Studies have shown that informing language learners about the literal underpinning of idioms can help them to remember these expressions. It has also been suggested that prompting learners to guess the meaning of lexical items may be beneficial because it can pique their curiosity and promote cognitive engagement. In the case of idioms, the…

Studies have shown that raising L2 learners' metaphor awareness contributes to the acquisition of figurative language, which fosters students' development of language skills. However, the instruments measuring metaphor awareness, in the majority of relevant research, did not seem to have undergone proper methodological procedures for checking…

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…

This study describes the quantitative aspects of metaphor in academic publications. In particular, we analyze the frequency of metaphor types and source domains in medical papers written by native and non-native speakers of English. The data have been collected from selected published articles on cancer and tissue engineering. The method combines…

Research on corrective feedback (CF) and language teachers' beliefs and practices on the provision of CF has been mainly limited to learners' non-target-like use of grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation, and spelling (non-formulaic forms). Consequently, learners' non-target-like use of formulaic sequences, that is, collocations, idioms, lexical…

Most second language (L2) learners are aware of the importance of vocabulary, and this awareness usually directs their attention to learning new words. By contrast, learners do not often recognise unfamiliar idioms if all the compositional parts look familiar to them such as "turn the corner" or "carry the day." College-level…

Most studies about figurative language learning focus on metaphor rather than metonymy; however, the interactions of metonymy and metaphor are so intricate that the boundary forms not a dichotomy but a continuum. Such a continuum and its influences on figurative language learning have not been studied in depth. The present study investigates EFL…

This paper reports on a study that examined a group of advanced German L2 learners' awareness and use of English focusing devices. Recent studies suggest that learners are aware of lexical resources, but lack awareness of grammatical structures. Focus constructions, i.e. pragmatically motivated word order variations, are pivotal to any text where…

EFL students of English literature face the substantial challenge of making sense of literary texts written in a foreign language. EFL teachers working with these students need to understand the problems that they face and develop ways of helping them to overcome them. This article focuses on metaphor in literature and on whether awareness raising…

The focus in studies of language awareness in L2 learning generally has been on the efficacy of teacher-generated attention to discrete elements of the forms of language through the manipulation of texts or corrective feedback. The study reported in this paper engaged learners in a collaborative task that involved learner-generated attention to…