This study investigates the pragmatic development of the refusal strategies to the four different eliciting types (1 request, 1 suggestion, 1 invitation, and 1 offer) by Chinese English major students with low-intermediate language proficiency. The data was collected through written discourse completion tasks, and coded based on the modified…

The debate on how to understand such expressions of multiplication entailing "times" as "n times more than" and "increase (by) n times" has been on and off in China since the 1980s. A review of literature seems to suggest that despite early-stage divergence in understanding, there is a general consensus among the…

The concept of semantic prosody has attracted great research interest in language teaching. Identifying learners' perception of semantic prosody and collocation may be beneficial to vocabulary teaching. This study analyzes two pairs of synonyms in English writings of Chinese students and English native speakers based on the ICNALE corpus. The…

Culture-loaded words and expressions are loaded with specific national cultural information and indicate deep national culture. They are the direct and indirect reflection of national culture in the structure of words and expressions. The improper use of culture-loaded words often leads to misunderstanding in cross-cultural communication. However,…

The purpose of this study was to investigate Turkish EFL learners' ability in composing cohesive texts in their first language and in English as their foreign language, and to examine whether there are similarities between lexical reiteration cohesive devices they employ in composing cohesive texts both in Turkish and in English. The study was…

The present study aimed to explore how tolerant of ambiguity Iranian EFL learners at university level are and if gender plays a role in this regard. To this end, upon filling in the revised SLTAS scale of ambiguity tolerance 194 male and female Iranian teacher trainees were assigned to three ambiguity tolerance groups; namely, high, moderate and…

The current study is an attempt to investigate whether any statistically significant relationship existed between Iranian EFL learners' ambiguity tolerance (AT) and their reading strategy use. To this end, three instruments of Survey of Reading Strategy (Mokhtari & Sheorey, 2002), Second Language Ambiguity Tolerance Scale (Ely, 1995), and a…