This article explores how leading textbook authors select and instruct vocabulary in beginner and intermediate Chinese textbooks used in the United States. Leading textbook authors were approached; subsequently; four authors completed interviews with pre-designed questions. Grounded theory methodology was used to analyse the interviews, and their…

Although measures of lexical complexity are well established for printed texts, there is currently no equivalent work for videos. This study, therefore, aims to investigate whether existing lexical complexity measures can be extended to predict second language (L2) learners' judgment of video difficulty. Using a corpus of 320 instructional videos,…

Choosing relevant vocabulary to teach in ESL composition courses can be a difficult task for instructors. They often rely on intuition rather than empirical methods for vocabulary selection. This paper presents two case studies where corpora were used either to select vocabulary items for instruction or to scaffold student learning of vocabulary…

This study examines the linguistic complexity of Spanish as a second language (L2) in learners' essays across proficiency levels at two timelines of a composition class during a college semester. Data comes from 22 L2 learners of Spanish enrolled in two sections of a third-year composition class at the college level, who were assigned nine…

Vocabulary knowledge plays a primary role in the ability to communicate in a second/foreign language. The present study examined how different input or output modalities combined with audiovisual input provided by TED-ED videos could foster vocabulary learning. In doing so, some written tasks and exercises were used to facilitate the process.…

The purposes of this study were to: (1) build an appropriate model for predicting primary schoolchildren's English vocabulary knowledge; (2) examine whether the developed model applies to new data; and (3) discuss how to apply the model to L2 vocabulary instruction. More specifically, the study asked third- and fourth-grade public primary school…

The study investigated the effect of marginal glossing and frequency of occurrence on the incidental learning of six aspects of vocabulary knowledge through reading in the second language (L2) Chinese. Participants were 30 intermediate L2 Chinese learners in an American public university. The MACOVA tests indicated that the treatment group who…

This empirical study attempts to examine the use of cohesive devices in the written discourse of EFL undergraduate students and seeks to find how the use of incorrect and repetitive cohesive ties affects the effectiveness of academic writing. Halliday and Hasan's (1976) list of cohesive devices was employed to analyze the cohesion in the…

Using a natural language processing tool, this study examined participant discourse in personalized learning schools to better understand what personalized learning looks like in practice. Term frequency-inverse document frequency (tf-idf) was used to identify the significant words and potential emergent themes for 134 interview transcripts. This…

This study investigates the effect of morphological treatment on morphological awareness and reading comprehension skill in a foreign language teaching. Experimental design was used in this study which was conducted with 74 freshmen who are studying at Translation and Interpreting Department. Following the Oxford Quick Placement Test and Nation's…

This study analyses the effects of data-driven learning (DDL) on the phraseology used by 223 English students at an Italian university. The students studied the genre of opinion survey reports through paper-based and hands-on exploration of a reference corpus. They then wrote their own report and a learner corpus of these texts was compiled. A…

Previous studies have shown that intentional learning through explicit instruction is effective for the acquisition of collocations in a second language (L2) (e.g. Peters, 2014, 2015), but relatively little is known about the effectiveness of incidental approaches for the acquisition of L2 collocations. The present study examined the incidental…

Intervention exercises have tended to be limited to restricted controlled output in studies related to second language (L2) learners' acquisition of written academic formulaic sequences (FSs), while measurement of use has been drawn from freer output (AlHassan & Wood, 2015; Jones & Haywood, 2004; Peters & Pauwels, 2015). The current…

This research sought to determine the level of productive vocabulary knowledge of the students grouped according to type of school and curriculum year level; performance of the students in the vocabulary test categorized according to frequency levels; their breadth of productive vocabulary knowledge related to type of school enrolled in,…

This study investigates the vocabulary knowledge, beliefs, and practices of adult English as a second language (ESL) instructors. Thirty participants responded to an online survey designed to elicit information regarding their knowledge and beliefs; approaches to assessment; vocabulary teaching techniques and strategies; instructional practices…