In the past two decades, corpora have been proposed as valuable computer-assisted tools for teaching and learning academic writing in English at the university level. This article reports on an empirical study that sought to examine the effectiveness of direct corpus consultation in overcoming vocabulary errors in academic writing. This study is…

Writing is one of the most crucial skills for EFL students and also one of the most difficult to acquire. Many students face difficulties when it comes to writing in English. To address this challenge, this study examined whether or not combining inquiry-based learning with visual literacy could enhance EFL students' writing proficiency in four…

Lexical items that are encountered more frequently and in varying contexts have important effects on second language (L2) development because frequent and contextually diverse words are learned faster and become more entrenched in a learner's lexicon (Ellis 2002a, b). Despite evidence that L2 learners are generally exposed to non-native input,…

One of the most interesting studies on the role of L1 and contrastive analysis in vocabulary teaching is by Laufer and Girsai (2008). However, due to some methodological issues, their research findings are open to criticism and controversy. The current study aimed to replicate the research with a more rigorous design to re-investigate the…

Within higher education, it is often believed that the adoption of English-medium instruction (EMI) will provide domestic students with the language skills that will enable them to be more competitive in their future professional pursuits. However, research into language learning and EMI at the university level is very scarce. This study examined…

The present study aims to investigate the direct and indirect contributions of Korean EFL college students' L2 receptive and productive vocabulary knowledge to their L2 writing performances by using a structural equation modeling (SEM) analysis with a goal to explore the pathways of vocabulary knowledge to writing. Data from 178 students were…

Among the language skills, writing has been considered as the most difficult skill not only for native speakers, but for foreign language learners as well in the sense that one cannot achieve fluency and accuracy unless they become successful language users in terms of listening, speaking, and reading. This action research studied the effect of…

Bilingual child ability in two languages is become popular issue in the comparison of those two languages. In this paper, the Indonesian bilingual child has parent, school and course using English actively, then his environment using Bahasa Indonesia. This research was conducted to measure ability and difficulties faced by bilingual child in…

We examined reading proficiency, focusing on fluency, in 56 Russian-speaking language minority (LM) students and 56 native Hebrew-speaking (NH) peers. Fifth-grade students completed measures of Hebrew reading accuracy and fluency from word to text level as well as phonological awareness (PA), RAN and vocabulary. LM students read single words less…

This study builds on previous work exploring reading and listening lexical thresholds (Nation, 2006; Laufer & Ravenhorst-Kalovski, 2010; Schmitt, Jiang, & Grabe, 2011) in order to investigate productive vocabulary targets that mark successful entry-level undergraduate writing. Papers that passed the Effective Writing Test (EWT) were chosen…

Lexical errors are a determinant in gaining insight into vocabulary acquisition, vocabulary use and writing quality assessment. Lexical errors are very frequent in the written production of young EFL learners, but they decrease as learners gain proficiency. Misspellings are the most common category, but formal errors give way to semantic-based…

As integrated tasks become more common in assessing writing for academic purposes, it is necessary to investigate how test takers approach these tasks. The present study explores the processes of test takers undertaking reading-to-write tasks developed for a university English placement exam. Think-aloud protocols and interviews of…