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…

Collocations make it possible to use and understand the language in an effective way. In this context, understanding collocation issues is important for both native speakers and language learners. This study aims at revealing certain determinations and problems with regard to the classification of word combinations in Turkish. For this purpose,…

Son and daughter metaphorical expressions are common in general as well as technical languages. This study explores the similarities and differences between English and Arabic ibn (son) and bint (daughter) expressions, and the difficulties that student-translators have with them. A corpus of English and Arabic general ibn (son) and bint (daughter)…

Focus on form (FonF) studies have predominantly addressed its effectiveness in improving learners' syntactic, lexical, orthographic, and phonological knowledge. Extending the scope of this line of research to formulaic FonF practices, this study investigates the relative effectiveness of incidental FonF targeting formulaic versus nonformulaic…

This study aims to explore cross-language intensification in affirmative sentences by examining the translation of standard amplifiers, words that scale upward towards an assumed norm to emphasize a quality of any entities, from Thai into English. The data comprises 602 parallel concordance lines with 17 intensifying patterns, which were drawn…

Introduction: Many ESL college students have reading comprehension problems in English, such as difficulty understanding ideas explicitly or implicitly stated in a text, making inferences, and inferring meanings of difficult words from context. Aims: The article proposes the integration of inspirational quotes in the teaching of English to EFL…

Currently, a relatively large number of spoken and written conventionalized expressions have been collected, catalogued, and systematized. In language pedagogy, a clear implication is that teaching grammar and vocabulary is likely to be more complicated than working with syntactic rules and single-word items. Old and new insights associated with…

This study aims to analyze positive remarks linguistically manifested through English intensifiers, i.e. very and so, and their collocates in café reviews. The appraisal framework primarily focuses on the feelings or attitudes of speakers or writers. It plays a part in providing communicative resources whereby speech functions are performed…

Oscar Wilde is one of the most hilarious playwrights in the history of English literature. And 'The Importance of Being Earnest' is his masterpiece. With Wilde's humorous and witty language as the starting point and aided by the concordancing software WORDSMITH TOOLS, a detailed analysis was carried out on this comedy from lexical level and…

This study examines how adult second language learners acquire the different meanings of the Spanish preposition "a". Cognitive linguistic models predict that spatial meanings are acquired first, as they are conceptually basic and are the source from which other meanings derive via natural cognitive mechanisms such as metaphor and…

This study introduces an approach to providing corrective feedback to L2 learners termed analogy-based corrective feedback that is motivated by analogical learning theories and syntactic alignment in dialogue. Learners are presented with a structurally similar synonymous version of their output where the erroneous form is corrected, and they must…

This paper reports on a study that examined a group of advanced German L2 learners' awareness and use of English focusing devices. Recent studies suggest that learners are aware of lexical resources, but lack awareness of grammatical structures. Focus constructions, i.e. pragmatically motivated word order variations, are pivotal to any text where…

The focus in studies of language awareness in L2 learning generally has been on the efficacy of teacher-generated attention to discrete elements of the forms of language through the manipulation of texts or corrective feedback. The study reported in this paper engaged learners in a collaborative task that involved learner-generated attention to…

A stylistics-based approach to teaching poetry in the English as a foreign language classroom is examined. Since students may not have the linguistic skills to appreciate a poem, an analytical framework is proposed that includes the elements of repetition, confusion, and surprise. Reference is made to two poems, "In a Season of Unemployment"…

Humor is an excellent teaching tool because, in addition to preventing classroom boredom and monotony, it introduces lateral aspects of language such as irony, sarcasm, mockery, elision, ellipsis, and euphemism. Humor in language can be approached interactively or structurally through a variety of activities. It can be used to expand vocabulary,…