This research creates an empirically derived, pedagogically useful list of formulaic sequences for academic speech and writing, comparable with the Academic Word List (Coxhead 2000), called the Academic Formulas List (AFL). The AFL includes formulaic sequences identified as (i) frequent recurrent patterns in corpora of written and spoken language,…

Lexical items, because they are language specific forms are undoubtedly one of the most difficult tasks in learning a second language. Phrasal verbs perhaps further exacerbate this difficult task since the meaning of already known verbs changes drastically when combined with different particles. Hence, facilitating the learning of these commonly…

Previous studies have demonstrated the efficacy of the Text Structure Strategy for improving text recall. The strategy emphasizes the identification of text structure for encoding and recalling information. Traditionally, the efficacy of this strategy has been measured through free recall. The present study examined whether recall and eye-movement…

The web is playing a central role in distance education. The word "usability" is usually synonymous with functionality of the system for the user. Also, usability of a website is defined as something that can be used by a specific group of people to carry out specific objectives in an effective way, with efficiency and satisfaction.…

Bilingual children sometimes produce constructions influenced by their other language (cross-linguistic transfer). Transfer can often be predicted by the existence of overlapping and ambiguous constructions in both languages. In this paper, we investigate whether cross-linguistic transfer occurs when overlapping constructions exist, but there are…

Two experiments investigate whether native speakers of French can use a noun's phonological ending to retrieve its gender and that of a gender-marked element. In Experiment 1, participants performed a gender decision task on the noun's gender-marked determiner for auditorily presented nouns. Noun endings with high predictive values were selected.…

What does mass-count syntax contribute to the interpretation of noun phrases (NPs), and how much of NP meaning is contributed by lexical items alone? Many have argued that count syntax specifies reference to countable individuals (e.g., "cats") while mass syntax specifies reference to unindividuated entities (e.g., "water"). We evaluated this…

Mandarin Chinese allows pervasive ellipsis of noun arguments (NPs) in discourse, which casts doubt concerning child learners' use of syntax in verb learning. This study investigated whether Mandarin learning children would nonetheless extend verb meanings based on the number of NPs in sentences. Forty-one Mandarin-speaking two- and three-year-olds…

It is generally accepted that formulaic sequences like "take the bull by the horns" serve an important function in discourse and are widespread in language. It is also generally believed that these sequences are processed more efficiently because single memorized units, even though they are composed of a sequence of individual words, can be…

We conducted a large-scale corpus analysis indicating that pronominal object relative clauses are significantly more frequent than pronominal subject relative clauses when the embedded pronoun is personal. This difference was reversed when impersonal pronouns constituted the embedded noun phrase. This pattern of distribution provides a suitable…

This study claims that Arab ESL students writing in English transfer L1 rhetorical modes of text organization into their English compositions. Fifty academic research papers were analysed in terms of the transition words and cohesive devices used, on the assumption that differences at the level of these language forms reflect differences at the…

Since the late 1980s, collocations have received increasing attention in applied linguistics, especially language teaching, as is evidenced by the many publications on the topic. These works fall roughly into two lines of research (a) those focusing on the identification and use of collocations (Benson, 1989; Hunston, 2002; Hunston & Francis,…

This study attempts comprehensively to investigate the effect of form versus meaning-focused tasks on the development of collocations among Iranian Intermediate EFL learners. To this end, 65 students of Mashhad High schools in Iran were selected as the participants. A general language proficiency test of Nelson (book 2, Intermediate 200A) was used…

The present study investigates whether three types of instruction (Focus on Meaning, Focus on FormS and Focus on Form instruction) have differential effects on the acquisition of the Spanish present subjunctive in complement/noun clauses. It seeks to establish whether "dictogloss", one of the proactive Focus on Form techniques, enhances the…

This paper examines the hypothesis that grammatical function reanalyses in simple sentences should not be treated as phrase structure revisions, but rather as increased costs in "linking" an argument from a syntactic to a semantic representation. To this end, we investigated whether subject-object reanalyses in German verb-final sentences can be…