This study examined the development of automaticity in processing L2 collocations, and the roles of L1 collocational knowledge and practice conditions in the development process. Korean learners of English were assigned to one of two practice conditions (practice in identical or varied contexts). The learning gains for word combinations with and…

This study reports on a self-paced reading experiment exploring whether the figurativeness of collocations affects L2 processing of collocations. The participants were 40 English native speakers and 44 Chinese-speaking English foreign language learners (including doctoral, postgraduate, and undergraduate students). To ensure that the effect…

EFL textbooks, academic material, and language proficiency tests include phrasal verbs. However, many Lebanese high-school EFL learners reflect unfamiliarity with phrasal verbs and tend to avoid them in their language production. To this end, a twofold research was conducted. First, a corpus linguistics analysis of the Lebanese national EFL…

Politics and politicking in Nigeria has assumed a considerably new dimension. Actors articulate their ideology and programmes, and construct their subjects and experiences in diverse linguistic processes with a view to achieving political victory. This paper examines clause structures of President Buhari's "My Covenant with Nigerians" to…

English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) textbooks and internet resources exhibit various formats and implementations of exercises on phrasal verbs. The experimental study reported here examines whether some of these might be more effective than others. EFL learners at a university in Japan were randomly assigned to 4 treatment groups. Two groups were…

Functional connectivity changes in the language network (Price, 2010), and in a control network involved in second language (L2) processing (Abutalebi & Green, 2007) were examined in a group of Persian (L1) speakers learning French (L2) words. Measures of network integration that characterize the global integrative state of a network (Marrelec,…

Second language (L2) learners have been found to experience difficulty in tasks that require the integration of discourse-pragmatic properties with syntactic and semantic properties (Sorace and Serratrice, 2009; Tsimpli and Sorace, 2006; Valenzuela, 2006). The present article investigates the sources of L2 difficulty in a phenomenon where multiple…

This study investigates the combined effects of task-based careful online planning and the storyline structure of a task on second language performance (complexity, accuracy and fluency). Sixty intermediate EFL learners were randomly assigned to four groups (n = 15). Participants were asked to perform two tasks with different degrees of storyline…

The prevalence of formulaicity in naturally occurring language use points to an important role in the way language is acquired, processed, and used. It is widely recommended that second-language instruction should ensure that learners develop a rich repertoire of formulaic sequences. If this is justified, it follows that learner failure to use…

This qualitative study investigates students' perceptions about paraphrasing and their cognitive and meta-cognitive processes in paraphrasing. Four Indonesian advanced EFL students enrolled in Applied Linguistics course of a graduate program in English Language Teaching of a state university in Malang were voluntarily willing to participate in the…

This study investigated how English as a foreign language (EFL) learners' types of language for thinking and types of oral elicitation tasks influence their lexical collocational errors in speech. Data were collected from 42 English majors in Taiwan using two instruments: (1) 3 oral elicitation tasks and (2) an inner speech questionnaire. The…

Previous studies have demonstrated the efficacy of the Text Structure Strategy for improving text recall. The strategy emphasizes the identification of text structure for encoding and recalling information. Traditionally, the efficacy of this strategy has been measured through free recall. The present study examined whether recall and eye-movement…

This paper presents a series of experiments that tested the usefulness of teaching Spanish mood using an approach to Cognitive Grammar specifically developed for the foreign language classroom: "Operational Grammar." Mood selection is one of the most difficult aspects of learning Spanish as a FL, and it is one of the last features…

Describes how Turkish and Morrocan adults acquire Dutch possessive clauses in which the verb "have" expresses the possessive relationship. The acquisition process is explained within the framework of recent generative theory on which "have-clauses are assumed to be popular locative constructions. (Author/VWL)

Focuses on acquisition of functional categories in the French determiner phrase. Development of determiners and prenominal adjectives in three bilingual Swedish-French children is compared with that of Swedish second language learners of French. Argues that acquisition is crucially different in these two cases. Bilingual children initially have…