This study explores whether English-dominant (ED) speakers and speakers of English as a foreign language (EFL) perceive the same degrees of formality in combinations of (in)formal greetings (Hi/Dear) and address forms (informal First Name/Ms. Last Name) with (in)formal nouns, verbs, and adjectives (Latinate/Germanic). It also explores which of…

Minority characteristic generic statements such as "ducks lay eggs" are judged to be generally true of the class, despite being true of a minority of cases, such as healthy female ducks of egg-laying age. Five studies explored the factors responsible for the acceptance of minority generic statements about biological kinds. Studies 1 and…

This research paper analyzes the extent to which Arabic-speaking EFL learners are aware of the English plural morphemes and whether they are able to recognize them in context. The study also investigates whether the participants' English proficiency level may play a role in their ability to recognize these morphemes. For the purpose of the study,…

This research conducted diagnostic assessment of problems in first-year undergraduates' English academic papers and tracked potential sources of the problems to the writing process and strategy use. Data collected include 339 term papers and interviews with 17 students. The samples were manually error tagged and marked against a detailed…

The purpose of this study is to examine the impact of parallel reading text (English and Arabic) on English as a Foreign language (EFL) Intermediate II level students? at Birzeit University in terms of reading comprehension, vocabulary retention, and sentence structure awareness. The sample for this study is 38 undergraduate students of the…

This article reports on a study conducted in Croatia on students' understanding of scientific words and representations, as well as everyday words used in chemistry teaching. A total of 82 undergraduate chemistry students and 36 pre-service chemistry teachers from the Faculty of Science, University of Split, were involved. Students' understanding…

Entropy is a central concept in thermodynamics, but has been found to be challenging to students due to its abstract nature and the fact that it is not part of students' everyday language. Interviews with three pairs of engineering students (N = 6) were conducted and video recorded regarding their interpretation and use of the entropy concept, one…

The following is a qualitative case study presenting three vignettes exploring the use of language play while microblogging during an academically sanctioned task. Ten students and one teacher used "Twitter" in an intensive, English as a second language advanced grammar course to practice writing sentences with complex grammatical…

Teaching grammar in a way that enables students to use grammatical structures correctly in their active use has always been one of the intricate tasks for most practitioners. This study compared the effectiveness of three instructional methods: games, dialogues practiced through role-play, and unfocused tasks for teaching grammar. Forty-eight…

Today it is necessary to approach environmental topics with students in an interdisciplinary manner to mitigate the environmental damages that the Earth is suffering. In this paper we report an action-research and innovation study aimed at sensitizing students with respect to the care and preservation of the environment through the writing of…

Designed to assess a reader's comprehension of items differing in contrastive vocal stress, this test consists of 64 items divided evenly between eight sentence types: declarative active, declarative passive, interrogative, and imperative, with each in a positive and negative form. The element of contrastive stress is placed on nouns functioning…