OpenCourseWare (OCW) and Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have gained increasing popularity and importance because they greatly expand students' access to university lectures. Although the main component of OCW and MOOC platforms is lectures, their differences may potentially affect the difficulty of academic listening comprehension. This study…

This research aimed to establish a pedagogically useful list of the most frequent opaque idioms in English news. It began by compiling an idiom search list from six prestigious idiom dictionaries. Through a set of criteria, 4,864 semantically non-compositional idioms were culled as search entries to interrogate the News on the Web (NOW)…

Traditional views of leadership often associate strong leadership with directness, decisiveness, and dominance, which are stereotypically coded as masculine while perceiving empathy and collaborative orientation-- qualities commonly associated with femininity--as less compatible with effective leadership. However, contemporary research…

According to the Presupposition-Denial Account, complement set reference arises when focus is on the "shortfall" between the amount conveyed by a natural language quantifier and a larger, expected amount. Negative quantifiers imply a shortfall, through the denial of a presupposition, whereas positive quantifiers do not. An exception may…

As a historically racialized utterance, "nigger" has been a contested and despised word since the late 17th Century. Now, in the 21st Century, "nigga" is still considered one of the most impactful words in the English lexicon. This dissertation provides one situated and contingent analysis of nigga as a moment of excess in the…

In order to facilitate the instruction and acquisition of EFL writing, this paper compares the uses of the light verb "get" in English writing by Chinese and L1 undergraduates by drawing on insights from the theory of norms and exploitations (TNE). Corpus pattern analysis (CPA) is conducted to analyze the data taken from two comparable…

Learning to read and spell involves learning about the written forms of words and how these are linked to language. Writing systems include formal patterns, which pertain to the appearance of written words, and functional patterns, which pertain to links between units of writing and units of language. We review the evidence that learners of a…

Purpose: The aim of this study is to evaluate whether Mandarin-speaking children with cochlear implants (CIs) demonstrated early lexical composition similar to their hearing peers who were at the same vocabulary level and the extent to which children with CIs were sensitive to linguistic and conceptual properties when developing early lexicon.…

Purpose: Previous studies have investigated the effects of the inability to produce hand gestures on speakers' prosodic features of speech; however, the potential effects of encouraging speakers to gesture have received less attention, especially in naturalistic settings. This study aims at investigating the effects of encouraging the production…

The study aimed to investigate the disciplinary variations and the structural/functional features of recurrent expressions in the introduction and literature sections of the Master of Arts (MA) theses in two corpora. It is significant since the bundles fulfil specific functions in the form of formulaic language. The sampling of the study was…

Purpose: This study explored approaches for measuring vocabulary among bilingual children with varying levels of proficiency in Spanish and English. Method: One hundred fifteen kindergarten and first-grade Spanish--English-speaking children completed measures of vocabulary and sentence repetition in Spanish and English. Scores were derived from…

Despite the growing interest in AI for language assessment, there remains a significant research gap regarding its usefulness for assessing less proficient language skills, particularly those of learners of English as a second or foreign language (S/FL). AI models often prioritize proficient writing, neglecting the intricacies of learner language.…

Two laboratories have reported that children with ASD are less likely than their typical peers to fill pauses with "um" but their use of "uh" is unaffected (Irvine et al., J Autism Dev Disord 46(3):1061-1070, 2016; Gorman et al., Autism Res 9(8):854-865, 2016). In this brief report, we replicated this finding by comparing the…

The current study aimed to gain insight into the nuanced challenges that Vietnamese learners encountered due to the interference of their native linguistic structures and norms. This qualitative study explored the experiences of Vietnamese learners in acquiring English, focusing on the influence of negative L1 transfer. This study focused on the…

Background: Bilingual assessment is particularly difficult in the very first period of children's second language (L2) exposure. This exploratory, longitudinal study examined L2 learning after 1 and 2 years of L2 exposure by young immigrants and how it is affected by their age at first exposure to the L2 (AoE). Method: Participants were 18…