Competent L2 writing has been described in research in terms of an increasing incidence, variety, and length of clauses; a countervailing compactness and tightness with reduced number of clauses even as clause length expands; and various interrelationships between syntactic realizations of texts and the genres they represent. These partly…

One of the critiques of proficiency as defined by scales, such as that of ACTFL, is its lack of grounding in linguistic realities. Measures of complexity, accuracy, and fluency provide a route in which proficiency can be quantitatively measured by identifying linguistic correlates (see Brown et al., 2017; Long et al., 2012). This project aimed to…

This study examined the differences and similarities among the writing of three types of developmental English and advanced ESL United States community college students, comparing the writing of resident English learners (RL2), whose home language was not English but who attended United States public schools for five years or more, to that of…

Purpose: This study attempts to evaluate the effect of the corpus-based inductive teaching approach with multiple academic corpora (PICA, CAEC and Oxford Corpus of Academic English) and conventional deductive teaching approach (i.e., multiple-choice items, filling the gap, matching and underlining) on learning academic collocations by Iranian…

The present study investigates native (L1) and second language (L2) processing of scope ambiguities in English sentences containing the universal quantifier every in subject NP and negation. Previous studies in L1 and L2 processing of scope ambiguities have found speakers to generally employ a 'minimal effort' principle that highly prefers the…

This study addresses the lack of comprehension data in second language acquisition research by focusing on English existential "there"-constructions (ETCs) with a locative extension (e.g., "there is an X on the Y"). The post-copular noun X used in the present study consisted of two types: actual and nonsense. Participants…

Although corpora and corpus linguistics have been applied for quite long in foreign and second language settings, there is still limited understanding about how EFL learners use corpus tools along with dictionaries to enhance their collocation knowledge. This study aims to gain insight into the effectiveness of corpus-based pedagogy in comparison…

The present study examined the interaction effects between teachers' choice of language in lexical explanation and second language (L2) learners' proficiency level on the learning of phrasal verbs and listening comprehension in a meaning-focused listening activity. Undergraduate L2 learners with two different levels of proficiency (intermediate…

The use of 'chunks' is not only a common and characteristic feature of first language use, but may also be a distinguishing factor between less and more proficient second language users. The present study aimed at investigating potential correlations between chunk use and holistically rated proficiency scores and development over time in advanced…

The present scenario fact that the English is a language of modern technological and scientific developments, text is a primary tool for students to gain the knowledge in writing skills. However, most male Saudi students show minimum efficient in L2 writing skill and do not have sufficient competence for writing the authentic English passages. To…

The extent to which learners benefit from instruction may be largely dependent on their individual abilities. However, there is relatively little work on the interaction between instructional effectiveness in second language learning and learner individual factors. In this study, we investigated the relationship between instruction, individual…

There is little research available on the incidental learning of figurative language from reading (e.g., Webb, Newton, & Chang, 2013). This study looked at collocations with both literal and figurative meanings, that is, duplex collocations (Macis & Schmitt, 2017a) and whether reading could enhance lexical knowledge of the figurative…

I examine whether teaching formulaic language raises English as a foreign language learners' awareness of pragmatic resources when expressing requests. To carry out this research I adopt a qualitative self-reflective approach which encourages students to use formulaic language when making requests. By responding to discourse completion tasks,…

This study investigated the cognitive processes underlying pauses at different textual locations (e.g., within/between words) and various levels of revision (e.g., below word/clause). We used stimulated recall, keystroke logging, and eye-tracking methodology in combination to examine pausing and revision behaviors. Thirty advanced Chinese L2 users…

This study aims to further the understanding of first language (L1) lexical transfer within the context of L1 Chinese learners of English. Previous transfer research has often focused on a small subset of grammar errors, without examining how lexical choices, especially in collocations and multi-word units (MWU), might have been influenced by L1…