This survey investigates to what degree the Chinese learners know about the discrepancies between Chinese and English thought patterns and their possible effects on English writing. Eighty-one students from North China Electric Power University participate in the survey. Qualitative and quantities approaches, involving the adoption of both…

Culture-loaded words and expressions are loaded with specific national cultural information and indicate deep national culture. They are the direct and indirect reflection of national culture in the structure of words and expressions. The improper use of culture-loaded words often leads to misunderstanding in cross-cultural communication. However,…

The current study sets out to investigate collocational knowledge for a set of 13 English amplifiers among native and nonnative speakers of English, by providing a partial replication of one of the projects reported on in Granger (1998). The project combines both phraseological and distributional approaches to research into formulaic language to…

This paper reports on an action research study using iPads during the teaching of Chinese idioms to heritage learners. A class of 12 second-year Chinese learners were engaged in a self-generated learning process focused on learning abstract and concrete idioms using iPads. Students' short-term and long-term learning was measured; feedback from a…

This paper examines whether and to what extent data-driven learning (DDL) activities can improve the lexico-grammatical use of abstract nouns in L2 writing. A topic-based corpus was compiled to develop concordance learning activities, and 40 Chinese students majoring in English were randomly assigned to a control group or an experimental group. At…

Learners frequently experience phonologically inconsistent input, such as exposure to multiple accents. Yet, little is known about the consequences of phonological inconsistency for language learning. The current study examines vocabulary acquisition with different degrees of phonological inconsistency, ranging from no inconsistency (e.g., both…

This study addresses the interrelation among coherence, substitution, and reference by non-English major Chinese students. The author collected data through student questionnaires. Participants included 30 non-English major Chinese undergraduate students. The findings of this study suggested that the similarities and differences were confirmed…

The basic objective of the present study is to investigate EFL Saudi prospective teachers' ability to translate culture-bound expressions and their translation strategy awareness. The study attempted to answer two questions: (1) To what extent are EFL Saudi prospective teachers able to translate culture-bound expressions? (2) To what extent are…