The use of subordination enables language users to achieve syntactic efficiency by allowing them to connect ideas in temporal/logical relation. Although the importance of subordination has been recognized in previous research on second language (L2) writing, it has been typically assessed with global indices that measure overall ratio of…

The question of whether L2 learners can use discourse cues online during pronoun resolution remains debated in the field. We examine one factor that has been argued to impact pronoun resolution in native speakers, implicit causality (IC) bias, a property related to certain verbs in which one of verb's arguments are considered to be the cause of an…

Despite having different semantic profiles, near synonyms are usually presented in dictionaries as being contextually interchangeable, which may lead EFL learners to assume their contextual interchangeability. Nevertheless, there is a scarcity of studies on how near synonyms are similar or different in their semantic and grammatical preferences.…

This study examines the referential context effect on second-language relative clause ambiguity resolution by proficient L1 Chinese learners who learn English as a foreign language (EFL) and investigates whether the ambiguity resolution process is constrained by individuals' working memory capacity (WMC). It presents a self-paced reading study and…

In this task-repetition intervention study, L2 learners' reuse of linguistic constructions was analyzed to investigate to what extent recurring reliance on specific constructions during the same task repetition predicts fluency development. English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) learners performed oral narrative tasks three times per day under two…

Previous research has indicated that explicit information (EI) about either the first language (L1) or second language (L2) along with task-essential practice can facilitate L2 learning (e.g., Fernández, 2008; McManus, 2022). However, little research has examined L1--L2 contrastive EI with L1/L2 practice. Targeting plural-marking accuracy, the…

Phrasal verbs (PVs), comprising a lexical verb and an adverbial particle, are a notoriously difficult category of multiword units even for advanced learners of English because of their syntactic peculiarity and semantic complexity. Non-native professional interpreters have also been found to use PVs much less often than their native counterparts…

The study compares English dependent prepositions of the verbs agree, apply, and die shown in English language coursebooks and a corpus. It also suggests English prepositional verbs and their dependent prepositions that are suitable for teaching to L1 Thai learners and a method that should be employed for the instruction. The data were collected…

The Null Subject Parameter (NSP) has long been considered pertinent to Second Language Acquisition (SLA) studies, especially when the native language (NL) and target language (TL) have different NSP settings. The study aimed to investigate whether seventy English L2 learners in Puerto Rico who were native Spanish speakers transferred their L1…

There has been increasing L3 research on L3 transfer selectivity, especially concerning which factor triggers crosslinguistic influence during L3 acquisition. According to Slabakova's (2016) Scalpel Model, every linguistic property has distinct and unique input factors regarding L3 acquisition such as high/low frequency or positive/negative input.…

That a certain class of verb commonly known as 'statives' is undergoing change in terms of the way in which certain verbs of this type are being used in everyday speech is nothing new to the field of linguistics. Much has been written about it, and the author of this paper alone has been preoccupied with the subject for many years now. However,…

The paper aims at discussing the difficulties that students from French speaking countries who are pursuing their education in a Ghanaian university face in identifying English determiners. This is a qualitative study that analysed the difficulties that level 100 Francophone students who have French as a Second Language(L2) and English as a…

The effectiveness of English Language Teaching (ELT) materials significantly influences the learning outcomes of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners, positioning these resources as cardinal in the acquisition process. Despite this widely acknowledged significance, there remains a notable gap in research concerning the evaluation of key…

Graded reading is one of the important ways of English learning. How to automatically judge and grade the difficulty of the English reading corpus is of great significance for precision teaching and personalized learning. However, the current rule-based readability assessment methods have some limitations, such as low efficiency and poor accuracy.…

This study analyzes four English synonyms -- clear, obvious, apparent, and evident -- concentrating on meanings, distribution across genre, collocations, and semantic preference and prosody. The data were drawn from learner's dictionaries and the Corpus of the Contemporary American English (COCA). It was discovered that the four synonyms share the…