language impairment. This study aimed to identify challenging English verb inflections among sixth grade speakers of Arabic (N = 85) and Hebrew (N = 86) using an elicited oral narrative task, and…

The patterns of paragraph writing as commonly used in the international journal are deemed necessary to be studied by scholars of non-English background wishing to write an article for publication in the international journals. Scholars of non-English speaking background, according to a number of research reports on rhetoric contrastive, have a…

The present study adopts a corpus-driven perspective to an analysis of the 'current relevance' meaning, a central meaning of the present perfect, in general and textbook corpora. The term 'current relevance' refers to a meaning of the present perfect, in which a past action or event is shown to be connected with the present time in some ways. The…