Although teachers have access to a great deal of scholarship on teaching academic vocabulary (AV), much less is known about the experiences and perceptions of English language learners regarding AV. To address this gap, we used an online metaphor elicitation survey and follow-up interviews to collect data from 432 undergraduates at a Hong Kong…

Background/purpose: This study examined Vietnamese English majors' competence and perception of academic collocations to determine the need for targeted instruction. The research aimed to identify specific challenges these learners face in learning and using academic collocations in their writing. Methods: The study involved 199 Vietnamese English…

The purpose of this study is two-fold: 1) to investigate the effects of Data-Driven Learning (DDL) framed within the Involvement Load Hypothesis (ILH) on Thai learners' use of academic collocations and 2) to examine how Thai learners utilized the involvement load (IL) components (need, search, and evaluation) to master academic collocations. It is…

This study was focused on adult English language learners (ELLs) that described their experiences with language acquisition in an elementary, middle, or high school in the United States. The problem addressed in this qualitative descriptive study was that public schools were unable to handle the academic inadequacies of ELLs as well as the…

This study aims at shedding light on the linguistic significance of collocation networks in the academic writing context. Following Firth's principle "You shall know a word by the company it keeps." The study intends to examine three selected nodes (i.e. research, study, and paper) shared collocations in an academic context. This is…

Canada's social and educational policies have always involved immigrant settlement and English/French bilingualism. Research on writing in second languages emerged in the 1980s from graduate programs of education and applied linguistics at major universities in Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa, and Vancouver, particularly done by scholars investigating…

Research in intercultural communication studies has demonstrated that social networking (SN) can affect language minority learners' cultural adaptation/identity process. Furthermore, internet usage preferences play an important role in the cultural adaptation of mobility groups. Drawing on these two lines of development, the current paper aims to…

Education outcomes for L2 students in academic preparation programs, undergraduate studies, and graduate work are directly influenced by the learning and use of academic vocabulary. Among 15 Saudi graduate students studying in New Zealand, this study investigated at their perspectives with academic vocabulary learning. Students in Saudi Arabia who…

The study identified the pragmatic competence level of the second language (L2) learners through Written Discourse Completion Test (WDCT) administered to purposively selected 40 first-year education students. A modified questionnaire based on Survey for Academic English Language Exposure (SAELE) was used to determine the effectiveness of academic…

Word frequency has a long history of being considered the most important predictor of word difficulty and has served as a guideline for several aspects of second language vocabulary teaching, learning, and assessment. However, recent empirical research has challenged the supremacy of frequency as a predictor of word difficulty. Accordingly,…

Learners entering higher education may learn specialized vocabulary of new disciplines in their second language (L2) with or without support from their first language (L1). However, these learners cannot rely on an established conceptual representation in L1 when learning L2 specialized vocabulary. The effects of learning a new concept in L1 prior…

This paper proposes the design of an instructional model, referred to as the universal genre sphere, for teaching academic writing in a manner appropriate to all learners, but developed especially with consideration for the needs of English as additional language students with or without diagnosed learning differences. Despite growing research on,…

Although studies in higher education have paid attention to the complexities of learning disciplinary language and discourse, little attention has been given to learning professional discourse in a second language (L2). Recent studies on language socialization have addressed this gap by focusing on L2 students' emerging communicative competence in…

In this article, we present the results of an eight-week in-class intervention, during which binomial expressions comprised of academic vocabulary (results and conclusions, facts and circumstances) were presented to intermediate-level learners of English. Constraints that govern the preferred order of highly fixed binomials were explained as the…

This article discusses intercultural communicative competence (ICC) as a present-day theoretical and practical concern. Byram's (1997) model of ICC serves as a point of departure for the discussion since this is a theoretical construct which has had considerable impact on curriculum development and teaching materials in a number of countries over…