This article reports on a case study that explores the views of four EFL program administrators of a university located in central China about the hiring and workplace situations of foreign English teachers. It was found that the administrators as a whole buy into the conventional pro-nativeness ideology with regard to hiring foreign English…

Although a number of interlanguage studies on apologies have been conducted, there has been no study of apologies among Thai EFL learners that differentiates between learners with high and low levels of exposure to the target language. This study, differentiating between learners with high and low levels of exposure to the target language,…

While more Chinese students are going abroad to persue their further academic study, how to help them improve academic writing competence has received wide attention. Modality, as one of the complex areas of English grammar, reflects the writer's attitude and is extremely important in academic written discourse. Therefore, it is necessary to…

Significant variation exists in how native speakers respond to word association tasks and challenges the usage of nativelikeness as a benchmark to gauge second language (L2) performance. However, the influence of word class and trials of elicitation is not sufficiently addressed in previous work. With controlled stimuli from multiple word classes,…

Breadth and depth of vocabulary knowledge have been studied from many different perspectives, but the related literature lacks serious studies dealing with their effects on vocabulary profiles of EFL learners. In this paper, with an aim to fill this gap, the relative effects of breadth and depth of vocabulary knowledge on L2 vocabulary profiles…

Pragmatic competence plays a very significant role in cross-cultural communication. In Chinese high school, many English teachers focus more on lexical and syntactic aspects of English. The aspect of pragmatics, however, is relatively neglected by high school English teachers. The aim of this research is to investigate pragmatic transfer in…

The purpose of the present study was to compare the speech act of offering advice as realized by Iranian EFL learners and English native speakers. The study, more specifically, attempted to find out whether there was any pragmatic transfer from Persian (L1) among Iranian EFL learners while offering advice in English. It also examined whether…

The utilization of English recurrent word combinations--lexical bundles--play a fundamental role in academic prose (Karabacak & Qin, 2013). There has been highly limited research about comparing Turkish non-native and native English writers' use of lexical bundles in academic prose in terms of frequency, structure and functions of lexical…

Recent studies in corpus linguistics have revealed apparent inconsistencies between the prescriptive grammar presented in EFL textbooks and the type of grammar used in the speech of native speakers. Such variations and learning gaps deprive EFL learners of the actual use of English and delay their oral/aural developmental processes. The focus of…

The purpose of this study is to explore any possible difference among the verb types chosen in articles written in English by the non-natives and natives. In so doing, Halliday's Systemic Functional Grammar (1994) was employed. 80 published articles from the medical sciences field of study were chosen from among which 40 were written by native…

This research was conducted to investigate how frequently Turkish advanced learners of English use the logical connector "thus" in their academic prose and to investigate whether it was overused, underused or misused semantically in comparison to English native speakers. The data were collected from three corpora; Corpus of Contemporary…

This study investigated the production of discourse markers by non-native speakers of English and their occurrences in their spoken English by comparing them with those used in native speakers' spoken discourse. Because discourse markers (DMs) are significant items in spoken discourse of native speakers, a study about the use of DMs by nonnative…

Assessing speaking skills is regarded as a complex and hard process compared with the other language skills. Considering the idiosyncratic characteristics of EFL learners, oral proficiency assessment issue becomes even more important. Keeping this situation in mind, judgements and reliability of raters need to be consistent with each other. This…

Pragmatic comprehension can be ideally developed through contact with target language speakers. This contact can be provided in English as Foreign Language contexts through telecollaboration. To test the actual effect of telecollaboration on the development of pragmatic comprehension, 30 Iranian undergraduates of English as a Foreign Language…

This paper reported findings on a contrastive analysis of epistemic expressions in argumentative essays between NS and NNS Chinese L2 writers. Based on an examination of a NS corpus and a NNS learner corpus across four proficiency levels, the study shows there is great similarity in the total number of epistemic devices used per thousand words…