Formulaic sequences are found to be processed faster than their matched novel phrases in previous studies. Given the variety of formulaic types, few studies have compared processing on different types of formulaic sequences. The present study explored the processing among idioms, speech formulae and written formulae. It has been found that in…

The emergence of empirical approaches to L2 pronunciation research and teaching is a powerful "fourth wave" in the history of the field. Authored by two leading proponents of evidence-based instruction, this volume surveys both foundational and cutting-edge empirical work and pinpoints its ramifications for pedagogy. The authors begin by…

Curricula are one of the most widely used educational inputs, yet few are developed and evaluated scientifically with a dearth of programs targeting academic language. This manuscript describes an iterative approach to the development of a tiered academic language curriculum supplement for prekindergarten (pre-K) and kindergarten (K) students. A…

The maze task is a psycholinguistic experimental procedure that measures real-time incremental sentence processing. The task has recently been tested as a language learning tool with promising results. Therefore, the present study examines the merits of a contextualized version of this task: the story maze. The findings are consistent with…

Children with limited language expression and comprehension abilities are at risk for academic failure, particularly in literacy acquisition. In addition, these children often have poor social outcomes, including difficulty forming friendships, social exclusion, withdrawal, and victimization. The academic and social difficulties that these…

Courtroom interpreting requires a high level of accuracy due to the strategic use of language in such an institutional setting. It is generally agreed among interpreting scholars that quality interpreting in court should accurately relay both propositional content and illocutionary force of the original utterances. This high standard of accuracy…

Reading comprehension is an essential academic skill (Nash & Snowling, 2006;National Reading Panel, National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, 2000).Yet, among students in the eighth grade, approximately 64% of all students and 91% of students with disabilities do not read at proficient levels (National Center for Education…

Conversational agents that draw on the framework of academically productive talk (APT) have been lately shown to be effective in helping learners sustain productive forms of peer dialogue in diverse learning settings. Yet, literature suggests that more research is required on how learners respond to and benefit from such flexible agents in order…

The field of Instructed Second Language Acquisition (ISLA) has expressed interest in pursuing a research agenda that expands the current heritage language (HL) strand of research to investigate how this heterogeneous population re-learns their family language, and how this experience differs from that of second language (L2) learners. This…

Comprehension includes interpreting sentences in terms of aspectual categories such as processes ("Harry climbed") and culminations ("Harry reached the top"). Adding a verbal modifier such as "for many years" to a culmination coerces its interpretation from one to many culminations. Previous studies have found that coercion increases lexical…

Children with autism spectrum disorder present with a variety of social communication deficits such as atypicalities in social gaze and verbal and non-verbal communication delays as well as perceptuo-motor deficits like motor incoordination and dyspraxia. In this study, we had the unique opportunity to study praxis performance in deaf children…

Although politeness markers are frequently used in written and spoken communication, pragmatic studies have not sufficiently explored the instruction of such markers to English as a foreign language (EFL) learners who lack sufficient opportunity to communicate with native speakers to acquire them in the context of use. Ignoring politeness as a…

Multiple-choice formats remain a popular design for assessing listening comprehension, yet no consensus has been reached on how multiple-choice formats should be employed. Some researchers argue that test takers must be provided with a preview of the items prior to the input (Buck, 1995; Sherman, 1997); others argue that a preview may decrease the…

This paper argues for the incorporation of bottom-up activities for English as a foreign language (EFL) listening. It discusses theoretical concepts and pedagogic options for addressing bottom-up aural processing in the EFL classroom as well as how and why teachers may wish to include such activities in lessons. This discussion is augmented by a…

To locate the underlying cause of biological gender errors of oral English pronouns by proficient Chinese-English learners, two self-paced reading experiments were conducted to explore whether the reading time for each "he" or "she" that matched its antecedent was shorter than that in the corresponding mismatch situation, as…