Numerous studies have shown processing advantages for collocations, but they only investigated processing of adjacent collocations (e.g., "provide information"). However, in naturally occurring language, nonadjacent collocations ("provide" some of the "information") are equally, if not more frequent. This raises the…

The effectiveness of explicit instruction, within the context of strategy development in learners, has been widely accepted for several years. However, the methods used within explicit vocabulary instruction are varied and comparatively few studies have directly compared methods. This study investigates the type of instruction (in a visual or…

This article explores the second language acquisition of motion events, with particular regard to cross-linguistic influence between first and second languages. Oral narratives in Spanish as a second language by native speakers of French, German and Italian are compared, together with narratives by native Spanish speakers. Previous analysis on the…

Second language learners reach expert levels in relative cue weighting only gradually. On the basis of ensemble machine learning models fit to naturalistic written productions of German advanced learners of English and expert writers, we set out to reverse engineer differences in the weighting of multiple cues in a clause linearization problem. We…

Pragmatic competence is essential for oral fluency and listening comprehension, allowing speakers to use and interpret language appropriately in varied contexts. The use of technological applications for teaching pragmatics is on the rise (Taguchi & Sykes, 2013), in part because they are well-suited to the types of awareness-raising tasks…

Our study aimed at finding out the effectiveness of corpus-based vocabulary teaching activities as well as students' attitudes towards concordance-based materials when corpus-based tasks in English vocabulary learning are used. The study was conducted in a preparatory school in a private university. The participants were 28 intermediate level…

English phraseology abounds with alliterative multiword units (e.g., slippery slope), which suggests that alliterative word strings have a comparative advantage to become stock phrases. One plausible explanation for this advantage is that alliterative word strings are relatively memorable, all else being equal, although there is little directly…

This paper examines whether and to what extent data-driven learning (DDL) activities can improve the lexico-grammatical use of abstract nouns in L2 writing. A topic-based corpus was compiled to develop concordance learning activities, and 40 Chinese students majoring in English were randomly assigned to a control group or an experimental group. At…