This dissertation provides a formal and functional analysis of grammatical voice in Sasak, an Austronesian language spoken in Eastern Indonesia. The research addresses two primary questions, which are (1) how does Sasak clause structure and morphosyntax vary across dialects? and (2) what shapes speakers' syntactic production, namely grammatical…

Early elementary students are not typically introduced to science-specific disciplinary literacies -- the specific ways in which scientists use and interpret language -- even though authentic experiences with literacy strategies and tools used within the field may help incorporate learners into the scientific community of practice. The lack of…

This study aims to analyze the use of tense and aspect in academic writing in engineering with a major focus on the use of simple past and present perfect. In general, one of the most difficult items for Japanese EFL learners is the appropriate use of tense and aspect. The previous literature pointed out that ESL learners are often confused about…

The present study addresses a significant but neglected aspect of vocabulary teaching in general and teaching collocations, in particular, which is color term collocations. A significant number of idioms involve use color terms such as blue blood, black death, red tape, black sheep, and yellow press that are significant to study in the context of…

Purpose: Sarcasm is a specialized speech act in daily vocal communication usually characterized by unique prosodic features, but the role of voice quality in expressing sarcasm has not been explored much. The goal of this study is to explore the voice quality features of Mandarin sarcastic speech in comparison to sincere speech. Method: Fifteen…

Scholars have focused on codeswitching problems for more than 50 years and have different voices about using codeswitching in the EFL classroom. This study used mix method to explore the EFL teachers' and students' attitudes towards using codeswitching in their College English classroom and the differences between novice and experienced teachers…

The present study aimed to figure out whether Turkish EFL learners transfer their L1 Turkish pragmatic norms to their L2 English compliments and compliment responses. Six senior ELT students took part in the study, carried out at a state university in Turkey. An open role play adapted from Tran's study (2006) was used in English and Turkish to…

In a recent paper, Simpson and Dervin (2019a) offer a radical critique of the Council of Europe's "Reference Framework of Competences for Democratic Culture" (RFCDC). However, Simpson and Dervin's paper contains numerous factual errors, interpretative errors and category errors in its description of the RFCDC. We identify 12 such errors…

Today's scientific texts are complex and multimodal. Due to new technology, the number of images is increasing, as is their diversity and complexity. Interaction with complex texts and visualizations becomes a challenge. How can we help readers and learners achieve multimodal literacy? We use data from the audio description of a popular scientific…

Language variation in a context is influenced by various factors. While there has been some research regarding English language variation, there has not been much research pertaining to Chinese variation (Gao, 2017; Xu, 2015). In the present study, we examined different language usages among different social classes of Tianjin in China in order to…

This study attempts to reveal whether there is unintentional reverse transfer L2[right arrow]L1 (English-Spanish) in the oral L1 production of university learners in formal contexts. The languages used by learners influence each other, and this transfer may occur from the first to the second language ("direct transfer"), or from the…

The construct of awareness plays a pivotal role in several big debates in the field of second language acquisition. It lies at the heart of discussions about the (im)possibility of learning without awareness, or conversely, whether some degree of awareness is a requirement for learning to take place. In this study, I propose a research agenda to…

This paper presents results of a study investigating four teaching methods used to introduce Chinese characters to beginner learners of Chinese as a foreign language (CFL) in an Irish secondary school between September 2016 and October 2016. Approximately 98 learners aged 14-16 were divided into four groups and taught for two one-hour classes per…

This study is descriptive quantitative research by using a test to collect the data needed. Iraqi English as a foreign language (EFL) students face difficulties in differentiating between using prepositions correctly. This study has been performed in the Department of English at College of Education for Women, University of Baghdad, to diagnosis…

This corpus-based study aims to identify the interactional and interactive metadiscourse markers in terms of frequency in the abstract and discussion sections of research articles on linguistics, written in English by native, Egyptian, and Saudi researchers. To attain this aim, 60 research articles have been randomly compiled and analyzed…