This dissertation uses the Conceptual Blending Hypothesis from the socio-cognitive method presented and refined by Kecskes (2002, 2004, 2007, 2010, 2020) to explain how the lexical choice of bilinguals differs across sociocultural situations. Quantitative (lexical density, lexical diversity, and lexical sophistication) and qualitative (lexical…

Teachers and parents intuitively judge the 'level' of the child and the 'level' of the text and try to match them; they know that overestimation or underestimation of either will be met with restlessness or boredom. In this way, they have an empirical understanding of Vygotsky's ZPD--the zone of proximal development he envisioned as measuring the…

This article reports on the results of action research conducted in a university ESP classroom in Oman. The impetus for this research was the practitioner's dissatisfaction with the current practice of introducing the grammatical concept of the English passive and its subsequent results. Framed within the sociocultural theory of cognitive…

This study investigates the relative effectiveness of two methods for teaching a set of English verb-noun collocations: form-focused instruction (FFI) and concept-based instruction (CBI). The sample comprised 73 Chinese-speaking learners of English taking intermediate English courses, who were randomly assigned to one of three groups: an FFI…

The field of language education has experienced a rise in using virtual reality (VR) to support interactive, contextualized, and collaborative language learning in recent years. The current study investigates the effects of auditory, visual, and textual input on speaking and writing in English for Tourism Purposes (ETP) through immersive,…

Students of private universities in Bangladesh are often found to be less competent in spoken English. Since the universities have adopted EMI (English medium instruction) policy, the prevailing linguistic condition on the campus is an "English only environment." In this context, students are required to communicate in English both…

This study aims to investigate (i) the Patani Malay (PM) and Southern Thai (ST) learners' knowledge of English collocations, (ii) the learning strategies employed by the two groups with different levels of English proficiency and (iii) the impact of their learning strategies on their test performance. Thirty-nine student participants from each…

Our cluster receives a number of referrals from schools requesting support with the implementation of assistive technology tools (particularly word prediction software) to support struggling reluctant writers. It is widely acknowledged that writing is pivotal for academic success, and when a learner has difficulty expressing their ideas they often…