Idioms are highly conventionalized expressions that allow users to express beyond literal meanings. Despite the language difference, counterparts of idioms may overlap cross-culturally due to similar origin, social habits, and experiences. It is therefore interesting to probe whether L2 learners may benefit from deliberate instructions built on…

Although previous studies support using pair work in the language learning classroom, some have shown that getting L2 learners into pairs without raising their awareness about the global norms of collaboration will not necessarily create quality opportunities for interlanguage development. In this study, we investigated the contribution of…

The current study investigated differences in lexical knowledge of Arabic learners whose age of onset (AO) of exposure to English medium instruction (EMI) was at the elementary, secondary, and tertiary educational levels. Ninety undergraduate students enrolled in a public university in the UAE took part in the study. Data collection involved a…

The use of L1 [learners' first language] in L2 [teaching of a new language] classes has long been debated in the field of TESOL [teaching English to speakers of other languages]. Although at least some use of the L1 is now widely advocated, questions remain about what might count as acceptable or effective use. While a number of studies have been…

A great deal of research undertaken in child language development, neurolinguistics and various branches of functional and cognitive linguistics has shown that a main source of language development is the spoken input to which learners are exposed. Despite the fact that for most adult L2 learners, the greatest exposure to the L2 is the input they…

The current study looks at whether bilinguals varying in language dominance show a processing advantage for idiomatic over non-idiomatic phrases and to what extent this effect is modulated by idiom transparency (i.e., the degree to which the idiom's figurative meaning can be inferred from its literal analysis) and cross-language similarity (i.e.,…

Exploring opportunities by which learners can internalize new knowledge and consolidate existing knowledge has long been a point of interest in English as a foreign language research. This study investigated how meta-talk opportunities on discourse markers created by four task types including text reconstruction, dictogloss, translation and jigsaw…

While there is a plethora of research on pronunciation problems of EFL learners with different L1 backgrounds, published empirical studies on syllabification errors of Iraqi Kurdish EFL learners are scarce. Therefore, to contribute to this line of research, the present study set out to investigate difficulties of this group of learners in the…

Vygotsky's writings on Sociocultural Theory (SCT) of mind, his concept of Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) and its related metaphor, scaffolding, serve as the theoretical basis for the study of peer collaboration. This paper aimed at examining the effects of peer-scaffolding on EFL writing ability and finding out how revising techniques are…

First language (L1) transfer has been a key issue in the field of applied linguistics, second language acquisition (SLA), and language pedagogy for almost a century. Its importance, however, has been re-evaluated several times within the last few decades. The aim of this paper is to examine current research that has investigated the role of L1…