It is a well-known fact that advice-giving practices may differ from culture to culture. While some societies such as British culture refrain from giving advice, others such as Turkish may prefer to give advice perceiving it as an indication of solidarity. Thus, precautions for preventing this nature of advice is taken by language itself in a…

The study aimed at investigating the effect of using WhatsApp-based learning activities on developing idiom knowledge among Saudi university English as a foreign language (EFL)students compared to conventional method. It also examined the students' perceptions towards the application of WhatsApp in idiom-learning. The rationale for conducting this…

Usage of definite and indefinite articles is known to vary across different varieties of English, especially in the outer circle. As a semantic/pragmatic category, definiteness is notoriously slippery to define -- is it uniqueness, familiarity, inclusiveness or identifiability? Literature has shown that the lack of an agreed definition can…

Purpose: Better auditory prostheses and earlier interventions have led to remarkable improvements in spoken language abilities for children with hearing loss (HL), but these children often still struggle academically. This study tested a hypothesis for why this may be, proposing that the language of school becomes increasingly disconnected from…

This dissertation draws on both qualitative and quantitative approaches to investigate the linguistic practices of teachers and children who are learning Mandarin Chinese as a Heritage Language (CHL) in two dual immersion preschools in California. CHL children have been interpreted as novice members in local speech communities who actively explore…

The study is aimed at exploring Master's students' sense-making of various second language (L2) texts and its correlation with interpretation depth and the students' intercultural competence. The significance of this research lies in the fact that it provides an insight on culture-specific issues challenging for advanced and proficient Ukrainian…

The present study aimed to catalogue and compare usage patterns of verb-particle constructions (VPCs) in Modern Standard Arabic and English by native and learner writers. Building upon an analysis of a multi-genre monolingual Arabic corpus, use of both Arabic and English VPCs was explored in a bilingual L1 (first language) Arabic L2 (second…

Introductory "it" pattern, as in "it was found that," is of significance in academic writing but the use of introductory "it" might be challenging especially for native- and non-native students and non-native academic writers. However, few studies have been conducted to compare the use of introductory "it"…

The visual-manual modality of sign languages renders them a unique test case for language acquisition and processing theories. In this commentary the authors describe evidence from signed languages, and ask whether it is consistent with Ambridge's proposal. The evidence includes recent research on collocations in American Sign Language that reveal…

This study reports findings from two truth value judgment experiments to address two research questions on Mandarin: (i) whether children and adults have the knowledge of the structural constraint Principle C in their pronoun resolution; and (ii) whether adults and children show the prohibition effect of the cyclic-c-command constraint or the QR…

Escape games are an increasingly popular leisure activity involving a group of players completing tasks to achieve a pre-defined goal, which is usually escaping from a room. In this chapter, I briefly outline the educational potential of escape game activities in language classes within the frameworks of gamification, pervasive learning, and…

Extracting the regularities of our environment is one of our core cognitive abilities. To study the fine-grained dynamics of the extraction of embedded regularities, a method combining the advantages of the artificial language paradigm (Saffran, Aslin, & Newport, [Saffran, J. R., 1996]) and the serial response time task (Nissen & Bullemer,…

Multiple constraints, including semantic, lexical, and usage-based factors, have been shown to influence dative alternation across different languages. This work explores whether fine-grained statistics and semantic properties of the verb affect the acceptability of dative constructions in Spanish. First, a corpus analysis reveals that verbs of…

Recent communicative teaching approaches view learning English as a Foreign Language (EFL) as involving more than knowledge of grammar structures. Students are expected to develop communicative skills which allow them to interact inside and outside the language classroom. To this end, learning idioms plays a significant role because these…

This dissertation investigated the caregiving relationships between infants and nonparental caregivers in early childcare settings through the lens of attachment and language behaviors. This study sought to provide an opportunity to extend our understanding of the socioemotional factors that influence children's development in their daily lives.…