This paper proposes a personalized teaching strategy based on Total Physical Response (TPR) to acquire new words. TPR combines target language items with semantically corresponding gestures conducive to learners understanding and memorizing them by repeatedly executing commands from their teachers. One limitation of TPR is that it does not allow…

This research was prompted by the phenomenon of binge-watching Korean television series (K-drama) amongst college students in Taiwan, where English as a foreign language (EFL) is a required course. The researcher-teacher sought to create a pedagogically useful list of the frequent semantically non-compositional multi-word expressions (MWEs) for…

This article reports a study examining whether foreign language (FL) word learning can be improved with reduction in cognitive load. Cognitive load theory has received substantial supports in various fields of learning but never in FL word learning. Due to the defined poverty in exposure to the FL, hence deprived cognitive pre-requisites for…

Lexical competence is considered as an important indicator of language proficiency. While learning vocabulary, learners need to remember various aspects of knowledge about the word (e.g., meaning, form and use). Many vocabulary learning strategies have been proposed to help learners consolidate vocabulary knowledge. Among them, grouping words…

Near-Synonyms and Similar-Looking (NSSL) words can create confusion for English as Foreign Language Learners as a result of a type of lexical error that often occurs when they confuse similar-looking words that are near synonyms to have the same meaning. Particularly, this may occur if the similar-looking words have the same translated meaning.…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to report on one high school English-language-learner's (ELL) breadth and depth of vocabulary as he communicated with his teacher through e-mail across geographic boundaries for over 18 months. Design/methodology/approach: The authors began by separating 358 e-mails into three time periods (first beginning,…

Task-based language learning using the benefits of online computer-assisted language learning (CALL) can be effective for rapid vocabulary expansion, especially when target vocabulary has been pre-arranged into bilingual categories under simpler, common Semantic Field Keywords. Results and satisfaction levels for both Chinese English majors and…