Many sentences of adult English are analytic constructions, namely clauses with a matrix verb complemented by a dependent predicate that does not have an expressed syntactic subject. Examples are subject and object control, raising to subject or object, periphrastic tense, aspect and modality, copular predication and "do"-support. In…

Adopting systemic functional linguistics (hereafter SFL) as the main theoretical framework, this study as part of a larger research project, aimed to examine how the language of textbooks deployed in teaching English as a foreign language (EFL) in the Vietnamese context shifted across levels in a book series. In order to do this, this research…

The present study explores subjunctive recognition and production among low-proficiency learners in the written and aural modalities. It seeks to establish whether mood recognition and production are increased due to irregular morphology and/or input manipulation. A total of 97 participants enrolled in second-semester Spanish classes completed…

Famously, "dog bites man" is trivia whereas "man bites dog" is news. This illustrates not just a fact about the world but about language: to know who did what to whom, we must correctly identify the mapping between semantic role and syntactic position. These mappings are typically predictable, and previous work demonstrates…

Previous studies of semantic implicit learning in language have only examined learning grammatical form-meaning connections in which learning could have been supported by prior linguistic knowledge. In this study we target the domain of verb meaning, specifically semantic preferences regarding novel verbs (e.g., the preference for a novel verb to…

This study aims at documenting the challenges that three Mexican students participating in a Content-Based Instruction (CBI) module from a Master's (MA) program in English Language Teaching (ELT) face when writing content and language objectives for CBI lessons. Through qualitative research based on a content analysis design, one lesson plan of…

The purpose of this study was to examine the effectiveness of a technology-based intervention (LanguageLinks: Syntax Assessment and Intervention®; Laureate Learning Systems, Inc., 2013) to improve reading comprehension for d/Deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) elementary students. The intervention was a self-paced, interactive program designed to…

Verb use and the production of verb argument structure in the written texts of children in elementary school is a key stepping stone towards academic writing success that has remained relatively unexplored and is a notable gap in our understanding of writing development. To evaluate the role of verbs in the written narrative texts of children, we…

From a sociocultural perspective, collaborative writing tasks offer opportunities to negotiate in decision-making processes while also sharing responsibility for the production of a single text (Storch, 2013, "Collaborative writing in L2 classrooms." Bristol: Multilingual Matters). Although research has found benefits for such tasks…

Languages differ in how they encode causal events, placing greater or lesser emphasis on the agent or patient of the action. Little is known about how these preferences emerge and the relative influence of cognitive biases and language-specific input at different stages in development. In these studies, we investigated the emergence of sentence…

Previous studies in the acquisition of clitic se in Spanish have focused on the syntactic processes needed to perform detransitivization. However, current approaches on event structure reveal that "se" encodes aspectual information which is crucial for its acquisition. We examine the use, intuition and interpretation of the aspectual…

Adopting the approaches of "pattern hunting" and "pattern refining" (Kennedy & Miceli, 2001, 2010, 2017), this study investigates how seven freshman English students from Taiwan used the Corpus of Contemporary American English to discover collocation patterns for 30 near-synonymous change-of-state verbs and new ideas about…

To achieve a high level of language fluency, learners need to possess sufficient collocational competence. However, collocation is considered a problematic area for many EFL learners, partly because of its arbitrariness. To gain more insight into the problems involving learners' productive collocational skills, the current study examines lexical…

This article hypothesizes that one of the reasons for Chinese EFL learners' rigid use of nominalization and insufficient use of hedging in academic writing can be attributed to the unclear understanding of the relationship between these two expressions. The aim of the research is to first prove and then explain the possible co-occurrence of…

Sixty-eight undergraduate translation students received direct instruction in the features of news headlines and news stories. A week later, they took a test that required them to identify the syntactic and lexical features of a sample of news headlines and news stories, supply deleted word, and substitute punctuation marks, infinitives, and block…