This dissertation investigates the interplay between the implicit knowledge that learners have of a nonnative language and their processing of that language, examining two types of relative clauses (RCs) in English: gapped RCs (e.g., "the man that they hired") and resumptive RCs (e.g., *"the man that they hired him").…

As far as the main purpose of teaching and learning of the Grammar of a language is concerned, it should tell the teachers and learners the principles and parameters of sentence construction in the given language, i.e. English Language in the context of the discussion in this paper. Incidentally, the grammatical device of tense becomes more…

Due to the typological differences between Korean's aspect system and English's aspect system in terms of progressive construction "-ko iss," learners can no doubt have difficulty acquiring and using the "-ko iss" construction in learner Korean. This dissertation investigates two main points: (i) how is the "-ko iss"…

Chinese directional complement (DC) constructions, as a subtype of Chinese multiword sequences, are challenging to acquire for second language (L2) learners. However, little is known about L2 Chinese learners' acquisition of figurative DCs and their comprehension of literal and figurative DCs. This study investigated whether the acquisition of…

Acquisition of an argument structure may be affected by the diversity of lexical types that appear in that structure (Conwell et al., 2011; Yang, 2016). Seventy-two 5- and 6-year-old English-speaking children completed a learning study where they were exposed to a novel argument structure and then tested on their ability to comprehend it. The…

Natural languages contain systematic relationships between verb meaning and verb argument structure. Artificial language learning studies typically remove those relationships and instead pair verb meanings randomly with structures. Adult participants in such studies can detect statistical regularities associated with words in these languages and…

This study explores the perspectives of the two authors, who have very different language backgrounds, reflecting the subtleties of first and additional language development. We distinguish between a 'literacy-track' (i.e. starting from written language) and an oracy track (starting from spoken language). We draw on duoethnography for our dialogic…

Scholars in writing studies have positioned numerous critiques of the tacit myth of Standard English (*SE) and its use as an unquestioned communicative norm. While these critiques reflect the overlap of the field's translingualism and anti-racist writing assessment movements, they also reveal an empirical need surrounding the writing instructors…

This study revisits and extends McManus and Marsden (2019a) to better understand "how" and "why" providing additional explicit information (EI) about learners' first language (L1) alongside EI and comprehension practice in the second language (L2) improved the accuracy, speed, and stability of L2 comprehension of the French…

Second language learners constitute a significant and expanding portion of the global population and there is a growing demand for tools that facilitate language learning and instruction across various levels and in different countries. The development of large language models (LLMs) has brought about a significant impact on the domains of natural…

This study explored the effects of learning activities which encouraged positive crosslinguistic influence from L2 Spanish to L1 English grammar in young learners. The learners (N = 82) were studying Spanish as their compulsory foreign language at an English state primary school in the UK. As part of ten timetabled Spanish classes over a period of…

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to revolutionize teaching and learning applications. This article examines the word cloud, a toolkit often used to scaffold teaching and learning for reflection, critical thinking, and content learning. Addressing the issues in traditional word clouds, semantic word clouds have been…

The benefits of grammar instruction in the teaching of writing is contested in most English-speaking countries (Jones et al., 2012). The majority of Anglophone countries abandoned the teaching of grammar in the 1950s based on the conclusions that it had no positive impact on learners' development of reading, writing and language (Locke, 2005).…

It is often assumed that cross-linguistically more prevalent distinctions are easier to learn potentially due to their conceptual naturalness. Prior work supports this hypothesis in phonology, morphology and syntax but has not addressed semantics. This work aims to unravel the potential factors that contribute to the learnability and the…

This study discusses the impact of interactionist output-oriented approaches, specifically, the effects of collaborative text reconstruction on subjunctive recognition and production in the written modality by English-dominant Spanish second-language learners. It also examines whether students' text length and text complexity increase after…