This dissertation aims to revisit foundational issues in syntactic theory regarding cyclicity and displacement. I take narrow syntax to operate over domains ("phases") more local than in current Minimalism. To do this, I define a notion of "phase overlap" which involves the sharing of grammatical features across two independent…

This dissertation analyzes the problem of metaphor identification in linguistic and computational semantics, considering both manual and automatic approaches. It describes a manual approach to metaphor identification, the Metaphoricity Measurement Procedure (MMP), and compares this approach with other manual approaches. The dissertation then…

This study used a pretest-posttest-delayed posttest design at one-week intervals to determine the extent to which written, audio, and audiovisual L2 input contributed to incidental vocabulary learning. Seventy-six university students learning EFL in China were randomly assigned to four groups. Each group was presented with the input from the same…

This article reports the findings of a study in which we investigated the possible effects of word order on the acquisition of case marking. In linguistic typology (e.g. Greenberg, 1963) a very strong correlation has been shown between dominant SOV (subject object verb) word order and case marking. No such correlation exists for SVO (subject verb…

Video viewing can be a valuable resource to expose students to large quantities of input so they can improve their vocabulary and content comprehension. Most studies so far have used short clips and have not explored in much detail the effects of individual differences (IDs) such as aptitude, listening skills and vocabulary size. This paper aims…

This article is a response to Muslim students reporting that they had been silenced by fear of the PREVENT Counter-Terrorism Strategy. By adopting a Critical Realist stance, real generative mechanisms of this actual phenomenon are investigated and theorised. Recognition of changing definitions of both 'radicalisation' and 'extremism' in different…

The present study aims to investigate the effects of gloss use, L2-gloss frequency and learner proficiency on incidental L2 lexical acquisition. A total of 163 university students in China were assigned to one of the three reading conditions: no gloss (NG), higher frequency L2 gloss (HFLG) and lower frequency L2 gloss (LFLG). The participants read…

The purpose of this study is to investigate the production of pragmatic markers (PMs) by multilingual students in a CLIL context. Previous studies have analyzed pragmatic competence in multilingual settings (e.g., Cenoz, 2003; Martín-Laguna & Alcón-Soler, 2015; Portolés, 2015; Safont & Portolés, 2016). However, to the best of our…

This study explores the impact of using TED Talks on improving oral presentation skills of Business English students and vocabulary uptake/retention. It also assesses the impact of improving such hard cognitive skills on increasing Business majors' speaking anxiety level. Sequential explanatory mixed method was used, which includes both…

With the steady increase in the English Language Learner (ELL) population in the U.S., this case study was aimed at capturing elementary teachers' perceptions of how well their teacher preparation program was prepared to teach ELLs. This work utilized the case study design, and included five North American elementary teachers as the subjects of…

The general consensus in the field is that when the home language is different from the language of instruction in school then children's literacy attainments could slow down. In this 26-year review of the literature on children's literacy attainments in low- to middle-income countries, 40 correlational, ethnographic and intervention studies…

The linguistic interdependence hypothesis (Cummins, 1979, 2000) states that children's second-language (L2) proficiency is, to some extent, a function of their first-language (L1) competence. Previous studies have examined this hypothesis with focus on a unidirectional relation from L1 to L2. In the present study, we examined…

Quechua language education and research has long been relegated to rural areas and elementary schools of the Andes. Nonetheless, current language policy in the southern Peruvian region of Cusco has opened new opportunities for Quechua, a minoritized Indigenous language, to be taught in cities and towns and in high schools. In this sociolinguistic…

The current study explored the home and school factors that are important for Singaporean pre-schoolers' (N = 1440) early English development from K1 to P1. Language input quantity and quality factors at home (e.g., number of English books,) and at school (e.g., instructional support in class) were used to predict children's English vocabulary and…

The global spread of English has made it the dominant language in academic publishing (Hyland, Ken. 2015. "Academic Publishing: Issues and Challenges in the Construction of Knowledge." Oxford: Oxford University Press). Influenced by enterprise culture, scholars from peripheral non-Western countries face mounting pressure to publish in…