Learning to use prepositions in English as a second language (L2) has been widely acknowledged to pose significant difficulties to learners, especially within metaphorical contexts. Difficulties relate to the complex distributional patterns of prepositions in discourse, namely, the variety of collocations requiring their use, as well as…

This study investigates the use of high-frequency cognitive verbs - think and believe - in Turkish L2 learners' interlanguage, both in terms of their verb senses and complementation patterns. In line with this purpose, a Sentence Production Task consisting of context-independent items and a Sentence Completion Task consisting of context-dependent…

Relationships among task characteristics, L2 performance, and interlanguage development are of interest both for SLA research and the design of syllabuses and language teaching materials. Complexity has been identified as a promising, but methodologically problematic, task design feature. A study was conducted of the effects of progressive…

The research investigated pragmatic transfer in responses to English tag questions by L1 Thai learners based on Interlanguage Pragmatics, specifically pragmatic transfer (Kasper & Blum-Kulka, 1993). The L1 Thai learners were categorized into two groups according to their English proficiency levels: advanced and intermediate. Oral and written…

This corpus-driven longitudinal study investigates the structural use of lexical bundles in published research article (RA) introductions in applied linguistics written by English experts and Korean graduate students across two different levels of study. Frequency-based bundles were retrieved from a corpus of 200 published RA introductions and two…

Knowledge of the target specialized language should be of use to English for specific purposes teachers who teach pronunciation. Knowledge of the target learners' first language (L1) should also be useful when these teachers use contrastive analysis, error analysis or interlanguage theory. However, as far as teaching the pronunciation of the…

A great deal of research concerning the acquisition of English morphology as a second language has been carried out in order to explain some typical stages in the acquisition of the English-s morphemes and the difficulty confronted by second language learners. According to Siegel (2003), interlanguage and functional transfer both play a crucial…

While there is a plethora of research on pronunciation problems of EFL learners with different L1 backgrounds, published empirical studies on syllabification errors of Iraqi Kurdish EFL learners are scarce. Therefore, to contribute to this line of research, the present study set out to investigate difficulties of this group of learners in the…

This study investigated whether second language (L2) learners of English could learn to produce stranded prepositions through structural priming. Structural priming is the tendency for speakers to repeat the structure of previously experienced sentences, without intention or conscious awareness of such behaviour, and is thought to be associated…

An investigation of the language transfer in second language (L2) lexico-semantic development looked at the relationship of the level of L2 proficiency and interlingual patterns of lexico-semantic correspondence. The linguistic categories used were verbs and adjectives. Relative degrees of difficulty for L2 learners were determined for four…

A study explored similarities and differences in relative pronoun use by native speakers (NSs) and non-native speakers (NNSs) of English. The study was conducted with 40 university students, 20 NSs and 20 NNSs. Specifically, the study examined the frequency of relative pronoun use and the spontaneity of subjects' responses in completing a sentence…

Proposes that the study of basilectal and acrolectal Singapore English can contribute to a better understanding of second language acquisition and use, emphasizing the operation of the monitor and specifications of the hierarchy of difficulty in the acquisition of syntactic structures. (Author/CB)

This review examined the sequencing and grading of tasks in English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) task-based learning pedagogy. Recent research on task-based learning has focused on cognition and the role that cognitive processes play in determining the ease or difficulty of any particular task. It is argued that an understanding of the effects on…

A study investigated communication strategies used to express lexical meaning in English by two groups (intermediate and advanced) of Spanish-speaking adult learners of English-as-a-Second-Language. Both structured and unstructured tasks were used to assess interlanguage development vis-a-vis proficiency, and results indicated that the…

Summarizes some preliminary findings from research into the nature and effect of various discourse modifications by a native speaker to a language learner. These modifications include (1) idiom avoidance; (2) comprehension checks and pauses; and (3) selection of information. An informal experiment gauging foreign students' impression of…