Knowledge of vocabulary is essential for learners of any language, and unfortunately, it has become clear recently the learners of English in a variety of contexts have not scored well on vocabulary tests. Low scores are problematic for language use and success in general, but they cause particular problems when it comes to the vocabulary needed…

This paper presents IdiomsTube (https://www.idiomstube.com), the first-ever computer-assisted language learning tool for facilitating the learning of English idiomatic expressions from YouTube videos. The web-based tool is designed to automatically (1) assess the speech rate and lexical difficulty level of any learner-chosen English-captioned…

Currently, a relatively large number of spoken and written conventionalized expressions have been collected, catalogued, and systematized. In language pedagogy, a clear implication is that teaching grammar and vocabulary is likely to be more complicated than working with syntactic rules and single-word items. Old and new insights associated with…

This article examines the creation of dictionaries for endangered languages (ELs). Though each dictionary is uniquely prepared for its users, all dictionaries should be based on sound principles of vocabulary learning, including the importance of lexical chunks, as emphasised by Michael Lewis in his "Lexical Approach." Many of the…

This article reports on a language learning system and a program designed to help students with academic vocabulary in the New Zealand university computer science department. The system is a learner-friendly corpus-based tool that allows students to look up lexico-grammatical patterns of a given word in academic writing. The program, based on a…

This literature review aims to analyze previous studies that address the incidental learning of vocabulary in second language acquisition. The articles included in this literature review look into the understanding of vocabulary learning through incidental means, the relationship of reading and incidental vocabulary learning, and the strategies…

This article overviews research on second language vocabulary instruction with a specific focus on semantic and thematic vocabulary-clustering types. The theoretical benefits associated with both the semantic and thematic approaches, as well as the potential problems associated with them, are discussed. The conclusion drawn is that reinforcing the…

One of the questions facing language instructors is how direct vocabulary instruction should be. Much recent research into vocabulary acquisition and studies of learning strategies strongly indicates that the explicit vocabulary learning vs. implicit vocabulary learning issue is not a dichotomy, but rather a continuum (Hunt and Belgar, 2005; Lee…

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the talking-pen device called the Mimic Me, an educational technology product of a large English conversation school in Japan, as an educational learning tool. The product will be reviewed in terms of its developmental appropriateness for the target audience based on current research. Although the Mimic Me…

It is suggested that a dictionary of English lexical phrases would be a valuable resource for learners of English as a Second Language. This form of collocation differs from ordinary collocations or idioms in that it is associated with particular discourse functions. In addition, most lexical phrases are in a form that allows interchangeable…