This study is intended to help English foreign language learners avoid a type of syntactic ambiguity in sentences resulting from prepositional phrases (PPs). The students are guided to make use of the features of both adverbials and adjectivals in resolving this type of ambiguity. The movability of adverbials and the use of relative clauses…

The current study analyzes three locative English prepositions, above, on, and over from a cognitive semantic point of view. Since English is a foreign language for Iraqi students, these prepositions pose a problem for Iraqi university students. The complexity of these three prepositions inspires the researcher to use the Cognitive Linguistic (CL)…

Discourse markers (DMs) are significant for fluent speech. Furthermore, they are essential elements of language for conversation organisation, reciprocal relation of interlocutors, productive speaking and comprehension. Although they have critical functions for pragmatic development, they are neglected in language teaching either because of the…

In the field of ELT, a growing awareness has been paid to the use of correct and appropriate word combinations. Of methods and techniques existed in the literature, the issue of lexical collocation gets a great deal of attention. However, one of the main obstacles, particularly for non-native writers (NNW), is indeterminate knowledge of word…

The present study investigates the impact of the integration of the Cognitive Linguistics (CL) pedagogy into Data-driven learning (DDL) on the learners' acquisition of two sets of English spatial prepositions of verticality, "over/under" and "above/below." The study followed a quasi-experimental design with a control and an…

Boosters are an important metadiscourse device for writers because it creates an emphatic impression in the reader. In addition, the competence of metadiscourse devices such as boosters is crucial in having native-fluency in academic writing. Therefore, this avoidance of using boosters may spawn foreignness in non-native writers' academic texts.…