The purpose of this article is to analyze a task included in the LINC Home Study (LHS) program. LHS is a federally funded distance education program offered to newcomers to Canada who are unable to attend regular LINC classes. A task, in which a language structure (a gerund) is chosen and analyzed, was selected from one instructional module of LHS…

Teacher preparation programs commonly use observational instruments to assess the progress and the exit performances of teacher candidates. However, while these instruments have been described and several have been studied for effectiveness, the field lacks a close examination of how they position participants: teacher candidates, K-12 pupils, and…

Idiomatic expressions pose substantial learning difficulties for learners across languages and tend to be acquired later in the course of language development both in L1 and L2. A number of factors have been identified as contributing to this difficulty. However, cross-linguistic studies on figurative language acquisition are still rare. The…

One of the linguistic outcomes of the sustained contact of a target language (L2) with a source language (L1) in the course of history is the adaptation and integration of loanwords from the former into the lexicon of the latter. This paper discusses the phonological strategies and parameters for the adaptation of English consonants (which mainly…

The most widely used language in research, business, politics and other areas of life in our contemporary world is the English language. The exploration of the world by the British people through colonization and their conquest of North America contribute immensely to the spreading of the language. This paper traces the historical spread of…

Few studies have compared the written competency of French immersion students and their core French peers, and research on these learners at a postsecondary level is even scarcer. My corpus consists of writing samples from 255 students from both backgrounds beginning a university course in French language. The writing proficiency of core French…

The study aimed to identify different second language (L2) learner motivational types drawing on the framework of the L2 motivational self system. A total of 1,278 secondary school students learning English in Iran completed a questionnaire survey. Cluster analysis yielded five different groups based on the strength of different variables within…

This study investigates the relationship in L2 writing between raters' judgments of communicative adequacy and linguistic complexity by means of six-point Likert scales, and general measures of linguistic performance. The participants were 39 learners of Italian and 32 of Dutch, who wrote two short argumentative essays. The same writing tasks…

Previous research within the field of argumentation has established that argumentation plays an important role in a variety of professions. Written argumentation has been extensively explored and investigated to examine its various aspects, including argument structures and schemes, argumentative strength, the role of audience, the evaluation of…

Social class has been underresearched in the field of applied linguistics. The central goal of this forum was to stimulate more conversation about social class as it impacts language learning and teaching. In this article, I comment on 3 salient themes that have emerged in the 5 articles: (1) agency and structure in language learning and teaching,…

Exposure real life language experiences forms an integral part of the acquisition process. Authentic materials--those derived from the culture of the target language rather than specially produced for language learners--increase the relevance of the learning experience by reusing texts taken directly from the target culture. Web 2.0 technologies…

This narrative article analyses three Korean undergraduate students' experiences conducting a linguistic landscape research project. Linguistic landscape research, the study of publicly displayed language such as billboards and other signs, is a relatively new area of scholarly interest. However, there has been only limited study of using…

This study explores various linguistic strategies that characterize what is commonly referred to as "Spanglish"; namely, code-switching, code-mixing, borrowings and other language contact phenomena commonly employed by Chicana/o bilinguals. The analysis of linguistic features is based on creative pieces of writing produced by Chicana/o…

Sarcasm production and comprehension have been traditionally described in terms of pragmatic factors. Lexical cues have received less attention, but they may be important potential indicators. A major obstacle to examining such features is determining sarcastic intent. One solution is to analyze statements explicitly marked as being sarcastic.…

There have been many studies on the acquisition of English unaccusative verbs which make use of learner corpora. Most of these studies have so far concluded that even advanced learners of English ungrammatically passivize unaccusative verbs and produce sentences such as "*The accident was happened" and "*The mobile phone was…