The present study investigated how Cantonese speakers learning English as a second language (L2) would comprehend English irony and whether their L2 proficiency and use would moderate their irony processing. Thirty Cantonese speakers with differing English proficiency (intermediate vs advanced) were asked to complete an irony comprehension task in…

Formulaic sequences, particularly idioms and collocations, have received increasing attention in English language learning settings to bridge the gap between daily and academic life. Thus, it is expected to increase students' motivation in English classes when they see reflections of formulaic sequences in their daily lives. Although the number of…

Native Arabic speakers used idiomatic expressions such as idioms, formulas, and collocations, in their daily communications. In learning Arabic as a second language (L2), effective communication requires "the ability to understand and use idioms appropriately and accurately in a variety of sociocultural contexts, in a manner like that of…

This study reports on a self-paced reading experiment exploring whether the figurativeness of collocations affects L2 processing of collocations. The participants were 40 English native speakers and 44 Chinese-speaking English foreign language learners (including doctoral, postgraduate, and undergraduate students). To ensure that the effect…

This study investigates the effects of conceptual metaphors on Turkish EFL learners' acquisition of phrasal verbs. The participants were 120 beginner, elementary, and pre-intermediate level students. The research follows a pre and post-test quasi-experimental research design. The students were assigned to proficiency levels according to their…

Idiomatic expressions are among the most difficult and challenging aspects in the realm of lexicon. The focus of the present study was on investigating the effect of short stories and pictures on learning idiomatic expressions by beginner EFL learners. For this aim, 52 Iranian EFL learners were chosen and assigned to three groups randomly: two…

The paper explores how various teaching methods, namely Phonology-Based Instruction (PBI) and Translation-Based Instruction (TBI), have an effect on students' acquisition of formulaic sequences. 20 multiword expressions were taught to 48 Vietnamese EFL students from three intact classes as 2 treatment groups (PBI and TBI) and 1 control group.…

This paper presents the findings of a quasi-experimental study designed to examine the possible effect of explicit or implicit teaching of pragmatic routines regarding the significance of exploring ways to foster interlanguage pragmatic competence considering the fact that language learners, at least, could benefit the real-life language use…

Employing a quasi-experimental design, this study examined the efficacy of humorous idiom video clips on the achievement of Iranian undergraduate students studying English as a Foreign Language (EFL). Forty humorous video clips from the English Idiom Series called "The Teacher" from the BBC website were used to teach 120 idioms to 61…

The teaching of English grammar to second language learners is usually a tedious, stressful and time consuming activity and even after all the effort, students have generally found these lessons boring and confusing. As such, innovative language instructors have been trying different approaches to the teaching of grammar in their classrooms. Using…

In this dissertation, the denaturalization of migrants in the US and Italy as represented in newspaper crime reports was identified and compared to the opposing naturalization of Italian crime organizations in Italy and Wall Street/corporate criminals in the US. This was accomplished through careful, multidisciplinary, scientific analysis of over…

Most current idiom processing models acknowledge, after Gernsbacher and Robertson (1999) that deriving an idiomatic meaning entails suppression of contextually inappropriate, literal meanings of idiom constituent words. While embedding idioms in the rich disambiguating context can promote earlier suppression of incompatible literal meanings,…

Explores the potential of cognitive linguistic notions such as conceptual metaphor and conceptual metonym for comparing the figurative phraseologies of English and Malay and anticipating second language learner difficulty. A comparative analysis is undertaken that identifies six types of relationship between figurative expressions in the two…

Examines the effects of age on hearing children's oral rather than written story production and whether there are age-related changes in the signed productions of deaf children comparable to those observed in hearing age-mates. (HOD)