Purpose: Assessing whether a book is relevant or suitable for use in teaching materials is not an easy and haphazard matter, various methods and theories have been offered by researchers in studying this matter. Taking a study of the context of textbooks, researchers found the urgency that textbooks are a foundation for education, socialization…

This paper explores two prominent strands of inquiry within new materialism -- Deleuze and Guattari's assemblage thinking and Karen Barad's agential realism -- and situates them in relation to language studies. While a singular definition of new materialist scholarship is not feasible, we argue that the selected approaches have potential to come…

The Topic Hypothesis posits that Chinese language learners progress through a developmental sequence comprising five stages (Gao, 2009; Wang, 2011), which includes the Object-Subject-Verb (OSV) structure at stage 4 and the ba-construct at stage 5. According to this hypothesis, learners typically master the OSV structure before acquiring the…

Language is crucial for adapting to society, and learning different languages enhances human efficiency. Learning a second language involves acquiring any language in addition to one's native language. Second Language Acquisition (SLA) has two meanings, generally, it describes the process of learning a second language, and more specifically, it…

This special issue revisits a classic topic in linguistic theory, A-bar movement, applied to developing and bilingual grammars. We claim that A-bar movement, or filler-gap dependencies, is still the quintessential linguistic phenomenon to illustrate the interaction between the biological endowment, the experience with language (past and present),…

Critical literacy in EFL context has been examined from different perspectives. However, there is limited empirical evidence of how news critical literacy is examined discursively among college EFL learners. By deploying a Projection profile from Systemic Functional Linguistics, this paper contributes to the written evaluation of college EFL…

Study 1: The present work examined the connection between language and conceptual development, investigating whether false-belief reasoning (FBR) and source-monitoring ability (SMA) abilities within the theory of mind (ToM) framework constrained the comprehension of semantic and pragmatic knowledge (evidential scalar implicatures) encoded in the…

While language aptitude and motivation are considered to be important contributors to second language (L2) attainment, two major gaps in the past research have been (1) a lack of nonlinear models stemming from a naive and tacit assumption that learning outcomes are linearly related to their predictors, and (2) a lack of unified and integrative…

"Second Language Acquisition -- Learning Theories and Recent Approaches" will aim to present the process of learning an additional language apart from one's native language. The process of understanding, writing, and speaking another language with fluency involves complex intellectual and emotional responses as well as continuous…

Acquisition of the perfective marker "-le" in Mandarin Chinese is a daunting task for second language learners. To date, there has been no consensus on what it is about "-le" that makes it such a challenge to learners. This study investigates the acquisition of "-le" from both a lexical perspective and a discourse…

Linguistic plurality is a situation in which a speech community speaks more than one language. It is a complex sociolinguistic phenomenon that helps explain the complexity of human nature. Human beings cannot exist in isolation and are therefore inclined towards interaction and transaction. The need and desire to interact leads to language…

This comparative case study explores the roles of reading-to-write and writing-only approaches on students' L2 writing skills. Six third-year English major students from a Thai university, with diverse proficiency levels, participated in the study. Data from students' writing samples, semi-structured interviews, and observations were analyzed…

Studies on teachers' beliefs about vocabulary learning and teaching have focused, so far, on English as a second language (L2), or foreign language (FL), in different contexts but little attention has been given to other L2s and FLs. In this study, 15 Spanish L2 instructors at large universities were interviewed in order to better understand where…

Whether or not to teach grammar explicitly is an issue that has long been debated in the field of SLA. There seems to be a growing consensus among many researchers now in support of embedding some element of explicit instruction within a communicative curriculum. The main arguments in support of explicit instruction are threefold: two widely cited…

This study utilizes Appraisal Theory, Visual Grammar Theory and the concept of peace values to conduct its investigation. Specifically, this study centers on the discursive methods employed to instill peace values, encompassing (1) the frequency of their occurrence, (2) the use of visual elements and (3) the incorporation of narrative elements for…