The present study examined the effect of a pedagogical intervention about humorous verbal irony in Spanish with a mixed group of 40 second language (L2) and heritage speakers of Spanish. Unlike previous studies that have considered only irony comprehension, this project incorporated both comprehension and production of irony into instruction and…

There has been an increased interest among researchers concerning the relationship between faith and English language teaching (ELT) in the context of the global spread of English; however, to this date, very few studies have focused on ELT and Islam. Considering the wider sociopolitical, ideological or religious issues connected to the global…

Taking a psycholinguistic perspective, this book investigates how second language (L2) learners' pragmatic abilities in English can be measured. It complements and extends earlier work on the testing of implicit and explicit grammar. The authors present a set of tests they developed using both well-established methods of measuring pragmatic…

Everyday language consists of many idiomatic and figurative expressions. For non-native English speakers to achieve native fluency, control of idiomatics--native speech that includes the use of both idiomatic and figurative language--is paramount. In this study, I aimed to explore the use of comics and comic strips in the learning and…

Conceptualizing how EMI teachers use language in multilingual university settings remains a challenge. While previous studies have explored the language challenges faced by EMI science teachers, few have operationalized 'classroom routines' for understanding classroom language use. This feasibility study applies Freeman et al.'s (2015)…

Native Arabic speakers used idiomatic expressions such as idioms, formulas, and collocations, in their daily communications. In learning Arabic as a second language (L2), effective communication requires "the ability to understand and use idioms appropriately and accurately in a variety of sociocultural contexts, in a manner like that of…

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…

The purpose of this study was to understand graduate and post-graduate EFL teachers' epistemological beliefs based on the standardized English language and their beliefs on the NEST/NNEST dichotomy. In order to gain a deeper understanding two different group of teachers were formed consisting of graduate and post-graduate level of education. The…

Collocations make it possible to use and understand the language in an effective way. In this context, understanding collocation issues is important for both native speakers and language learners. This study aims at revealing certain determinations and problems with regard to the classification of word combinations in Turkish. For this purpose,…

This study investigated the relationship between a metaphor-based approach to teaching English as a foreign language (EFL) and involvement of the brain's right hemisphere. Specifically, it examined learners' understanding of three levels of sureness associated with different expressions in English -- those that are "certain,"…

Purpose: This study investigated the impact of metaphoric actions--head nods and hand gestures--in producing Mandarin tones for first language (L1) and second language (L2) speakers. Method: In 2 experiments, participants imitated videos of Mandarin tones produced under 3 conditions: (a) speech alone, (b) speech + head nods, and (c) speech + hand…

In countries such as the United States and Canada, an increasing number of non-native English speaking graduate students work in the capacity of university teaching assistants. Over the past several decades, a number of communication challenges between non-native English speaking International Teaching Assistants (ITAs) and native English-speaking…

This article hypothesizes that one of the reasons for Chinese EFL learners' rigid use of nominalization and insufficient use of hedging in academic writing can be attributed to the unclear understanding of the relationship between these two expressions. The aim of the research is to first prove and then explain the possible co-occurrence of…

To date, research into conference interpreting has not produced a definition of the concrete subskills associated with an A, B and C language in interpreters' combinations of working languages. Existing frameworks for performance assessment in foreign languages are not designed to cover the very advanced range of language mastery associated with…

Every speaker of a native language undergoes an interlanguage continuum or the way that the language learners go through from the first to the second language. Interlanguage is an essential theory for teachers to know what goes on in the learning process. It makes the teachers look at the varieties of mistaken linguistic forms with an eye for…