In language teaching, emphasis is usually placed on grammatical competence rather than metaphorical competence to improve a learner's proficiency in the target language. Research has shown that figurative language poses a problem for second language learners whether it is in their ability to interpret, process, or produce metaphors. This affects…

As the knowledge that students have to learn becomes more specialized and complex in secondary schools, the language that constructs such knowledge also becomes more technical, dense, abstract, and complex, patterning in ways that enable content experts to engage in specialized social and semiotic practices. In order to effectively engage with the…

This paper adopts an automated frequency-driven approach to identify frequently-used word combinations (i.e., "lexical bundles") in academic writing. Lexical bundles retrieved from one corpus of published academic texts and two corpora of student academic writing (one L1, the other L2), were investigated both quantitatively and qualitatively.…

By means of a phraseological identification method, this study provides a general description of the use of conventional sequences (CSs) in interviews at four different levels of spoken L2 French as well as in interviews with native speakers. Use of conventional sequences is studied with regard to overall quantity, category distribution and type…

Two eye-tracking experiments in the Visual World paradigm compared how monolingual Russian (Experiment 1) and heritage Russian-English bilingual (Experiment 2) listeners process contrastiveness online in Russian. Materials were color adjective-noun phrases embedded into the split-constituent construction Krasnuju polozite zvezdovku..."Red put…

This paper sets out to show: (1) Teachers of English to young learners need to support their learners' general cognitive development and learning along with language learning; (2) The use of stories has a very important role in teaching English to young learners (TEYL); (3) The use of stories and books can provide scaffolding for our young…

P. Maguire, B. Devereux, F. Costello, and A. Cater discussed the Gagne and Shoben (1997) CARIN theory of conceptual combination and, after presenting a sample drawn from the British National Corpus and comparing the two corpora, concluded that the Gagne and Shoben corpus is too small and unrepresentative. They then discussed the mathematical model…

The study reported here compares two linguistically informed hypotheses on agrammatic sentence production, the TPH [Friedmann, N., & Grodzinsky, Y. (1997). "Tense and agreement in agrammatic production: Pruning the syntactic tree." "Brain and Language," 56, 397-425.] and the DOP [Bastiaanse, R., & van Zonneveld, R. (2005). "Sentence production…

Using textual analysis and interviews with student writers, this study aims to provide an insight into second language students' use of direct quotations in their MA theses by comparing direct quotations in high-rated and low-rated Master's theses, and by exploring student writers' own motivations to quote directly from sources. The corpus…

This article discusses challenges involved in contrastive discourse analysis that emerged while carrying out a follow-up study into a Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) program in Spain. Reversing the focus on English of much contrastive rhetoric work, the study investigates the effect of second-language-English on…

In language learning, infants are faced with the challenge of decomposing continuous speech into relevant units, such as syntactic clauses and words. Within the framework of prosodic bootstrapping, behavioral studies suggest infants approach this segmentation problem by relying on prosodic information, especially on acoustically marked…

Two sentence processing experiments on a dative NP ambiguity in Korean demonstrate effects of phrase length on overt and implicit prosody. Both experiments controlled non-prosodic length factors by using long versus short proper names that occurred before the syntactically critical material. Experiment 1 found that long phrases induce different…

This study investigated first language (L1) influence on the acquisition of second language (L2) collocations using a framework based on Kroll and Stewart (1994) and Jiang (2000), by comparing the performance on a phrase-acceptability judgment task among native speakers of English, Japanese English as a second language (ESL) users, and Japanese…

The results of a self-paced reading study with German second language (L2) learners of Dutch showed that noun animacy affected the learners' on-line commitments when comprehending relative clauses in their L2. Earlier research has found that German L2 learners of Dutch do not show an on-line preference for subject-object word order in temporarily…

This study investigates the role of transfer from the stronger language by focusing on the interpretation of definite articles in Spanish and English by Spanish heritage speakers (i.e., minority language-speaking bilinguals) residing in the U.S., where English is the majority language. Spanish plural NPs with definite articles can express generic…