The current study seeks to probe the use of refusal strategies and their frequency among Saudi EFL students of Bachelor of Science (BS) at Moon University (pseudonym), Saudi Arabia. Through a convenient sampling procedure, 20 students were selected, and Discourse Completion Test (DCT) was administered. This test comprised 12 situations eliciting…

From the perspective of complexity theory and based on Robinson's Cognition Hypothesis and the Triadic Componential Framework, this paper investigated the effect of manipulating task complexity along resource-dispersing dimension on L2 written performance. The results showed that: 1) Significant interactive effects were found between the two…

The present study attempts to identify difficulties that Japanese students encounter with metadiscursive nouns in writing second language (L2) argumentation essays. Metadiscursive nouns are abstract and unspecific nouns which can serve as cohesive markers by retrieving their meanings in the text where they occur. Using a selected number of nouns…

The main aim of this paper is to examine the syntactic status of a selected text-corpus focus, with a special focus on the verb within its Verb-Phrase. The major claim is that the power of the verb in its VP is loaded syntactically through which the speaker's desire of the doublespeak within X-Phemism is achieved. In order to fulfill this claim, a…

Translation ability requires many language skills to produce an accurate and complete text; however, one important skill, critical reading in the research, has been neglected. This research, therefore, employed the explanatory sequential mixed method to investigate the differences in Thai-English translation ability between students with a high…

For many sociolinguists, the issue of shyness and hesitation phenomenon has been problematic for Japanese L1 and L2 speakers, particularly in gendered interactions. Over the past decade, more Japanese are shunning conversations, relationships, and isolating themselves, which is accelerating the demographic crisis in Japan. Thus, this paper focuses…

As an important yet intricate linguistic feature in English language, synonymy poses a great challenge for second language learners. Using the 100 million-word British National Corpus (BNC) as data and the software Sketch Engine (SkE) as an analyzing tool, this article compares the usage of "learn" and "acquire" used in natural…

The study aims to investigate to what extent Chinese EFL learners' language use is influenced by English textbooks. Such influence may suggest the existence of lexical priming effects. Based on detailed and systematic analysis of a learner English corpus, in comparison with a textbook corpus, the present study revealed striking similarities of the…

The purpose of this study was to determine if first language interference does play a significant role in the use of articles in English by native speakers of Arabic as compared to other ESL learners. An error analysis was conducted on the use of English articles in essays taken from two groups of advanced ESL learners. The essays were composed by…

The article summarizes the results of the comparative study of Reading comprehension texts used in B2 level tests: Unified (Russia) State Exam in English (EGE) and Cambridge First Certificate in English (FCE). The research conducted was mainly focused on six parameters measured with the Coh-Metrix, a computational tool producing indices of the…

This research studied the use of modals in argumentative written tasks by Form 5 Malaysian secondary school ESL students. The aim of this study was to examine the use of English modals at the syntactic level from data presented in the MCSAW Corpus. The research design comprised a qualitative technique through discourse analysis aided by…

This paper reports a textual analysis of letters written by 21 male and 21 female participants in Persian. Each writer wrote two letters, one to a dating service and another one to a hypothetical person chosen and introduced by the center. Therefore, a total of 84 letters were collected from the participants. Schema theory was used to find the…