The present study sets out to address a critical academic feature necessary to understand research articles (RAs) through investigating foreign language (FL) Tunisian doctoral students' awareness of the kind of relationship between text, writer, and readership in English research articles across three distinct disciplines: Linguistics, Economics,…

Researchers have investigated the promise of unimodal and bimodal input in enhancing vocabulary learning from meaning-focused activities. Compared to unimodal input, the simultaneous presentation of written and aural input in bimodal input has been argued to direct L2 learners' attention to words and enhance the form-meaning links for new…

The current study aimed to explore the effect of first language (L1) orthography on second language (L2) Chinese morphological awareness. One hundred and twenty-nine students (61 L1 English readers and 68 L1 Thai readers) who studied Chinese as a second language participated in this study. They completed four tasks of morphological awareness…

The current study investigates the relation between working memory updating and second language learning (L2) outcomes in typically-developing fourth grade children. Our primary aim was to replicate and extend previous findings on the relationship between updating and low-level reading skills, i.e. fluency. Our second objective was to examine…

Previous research has furnished evidence that alliterative expressions (e.g. "a slippery slope") are comparatively memorable for second language learners, at least when these expressions are attended to as decontextualized items (Lindstromberg and Boers, 2008a; Boers et al., 2012). The present study investigates whether alliteration…

Simplification of text as a pedagogical technique in second language instruction implies: (1) the selection of a restricted set of features from the full range of foreign language resources (linguistic simplification) and/or (2) the rearrangement of content of foreign language messages (content simplification) for purposes of instructional…

This paper explores the patterns and processes used by adult students of English as a second language (ESL) when they guess at the meanings of nonsense words in a reading text. The findings suggest that while word-unit processing is a major component of both first- and second-language reading, a major difference between first- and second-language…

Analysis of several texts simplified to teach reading comprehension to college second language students shows that simplification affects both textual cohesion and coherence. Moreover, simplification restricts the amount of significant semantic information and creates a more transparent pattern of reference. The use of cohesive conjunctions varies…