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…

Corpus analyses of learners' dictionaries of English idioms have revealed that 11% to 35% of English figurative idioms show either alliteration ("miss the mark") or assonance ("get this show on the road"), depending on the type considered. Because English multiword combinations, particularly idiomatic expressions, present a…

This study introduces an approach to providing corrective feedback to L2 learners termed analogy-based corrective feedback that is motivated by analogical learning theories and syntactic alignment in dialogue. Learners are presented with a structurally similar synonymous version of their output where the erroneous form is corrected, and they must…