Due to globalization, English as a medium of instruction (EMI) has gained popularity in higher education. While EMI is mostly adopted in content courses, content instructors may explicitly or implicitly attend to language to help students comprehend course content. However, little research has explored how content instructors provide language…

Students' knowledge of academic vocabulary is a crucial aspect of learning English as a second or foreign language at the university level. Using academic vocabulary lists could be a valuable resource in teaching and learning vocabulary. This study measured the academic vocabulary size of Nepalese university students using Schmitt's (2010)…

The research aimed at identifying approaches for building a bilingual individual through written an academic text, using five text types for achieving this goal. The analysis of text types used in this study were glossed, bilingual, dictionary assisted text, authentic, task-based text that reveals valuable insights into their effectiveness and…

Despite the extensive research into academic vocabulary in university student writing, little is known about academic vocabulary in international foundation-level students' assessed academic writing. Considering that academic vocabulary is regarded as a key element of academic writing style and that written assignment is one of the main forms of…

Academic vocabulary is necessary for university students. Vocabulary learning strategies (VLS) assist students to enhance their vocabulary knowledge and should be examined in accordance with their dynamic nature (Gu, 2020). Dynamic assessment (DA) is considered an alternative assessment that simultaneously and systematically assesses and teaches…

There are few published estimates of vocabulary sizes amongst students in tertiary education. Research does not offer estimates of the vocabulary size tertiary students might be expected to possess, though estimates exist for K-12 education, some EFL contexts, and the general population. Such research is important. For reading comprehension during…

This study investigates the use of formulaic sequences (FS) in academic writings of Chinese learners of English as a foreign language across different levels of studies at a public university in China. Frequency-based formulas were retrieved from a corpus of student academic texts written at five time points between Year 1 and Year 3. 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…

Academic vocabulary is regarded as an important vocabulary set for students at the tertiary to master's levels. Besides academic vocabulary, field-specific vocabulary is another important set that students in different fields of study should be required to explore. The physical education and sports science English word list was created to assist…

Background: Cognitive and linguistic factors have been incorporated into models to explain reading comprehension beyond classical models of reading. This study explores the contribution of executive functions, mainly domain-general and reading-specific cognitive flexibility, in reading comprehension of science texts in monolingual Spanish speaking…

The involvement load hypothesis (ILH), which predicts the lexical learning potential of tasks, assumes that writing sentences (SW) and compositions (CW) using novel target words (TWs) lead to similar lexical gains. However, research on the issue is scarce and contradictory. One possibility is that the higher cognitive load of CW hinders learning…

This paper focuses on Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL), an educational approach where a foreign language is used to teach non-language subjects. More specifically, this contribution presents new insights into an under-researched area, namely the potential of CLIL in fostering the learning and use of subject-specific target language…

Although research on content and language integrated learning (CLIL) has shown that CLIL instruction may enhance students' second or foreign language learning compared to regular foreign language instruction, there are also studies that have indicated similar language development between CLIL and non-CLIL students. However, CLIL can be organized…

This research project involved a mixed-methods study investigating language-related challenges of first-year students at an English Medium Instruction (EMI) university in Hong Kong. The two-phased sequential study employed a questionnaire survey and semi-structured student interviews. The survey and interview findings indicate that first-year…

This study at a Canadian university grew out of the need to know whether students acquired academic vocabulary incidentally through text exposure (extensive reading) in class. The ability to explicitly teach all the words on the academic word list is an unreasonable expectation for a one-semester course. This study, therefore, investigated whether…