This study investigates the function and morphosyntax of English Embedded Language (EL) islands in Pashto-English bilingual data, using the Matrix Language Frame model to explore the role of the two languages in codeswitching and the pragmatic force behind the selection of EL islands. A dataset of 14 hours was collected from AVT Khyber, a YouTube…

English-language, and especially US-American TV series have been identified as a major point of contact with the target language for learners of English as a Foreign Language, and the discourse represented there constitutes authentic material that is easily accessible. While the potential of using TV discourse in language education has been widely…

This study investigates how visual context influences second language (L2) long-term structural priming for the Chinese "ba" construction. The experiment consisted of a baseline phase, an exposure phase, an immediate posttest, and a delayed posttest. L2 Chinese learners (N = 120) were assigned to 1 of 4 groups for the exposure…

This study explores the effects of extensive audio-visual input with three captioning modes -- unenhanced captions, textually enhanced captions, and no captions -- on learning a variety of L2 grammatical constructions and examines the effects of three learnability factors: construction type, frequency, and recency. A total of 112 participants…

This article examines how the radio drama, or "Hörspiel", might be successfully implemented in the German classroom to train students' ability to listen for context. "Hörspiele" can help students reduce their dependency on visual stimuli, develop critical and discerning listening skills, and acquire familiarity with a…

This article addresses the benefits of audio-visual input for learning second language (L2) vocabulary and grammatical constructions. Specifically, it explores the role of frequency, the effects of subtitles and captions, and the mediating role of learner proficiency on language gains in two longitudinal studies. Study 1 targets vocabulary…

This article intends to show how situation comedies may be used in the English language classroom to develop awareness-raising activities aimed at soliciting an understanding of essentially pragmatic and cultural aspects of everyday language. After a brief overview of studies on pragmatic teachability (Rose and Kasper 2001, 2002) and learnability…

TV shows, especially soap operas and sitcoms, are usually considered by ESL practitioners as a source of authentic spoken conversational materials presumably because they reflect the linguistic features of natural conversation. However, practitioners might be faced with the dilemma of how to evaluate whether such conversational materials reflect…

This practical paper discusses the effect of explicit instruction to raise Japanese EFL learners' pragmatic awareness using online discourse completion tasks. The five-part tasks developed by the authors use American TV drama scenes depicting particular speech acts and include explicit instruction in these speech acts. 46 Japanese EFL college…