Learners frequently encounter challenges in accurately utilizing near-synonyms in the English language. This investigation explored the similarities and differences among four near-synonymous verbs: "attempt, endeavor, strive," and "try." The analysis encompassed their prevalence across diverse genres, formality levels,…

This article describes how a class dedicated to supporting language needs in concurrent science courses developed complex grammatical literacy with an emphasis on a functional understanding of language for technicality, precision, and persuasion. The success of the curriculum was predicated on three factors: the grammatical content selection and…

For English as a Second Language (ESL) students or English Language Learners (ELLs), the use of various adverbial clauses was summarized and illustrated of comparison, concession, condition, degree, manner, place, proportion, purpose, reason (or cause), result, and time, including the non-finite clauses, some prepositions, and prepositional…

Expressing emotions in a narrative requires a high degree of narrators' involvement in and reflection of personal experiences. An array of complex emotions is reflected in the narrators' use of a wide range of language and paralanguage tools when they share their feelings with their audience. This study attempted to investigate how female…

This study intended to explore the different types of phraseological units in IELTS academic writing task 2 and probe into the IELTS candidates' perceptions of phraseological competence. To this end, a corpus entailing 100 essays (26,423 words) written for IELTS writing task 2 was scrutinized, through which phraseological units were extracted and…

English speaking accuracy is one of the most important aspects of Business English. While most studies are conducted to improve English speaking accuracy, they neglect phrasal semantics. This present study involves 30 participants from Phu Em Company. The study employs a mixed-methods design in which the quantitative approach helps quantify the…

This study examined structural priming during online second language (L2) comprehension. In two self-paced reading experiments, 64 intermediate to advanced Chinese learners of English as a foreign language read coordinated noun phrases where the conjuncts had either the same structure or different structures. Experiment 1 showed that the second…

This study assessed the effect of adjectives and noun premodifiers on L2 noun phrase comprehension and error types among English Language Learners. We also examined the correlation between L2 noun phrase comprehension and L2 reading comprehension, as well as the contribution of L2 noun phrase comprehension to L2 reading comprehension. One hundred…

This longitudinal mixed-methods study tracked the informal language contact and phrasal verb knowledge of 21 Chinese foundation program students in the United Kingdom (UK) during the 2019-2020 academic year through three rounds of data collection. Because of the disruption due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the study was able to capture the impact of a…

The aim of this study is to shed light on the learnability regarding usages of three English articles ("a," "the" and zero) among Chinese EFL learners. To this end, three tasks were administered in a pool of 107 participants to examine the extent to which learners can accurately use articles across different semantic contexts…

Little is known about how nonnative speakers process novel language patterns in the input they encounter. The present study examines whether nonnatives develop a sensitivity to novel binomials and their ordering preference from context. Thirty-nine nonnative speakers of English (L1 Arabic) read three short stories seeded with existing binomials…

This study explored how visual input enhancement impacts caption-reading behaviors, the acquisition of English collocations, and the recall of onscreen captions. The participants comprised 53 Korean undergraduate students at a high-intermediate level of English proficiency. They were assigned to either a baseline or an enhancement group. The…

This study investigated L1 Chinese learners' acquisition of the English "Noun + Relative Clause (N + RC)" based on Structural Priming (SP)(Bock,1986; Bock & Griffin, 2000) and Lexical Residual Activation (LRA)(Cleland, 2003). It was hypothesized that, based on SP, when L1 Chinese learners were primed by the English "N +…

The aim of this study is to investigate how L2 learners develop their ways of expressing compliments in L2 as a result of a virtual exchange. Although compliments play an important role in the discourse of second language (L2) classrooms studies exploring production of this speech act among L2 learners are limited. This study explores how 18…

The Conceptual Metaphor Theory (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980) started a new approach to viewing metaphors in languages. Traditionally, metaphor is considered as one of the rhetorical devices. Conceptual metaphor, however, is an approach for us to understand abstract notions in terms of relatively concrete concepts. The HEART metaphor in Chinese…