Design students must develop competence in a wide range of areas in order to be successful in their future practice. Increasingly, knowledge of design methods is used to frame both a designer's repertoire and their overall facility as a designer. However, there is little research on how students build cognitive schema in relation to design methods…

This study reviews the difficulties that learners of English as a second or foreign language encounter in the use of English articles and puts forward some suggestions that can help advanced learners overcome their problems. It has been observed that learner performance may be deceptive and accurate article selections may be led by inappropriate…

This study addresses the lack of comprehension data in second language acquisition research by focusing on English existential "there"-constructions (ETCs) with a locative extension (e.g., "there is an X on the Y"). The post-copular noun X used in the present study consisted of two types: actual and nonsense. Participants…

Considering the importance of willingness to communicate (WTC) as a critical component of effective pedagogy (MacIntyre et al., 1998), the present qualitative study investigated the affordances extramural digital settings (EDSs), as newly emerged popular environments, offer to advanced EFL learners. To this aim, we asked a purposeful sample of 8…

In argumentative writing, writers are expected to use hedged expressions and stance devices through specific linguistic expressions to convince their proposition effectively. Yet little research attention has been paid to whether the inclusion of such devices is related to the overall quality of second or foreign language learners' argumentative…

This paper illustrates the use of two language-teaching and learning methods (process drama and theatre) in a class of Italian. Process drama is based on improvisation, over-identification, and dramatisation from a short set of coordinates that students can read just a few minutes before the activity that will be later performed in class (see…

The purpose of this study was to analyze six English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners' trajectories of discriminating near-synonyms in a data-driven learning task. Since the learners find it considerably difficult to learn subtle meaning differences of near-synonyms, corpus-based data-driven learning may provide an opportunity for them to…

Usage-based linguistics posits that communicative functions, including pragmatics, are at the core of language (Tomasello, 1992). It is surprising, then, that pragmatics is rarely systematically included in second language curricula (e.g., Bardovi-Harlig, 2017), especially since pragmatics instruction has been shown to significantly contribute to…

The present study examined the interaction effects between teachers' choice of language in lexical explanation and second language (L2) learners' proficiency level on the learning of phrasal verbs and listening comprehension in a meaning-focused listening activity. Undergraduate L2 learners with two different levels of proficiency (intermediate…

The use of 'chunks' is not only a common and characteristic feature of first language use, but may also be a distinguishing factor between less and more proficient second language users. The present study aimed at investigating potential correlations between chunk use and holistically rated proficiency scores and development over time in advanced…

This paper sums up partial results of a long-term project aimed at determining specific needs in teaching advanced English students at the Institute of Foreign Languages of the Faculty of Education, Palacký University, where both authors have been teaching for more than 15 years. In our advanced English students, we have long observed a tendency…

I examine whether teaching formulaic language raises English as a foreign language learners' awareness of pragmatic resources when expressing requests. To carry out this research I adopt a qualitative self-reflective approach which encourages students to use formulaic language when making requests. By responding to discourse completion tasks,…

This article takes the theme of metadiscourse across genres as a point of departure. To illustrate variation in the use of metadiscourse, reflexive uses of second person "you" are examined in different genres and discourse types, all of which represent academic discourse. The material includes university lectures, research articles,…

This article reports on a pedagogical project aimed at helping second language (L2) learners of English develop the ability to detect and appropriately interpret spoken sarcasm. The study used a pre- and posttest procedure to assess the development of learners' ability to both detect sarcasm and impute appropriate speaker intentions and attitudes…

Since modal auxiliary verbs have been proved to be one of the most troublesome grammatical structures in English, the researchers of this study decided to do an analysis on the ways in which advanced EFL Iranian students use modal auxiliaries focusing specially on nine modals' semantic functions. Consequently, was conducted based on the following…