This paper provides educators a foothold in the tricky terrain of metaphor, its theoretical underpinnings and pedagogical possibilities. Metaphor provides us with a means of comprehending domains of experience that do not have a preconceptual structure of their own. Conceptual metaphors permit mental imagery from sensorimotor domains to hold sway…

Social media is widely used in many different sectors worldwide. In language education, it can impact students' language learning, and students may have diverse opinions about its use. This study aimed to explore how Thai university students conceptualise social media and their perceptions of it. An elicitation task, "social media is like ……

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…

This study examined translingual practices in two playdates of a Korean four-year-old boy (Theo) with a Korean boy and an American boy. The boys played a game called "Candy Land." In both playdates, the boys' naturally occurring English and Korean communication strategies were observed and analyzed based on Canagarajah's (2013) four…

English as a lingua franca (ELF), a shared contact language of communication for speakers from different linguistic and cultural backgrounds, has become a common phenomenon in a globalized world. Central to ELF interactions is the ability to negotiate meanings drawing on a broad range of cultural repertoires and linguistic resources. Helping ELF…

This paper examines Chinese (n = 11) and Spanish (n = 11) student teachers' learning-to-teach experiences during the teaching practicum or placement period through the lenses of transformative learning theory and third space construct. We traced student teachers' transformative learning experiences through observation, interviews, reflective…

Typically developing, American adolescents in Grade 10 (n = 38) ranked the relative importance of 14 communication skills in their friends' communication with them. The skills were considered those associated with figurative language (e.g., appropriate slang use), empathy (e.g., vocal tone comprehension), or discourse management (e.g., appropriate…

We tested sarcasm production and identification across original communicators in a spontaneously produced conversational setting, including testing the role of synchronous movement on sarcasm production and identification. Before communicating, stranger dyads participated in either a synchronous or nonsynchronous movement task. They then completed…

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…

In recent years, despite the fact that many researchers have devoted much of their attention to second language attrition, not much focus has been given to first language attrition (FLA) specifically among Iranian immigrants. The present study attempts to describe FLA in the semantic domain of idiomatic expression and effect of length of residence…

Within the currently diverse UK higher education environment, one important aspect of learning is the development of intercultural competence. The study that informs this paper investigated the ways intercultural competence was perceived as being enhanced or inhibited through current language and educational practices at a university that…

Languages differ in their preferences for particular intensifying constructions. While intensifying adjectival compounds (IACs) (e.g. "ijskoud, ice-cold") are productively used to express intensification in Dutch and English, in French this construction is hardly productive. Consequently, French-speaking learners may encounter…

The use of collocation has always been considered as a good yardstick by which the idiomaticity of second language (L2) use is reliably judged. Hence, this study aims at investigating the relationship between optimizing the lexical approach and improving the collocational accuracy and the ability to operate on the idiom principle in the writing of…

This is a theoretical paper that addresses the challenge of educational access to the Humanities and Social Sciences. It plots a theoretical quest to develop an explicit pedagogy to give "disadvantaged" students in the Humanities ways of working successfully with texts. In doing so it draws on Bernstein, Moore and Maton's work to…

Creativity is commonly assessed using divergent thinking tasks, which measure the fluency, flexibility, originality, and elaboration of participant output on a variety of different tasks. This study assesses the degree to which creativity can be identified based on linguistic features of participants' language while completing collaborative…