Adult second language learners arrive at the language learning situation with an already formed first language grammar system in place. The study of cross-language similarity across the first and second languages explores how the similarities and differences in the two languages make learning more or less difficult, particularly for adult…

Emergentist, usage-based L2 research has witnessed that emphasizing formulaic sequences as entry points in meaning-based instructional contexts contributes to the development of linguistic comprehension and production. Related studies have thus far striven to find the most effective methods of highlighting these word strings. This study explored…

Open Educational Resources (OER) aim to provide equal access to education. Yet, as the language level used in OER presents a barrier to many learners, there is a need to make these resources more comprehensible. This study combined eye-tracking methodology and comprehension assessment to explore the effect of text simplification on English second…

The current study investigated the effects of three forms of output activity on EFL learners' recognition and recall of second language (L2) vocabulary. To this end, three groups of learners of English as a foreign language (EFL) were instructed to employ the following three output activities after reading two narrative texts: (1) summarizing the…

The visual front-end of reading is most often associated with orthographic processing. The left ventral occipito-temporal cortex seems to be preferentially tuned for letter string and word processing. In contrast, little is known of the mechanisms responsible for pre-orthographic processing: the processing of character strings regardless of…