Background: Spelling acquisition requires the assimilation of the regularities of the writing system, but these regularities may differ between the native and a foreign language. English spelling acquisition is a challenge for Spanish-speaking children due to differences in the orthographic systems. The aim of this study was to examine to what…

Reading acquisition involves connections between the spoken language and the writing system. The English-language writing system holds an inconsistent alphabetic system, thus encouraging readers to develop representations between the grapheme and the word. Reading in English as a Foreign language supposes a challenge, especially when the reader's…

This article reports the results of a study that explored Thai EFL learners' repertoire of congruent and incongruent academic English (L2) collocations in relation to their native-Thai language (L1) and academic experience. Eighty Thai tertiary students performed a gap-filling translation test on 15 congruent and 15 incongruent collocations by…

Awareness of the career to be pursued can be present as early as childhood and can vary according to knowledge and interest. Most of today's children are more focused on achieving excellence in education, but still vague in the career that will be pursued. This situation persisted when they continued their studies at higher education and they…

Previous studies of semantic implicit learning in language have only examined learning grammatical form-meaning connections in which learning could have been supported by prior linguistic knowledge. In this study we target the domain of verb meaning, specifically semantic preferences regarding novel verbs (e.g., the preference for a novel verb to…

Sixty-eight undergraduate translation students received direct instruction in the features of news headlines and news stories. A week later, they took a test that required them to identify the syntactic and lexical features of a sample of news headlines and news stories, supply deleted word, and substitute punctuation marks, infinitives, and block…

Recent research has demonstrated that L2 learners and heritage speakers might have two different profiles in terms of their syntactic, morpho-syntactic, and lexical-semantic knowledge of a target language (Montrul, 2004, 2006, 2010; Montrul, Foote, & Perpinan, 2008). However, the most influential of the major studies have been limited to…

This study investigated learner knowledge of the figurative meanings of 30 collocations that can be both literal and figurative. One hundred and seven Chilean Spanish-speaking university students of English were asked to complete a meaning-recall collocation test in which the target items were embedded in non-defining sentences. Results showed…

This article describes a research study that determined the depth of vocabulary knowledge of 28 intermediate ESL learners. The study was carried out with Bricklayer, a vocabulary assessment tool for L2 English which tested the ESL learners on 72 words. Two post-tests collected evidence for concurrent validity. A semantic distance test captured…

Morphological awareness can help learners of a second language (L2) infer and learn the meaning of unknown words. It is, however, unclear how morphological awareness evolves in adult English-speaking learners of instructed L2 Spanish and how this development relates to vocabulary knowledge. Moreover, the manner in which derivational morphology is…

Second language (L2) learners' successful performance in an L2 can be partly attributed to their knowledge of collocations. In some cases, this knowledge is accompanied by knowledge of the semantic and/or grammatical patterns that motivate the collocation. At other times, collocational knowledge may serve a compensatory role. To determine the…

The sheer quantity of words known (breadth) is strongly predictive of reading comprehension, yet little is understood about how quality of word knowledge (depth) affects comprehension. A group of 35 bilingual and monolingual 5th-grade students worked on developing depth of knowledge of 8 words, culminating in an activity in which the students…

This experimental study on the acquisition of the double-object construction in Spanish as a second language (L2) by a group of first language (L1) English adults investigates the role of Universal Grammar (UG) and its interaction with L1 in two modules of grammar: morphosyntax and semantics. The double-object construction in Spanish differs from…

The 12th iteration of the International Conference on Educational Data Mining (EDM 2019) is organized under the auspices of the International Educational Data Mining Society in Montreal, Canada. The theme of this year's conference is EDM in Open-Ended Domains. As EDM has matured it has increasingly been applied to open-ended and ill-defined tasks…

The study investigated the role of a second language (L2) learner's prior cultural knowledge in target language lexical meaning-making. Comparison focuses on what important similarities in L2 lexical meaning-making of culturally loaded words appear among learners with the same ethnic background, and what important lexical meaning differences exist…