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…

Learning a second language (L2) is not merely mastering an additional linguistic system, but rather learning a new way of conceptualizing the world. Grammatical development does not always align simultaneously with conceptual development in L2. That explains why L2 learners may produce sentences that are grammatically correct, but pragmatically…

The authors explore how the use of sarcasm in an urban high school English classroom fostered critical language awareness and positive relationships among diverse classroom participants. The guiding research question was, What were the social-pedagogical functions of sarcasm in this classroom? Drawing on interactional sociolinguistics and…

This paper presents findings from observations of literary translation workshops with secondary-school MFL pupils, revolving around a literary translation from L2 to L1 which does not require pre-existing language skills in the L2. Our research questions were: what skills do pupils mobilise when they work in groups on a literary translation? What…

This study aims to explore cross-language intensification in affirmative sentences by examining the translation of standard amplifiers, words that scale upward towards an assumed norm to emphasize a quality of any entities, from Thai into English. The data comprises 602 parallel concordance lines with 17 intensifying patterns, which were drawn…

Within the currently diverse UK higher education environment, one important aspect of learning is the development of intercultural competence. The study that informs this paper investigated the ways intercultural competence was perceived as being enhanced or inhibited through current language and educational practices at a university that…

This anniversary volume of the Association for the Teaching of Spanish in Higher Education in the United Kingdom is a compilation of contributions made by members and delegates at the 2019 ELEUK annual conference held at the University of Edinburgh. Throughout the book, authors share their teaching, assessment, and research practice in the area of…

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…

This study investigates how 6- to 7-year-old children in a bilingual preschool together with their teachers take on the challenge of translating the lyrics to a children's song from Finnish to English. With an interest in how translation activities can engage children in communication and metacommunication, and facilitate the development of…

This study introduces an approach to providing corrective feedback to L2 learners termed analogy-based corrective feedback that is motivated by analogical learning theories and syntactic alignment in dialogue. Learners are presented with a structurally similar synonymous version of their output where the erroneous form is corrected, and they must…

Idioms have long been regarded as problematic for L2 learners due to the arbitrariness of their meanings and forms. Traditional methods of teaching idioms focus on rote learning and memorization. Recent developments in cognitive linguistics research have considered idioms as analyzable expressions which are motivated by conceptual metaphors and…

Recent research in cognitive linguistics has shown that idiomatic phrases are decomposable and analyzable and that the individual words in idiomatic phrases systematically contribute to the overall figurative interpretations. This cognitive linguistic view suggests that enhancing awareness of conceptual metaphors embedded in the individual words…

New evidence shows that some types of metalinguistic awareness could be important for reading comprehension in much the same way that phonemic awareness is important for learning to decode. In a recent study, students between 7 and 9 years old were taught to manipulate language and understand the multiple meanings of ambiguous words and sentences.…

Heritage language speakers constitute a unique cultural and linguistic resource in the United States while also presenting particular challenges for language educators and language programs. This paper examines the potential of systemic functional linguistics (SFL) in a curriculum for Spanish second language learners/heritage speakers, with…

Combining principles of peace education and political discourse analysis, this study dwells on one powerful metaphorical mechanism engaged in by Israeli political leaders: war-normalizing metaphors, a mechanism for framing war as part of human nature and normal life. Six core semantic fields were identified as particularly useful "raw…