Formulaic expressions (FEs), such as conventional collocations (e.g., fresh air) and phrases (e.g., take a break), constitute a significant part of language use in our daily lives (Erman & Warren, 2000). FEs are defined as multiword units that holistically represent a single meaning, and they are likely stored and retrieved as unanalyzed…

This study is intended to help English foreign language learners avoid a type of syntactic ambiguity in sentences resulting from prepositional phrases (PPs). The students are guided to make use of the features of both adverbials and adjectivals in resolving this type of ambiguity. The movability of adverbials and the use of relative clauses…

Idioms are highly conventionalized expressions that allow users to express beyond literal meanings. Despite the language difference, counterparts of idioms may overlap cross-culturally due to similar origin, social habits, and experiences. It is therefore interesting to probe whether L2 learners may benefit from deliberate instructions built on…

This research study aims to explore students' perceptions and reflections on the effectiveness of project-based learning (PBL) in a Thai-English translation course in the EFL context. The participants of this study included forty-nine students who were enrolled in the Thai-English translation course. The participants were asked to produce a…

Past experimental studies of corrective feedback (CF) have isolated factors like grammatical complexity, learner proficiency, and L1 one by one, carefully designing experiments that eliminate the influence of "extraneous" factors. Because each factor is actually codependent, more holistic study is needed. Eleven studies, all of which had…

This current study aimed to investigate the influence of derivational and inflectional morphological awareness on the writing of undergraduate students studying English as a Foreign Language. They were divided in to two groups and each group comprised 200 advanced EFL learners. Explicit morphological instructions were given to group two in the…

The present study aimed at developing English as a foreign language (EFL) college students' translation performance through raising their awareness of related syntactic and semantic errors. During the pilot study, the researcher analyzed fifty translated passages from students' assignments. The aim of this systematic analysis was necessary to…

Background: Children diagnosed with intellectual difficulties experience difficulties with narrative skills, due to limited syntactic knowledge. The Colourful Semantics approach with thematic roles and a colour coding system may encourage syntactic development in children experiencing intellectual disabilities. Aim: To evaluate the effectiveness…

Purpose: The present article reports on the implementation and results of a randomized intervention trial targeting the literate language skills of prekindergarten children without identified language disorders but with low oral language skills. Method: Children (N = 82; 45 boys and 37 girls) were screened-in and randomized to a business-as-usual…

Clinical Question: Would Spanish-speaking ELL students who struggle to learn to write (P) benefit more from a writing intervention that addresses cognitive (executive function) and social well-being (motivation, peer inclusion) (I), or writing intervention strategies that address written language text macrostructure or microstructure only (C), as…

In the information systems field there are numerous programming languages that can be used in specifying the behavior of concurrent and distributed systems. In the literature it has been argued that a lack of pragmatic and semantic consideration decreases the effectiveness of such specifications. In other words, to simply understand the syntactic…

Second language acquisition research into the effects of corrective feedback has investigated a variety of learning targets using a wide range of implicit and explicit feedback types (Li, 2010). To date, however, its linguistic focus has been limited to theoretically noticeable surface features (Carroll, 2001; Schmidt, 2001), and researchers have…

Learning a second language is very difficult, especially, for the disabled; the disability may be a barrier to learn and to utilize information written in text form. We present the SignMT, Thai sign to Thai machine translation system, which is able to translate from Thai sign language into Thai text. In the translation process, SignMT takes into…

Discussion of problems in computer assisted instruction focuses on poorly written software and the role of computer programing. Use of computers without programing knowledge is discussed, and pragmatics is emphasized as the discipline needed to supplement syntax and semantics in the field of computer science. (seven references) (LRW)

Ten students (ages 10-12) with severe written and spoken language difficulties were provided explicit instruction in phonological processing skills and semantic-syntactic skills. Results indicated that phonological and semantic-syntactic deficits could be remediated successfully, and improvement in these skills had significant positive effects on…