Captions and subtitles as a form of scaffolding for audiovisual materials has gained much attention in second or foreign language (L2) learning in recent years and various studies report their positive effects on learners' listening comprehension. However, few attempts have been made to investigate how textual information specifically affects the…

This paper is a critical analysis of curriculum with a discussion of its main tenets and exploration of issues within the literature. The focus is on curriculum in English as a Second Language (ESL) using critical applied linguistics as a framework. The ideas explored in the paper are synthesized and applied to ESL curriculum in the United Arab…

This paper reports on the early stages of a locally funded research and development project taking place at Rennes 2 university. It aims at developing a comprehensive pedagogical framework for pronunciation training for adult learners of English. This framework will combine a direct approach to pronunciation training (face-to-face teaching) with…

This article describes the use of instructional technology to promote, through a combination of behaviorist/structuralist and communicative/action-based methodologies, correct pronunciation of French as a Foreign Language (FFL) to native Greek-speaking false-beginner-level learners. It is based on the analysis of a teaching programme, complemented…

Recent years have witnessed a lively debate on the nature of learners' morphological competence and use. Some argue that a breakdown in acquisition of second-language (L2) is expected whenever features required for the analysis of L2 input are not present in the L1. Others argue that features have the same nature and etiology in first…

This study is concerned with the acquisition of English verb transitivity by native speakers of Japanese. Both a verb's semantic class (Levin, 1993; Pinker, 1989) and its frequency (Ambridge et al., 2008) have been proposed to influence the acquisition of verbs in L1. For example, verbs whose meaning entails change-of-location or…

Nasals are cross-linguistically susceptible to change, especially in the syllable final position. Acoustic reports on Mandarin nasal production have recently shown that the syllable-final distinction is frequently dropped. Few studies, however, have addressed the issue of perceptual processing in Mandarin nasals for L1 and L2 speakers of Mandarin…

According to generative linguistic theory, certain principles underlying language structure are innately given, accounting for how children are able to acquire their mother tongues (L1s) despite a mismatch between the linguistic input and the complex unconscious mental representation of language that children achieve. This innate structure is…

Lexical access in bilinguals is known to be largely non-selective. However, most studies in this area have involved bilinguals whose two languages share the same script. This study aimed to examine bilingual lexical access among bilinguals whose two languages have distinct scripts. Korean-English bilinguals were tested in a phoneme monitoring task…

This study examines the effects of foreign language learning context (three-month study-abroad; versus "at-home" instruction) and age (10-11-year-old children versus university students) on the development of effective foreign language communication strategies (CS) in monologue production. Participants (N = 95) were all Spanish/Catalan…

This study illustrates why preschool children who are dual language learners (DLLs) are not a homogeneous group. An empirically developed model of preschool DLL subgroups, based on latent class analysis, was presented. The model reflects three separate subgroups of DLL children present in many classrooms where DLL children are served: Bilinguals,…

Currently there is a general uncertainty about what makes collocations (i.e., fixed word combinations with specific, not easily interpreted relations between their components) hard for ESL learners to master, and about how to improve collocation recognition and learning process. This study explored and designed a comparative classification of…

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…

Mastery of English in China has gathered increased prominence due to the need to foster cultural, political, and economic connections worldwide. Reading is an obvious skill of vital importance for advancing efforts as a player in the world economy. The present article examines research published in academic journals in Chinese and English to…

The aim of this study was an attempt to investigate the use of conjunctions in argumentative essays written by English as a Foreign Language fourth-year undergraduate Libyan students majoring in English at Omar Al-Mukhtar University in Libya. A corpus of 32 argumentative essays was collected from a sample of 16 students in order to be investigated…