Studies have shown that informing language learners about the literal underpinning of idioms can help them to remember these expressions. It has also been suggested that prompting learners to guess the meaning of lexical items may be beneficial because it can pique their curiosity and promote cognitive engagement. In the case of idioms, the…

Although teachers have access to a great deal of scholarship on teaching academic vocabulary (AV), much less is known about the experiences and perceptions of English language learners regarding AV. To address this gap, we used an online metaphor elicitation survey and follow-up interviews to collect data from 432 undergraduates at a Hong Kong…

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…

Today reading comprehension is considered an essential skill in modern life, therefore, higher education students require more specific skills to understand, interpret and evaluate texts effectively. Short answer questions (SAQs) are one of the relevant and proper tools for assessing reading comprehension skills. Unlike multiple-choice questions,…

Expressions of impossibility refer to events that can never or rarely happen, tasks that are difficult or impossible to perform, people or things that are of no use and things that are impossible to find. This study explores the similarities and differences between English and Arabic expressions of impossibility, and the difficulties that…

Studies have shown that raising L2 learners' metaphor awareness contributes to the acquisition of figurative language, which fosters students' development of language skills. However, the instruments measuring metaphor awareness, in the majority of relevant research, did not seem to have undergone proper methodological procedures for checking…

The present study endeavors to investigate the learning of the comprehension of semantic interpretation of metaphor in the expository writing by EFL learners at Albalqa Applied University, Jordan. Moreover, the study attempts to see the role of mother tongue influences in the learning and comprehension of semantic interpretation of metaphor in…

In this study, the effects of the conceptual metaphor theory (CMT) on the teaching of orientation idioms was investigated. The study was designed as an action research project and was conducted with 45 B2 level students from 21 countries who were native speakers of 10 different languages. The students were learning Turkish to pursue the…

Richards (2015) states that receptive competence is far more developed in all language users than productive competence and that in L2 learning, new lexis first shows as passive knowledge and later as active or productive competence. Moreover, productive competence is not a natural corollary to receptive competence; rather, the former requires…

The present study investigated how Cantonese speakers learning English as a second language (L2) would comprehend English irony and whether their L2 proficiency and use would moderate their irony processing. Thirty Cantonese speakers with differing English proficiency (intermediate vs advanced) were asked to complete an irony comprehension task in…

Formulaic sequences, particularly idioms and collocations, have received increasing attention in English language learning settings to bridge the gap between daily and academic life. Thus, it is expected to increase students' motivation in English classes when they see reflections of formulaic sequences in their daily lives. Although the number of…

Time metaphorical expressions are common in all languages and in general as well as specialized contexts. This study explores the similarities and differences between English and Arabic time metaphorical expressions containing , and the difficulties that student-translators have in translating them; the translation strategies they use and the…

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…

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 study explores the similarities and differences between English and Arabic numeral-based formulaic expressions, and difficulties that student-translators have with them. A corpus of English and Arabic numeral-based formulaic expressions containing zero, two, three, twenty, sixty, hundred, thousand…etc., and another corpus of specialized…