This study investigates the frequency and functions of "just" in British academic spoken English. It adopts the meanings of "just" established by Lindemann and Mauranen, 2001, taken from the occurrences of "just" across five speech events in the Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English (MICASE) to see if they also apply to occurrences of "just"…

The present paper shows the first results of a linguistic project devoted to the construction of web learning tools for reinforcing sensitivity to diaphasic varieties and for learning style variation in L2/LS learning. (Contains 1 figure and 1 footnote.) [Support for this research was provided by the VALERE Project.]

Search engines have been a major factor in making the web the successful and widely used information source it is today. Generally speaking, they make it possible to retrieve web pages on a topic specified by the keywords entered by the user. Yet web searching currently does not take into account which of the search results are comprehensible for…

The present paper examines the oral performance of Hindi language learners during practice Oral Proficiency Interviews (OPI) conducted during workshops hosted by New York University and sponsored by STARTALK. The most salient characteristics of the heritage language learners' output are compared with the output of foreign language learners who are…

Formulaic language is important to language acquisition; however, English language learners are often reported to have problems with formulaic expressions. Several lists of formulaic sequences have been proposed, mainly for developing teaching and testing materials. However, their limited numbers and insufficient usage information seem unable to…

Metalinguistic skills may develop differently in multilingual and monolingual children. This study investigated effects of immersion in Cherokee as a second language on young children's (4;5-6;1) skills of noticing morphological forms/patterns in English, their first language, by comparing English past tense skills on two nonword and two real-word…

Collocation is practically very tough to Chinese English learners. The main reason lies in the fact that English and Chinese belong to two distinct language systems. And the deep reason is that learners tend to develop different metaphorical concept in accordance with distinct ways of thinking in Chinese. The paper, taking "absorb…

The development of oral language and specifically increased control over literate discourse is critical to students' ability to create and comprehend texts in the early years of schooling and beyond. For students with home languages that differ from the forms of language used in school, the development of oral language through carefully designed…

Because idioms are omnipresent in the authentic language students are exposed to, to successfully comprehend and produce natural language, learners of a second or foreign language need to possess a good knowledge of idioms and competence in idiom use. This paper examines the approaches to teaching and learning idioms. A discussion of the…

This study examines the acquisition of target-like patterns of variation by 22 American learners of French during study abroad (SA) in France and correlates such acquisition with the creation of dense, multiplex, exchange-based social networks (Milroy 1980) with native speakers (NSs) during the SA period. In this longitudinal study, naturalistic…

Three analyses of Spanish-English cognates were conducted, with the purpose of identifying features that might facilitate or inhibit bilingual students' cognate recognition and cross-language transfer of vocabulary knowledge. Results revealed that both the General Service List and the Academic Word List (AWL) contain a substantial number of…

The following article aims to revisit Selinker's theory of Interlanguage by analysing a group of undergraduates' written scripts in L2. The initial outcomes of the study establish a linguistic parallelism between students' Interlingua and English as a lingua franca in the academic world. In the light of this comparison, certain theoretical…

Foreign language (FL) education has been marked by a monolingual principle that has favoured "intralingual" methodologies. Bakhtin's view of language interillumination--that languages throw light on each other--challenges such language teaching practices radically. Using conversation analysis methods, this article examines transcripts of…

The literature on formulaic language lacks sufficient research on how L2 learners make progress in native-like formulaicity of their target language. This study analyzed the use of formulaic sequences (FSs) by 56 Chinese university English majors in their prepared monologues at the beginning and end of a three-year period and compared the student…

The purpose of this study is to elicit problem causing word stress patterns for Turkish EFL (English as a foreign language) learners and investigate whether Internet-based pronunciation lesson is superior to traditional pronunciation lesson in terms of enhancing Turkish EFL learners' accurate production of stressed syllables in English words. A…