The Katzenberger Hebrew Language Assessment for Preschool Children (henceforth: the KHLA) is the first comprehensive, standardized language assessment tool developed in Hebrew specifically for older preschoolers (4;0-5;11 years). The KHLA is a norm-referenced, Hebrew specific assessment, based on well-established psycholinguistic principles, as…

This study was framed in the sociocultural theory to look into the evolution of L2 learners' beliefs about the general English course during a term. One hundred ninety-eight male and female university students and their general English course teacher were randomly selected as the participants of the study. Data were gathered through the…

Many studies have found EFL/ESL learners over/under/misuse linking adverbials. Because their use is specific to genre and register (Biber et al., 1999), and news writing is a compulsory course for EFL journalism majors at many Chinese universities, this study investigates their usage patterns in news and suggests teaching material design for the…

This practical paper discusses the effect of explicit instruction to raise Japanese EFL learners' pragmatic awareness using online discourse completion tasks. The five-part tasks developed by the authors use American TV drama scenes depicting particular speech acts and include explicit instruction in these speech acts. 46 Japanese EFL college…

This study focuses on the difficulties experienced by the instructors while teaching writing skill to Arabians from Syria, and how these difficulties could be overcome. The study group of the research includes 11 instructors working in Turkish Teaching Centers (TTCs) of Cukurova University and Adana Science and Technology University. The data…

A number of studies have suggested the possible benefits of using concordancers in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) writing. To date, however, there is still limited understanding of how EFL writers may make use of such tools along with dictionaries when engaging in a writing task. To better understand the question, this study investigated a…

Quality Matters Program is designed to certify the quality of online courses in colleges and universities across and beyond the U.S. The Quality Matters Rubric (QMR) consists of eight general standards and 41 specific standards which are used to evaluate and design online and blended courses. The purpose of this study is to highlight the QMR…

While research suggests that study abroad (SA) benefits second language (L2) oral fluency, its benefits for other domains are less clear, especially for shorterterm programs, which are becoming more common. Additionally, studies investigating the relationship between cognitive capacity and benefits of SA report inconsistent patterns. In light of…

This essay formulates a rule for the use of the to+verb and verb+ing finite complements designed to help students and teachers of English as a foreign language. The rule results from an analysis of the distinction between the directional function and inceptive aspect of the to+verb form, rooted in the prepositional origins of to, and the…

The purpose of this research was to highlight the problems ESL students faced when studying social studies at Saint Joseph Bangna School. In particular, what improvements could be made to the kinds of academic exercises contained within the books & websites as teaching materials. It was designed around three research questions relating to what…

Producing a sentence involves encoding a preverbal message into a grammatical structure by retrieving lexical items and integrating them into a functional (semantic-to-grammatical) structure. Individuals with agrammatism are impaired in this grammatical encoding process. However, it is unclear what aspect of grammatical encoding is impaired and…

This dissertation investigates the sociolinguistic perception of morphosyntactic variation and is motivated by exemplar-based approaches to grammar. The study uses syntactic priming experiments to test the effects of participants' exposure to subject-verb agreement variants. Experiments also manipulate the gender, social status, and individual…

When referring to things in the world, speakers produce utterances that are composites of speech and action. Pointing gestures are a pervasive part of such composite utterances, but many questions remain about exactly how pointing is integrated with speech. In this dissertation I present three strands of research that investigate relations of…

Recognition judgments to the non-antecedents of a repeated-noun anaphor are slower and less accurate after than before the processing of the anaphor. Disagreement exists as to whether this pattern of performance reflects a bias shift carried out by a memory process associated with the recognition of a word that has previously occurred in the…

This article documents a fairly rare kind of interlanguage phenomenon, namely one in which interlanguages exhibit syntactic constructions that are grammatical neither in a learner's native language nor in his or her target language, but are nevertheless typologically attested. The target construction is "wh"-scope marking, a cross-linguistically…