This paper presents a novel methodology to determine textbook readability. The method mainly relies on students' lexical coverage to determine the readability level of textbooks, taking into consideration that readability depends primarily on vocabulary knowledge and that it is a function of lexical coverage in teaching English as a Foreign…

Although the field of machine translation has witnessed huge improvements in recent years, its potentials have not been fully exploited in other interdisciplinary areas such as foreign language teaching. The aim of this paper, therefore, is to report an experiment in which this technology was employed to teach a foreign language to a group of…

In order to provide "a common basis for the elaboration of language syllabuses, curriculum guidelines, examinations, textbooks, etc. across Europe", The Common European Framework for Languages (CEFR) was published in 2001 by the Council of Europe. It has affected the way languages are taught, learnt and assessed and also how foreign…

The meaning of words can be influenced by their co-occurrences. Semantic prosody (SP) is attitudinal and evaluative meaning inferred from the habitual lexical environment of a word in a corpus. By introducing SP in an English teaching classroom, teachers can reveal more implicit knowledge about language usage and assist students in reaching…

This study examined how students of English as a foreign language (EFL) with different first language (L1) backgrounds use interactional metadiscourse markers in argumentative writing. Specifically, to explore unique patterns of metadiscourse features that reflect context and development, the essays written by Chinese, Japanese, and Korean EFL…

Much progress has been made in the areas of diminishing, avoiding, and resisting plagiarism, due to the recent development of plagiarism tools. Many scholars/authors across the globe have been struggling with plagiarism, giving a number of lectures and writing articles pinpointing strategies that take into account on-line plagiarism services such…

The present article aims to examine the development of storytelling ability of Thai children. The Thai Frog Story corpus, consisting of a total of 50 narratives by 4-, 6-, 9-, 11- and 20-year-old participants, is used as data for this study. Three main components of narrative macrostructure are employed as the framework for analysis: onset,…

The traditional approach to presenting idioms relies mainly on teachers' or materials writers' judgement, one-by-one and quite incidentally; and the existing teaching materials and references for idioms are mostly intuition-based. However, a more recent approach to better teaching and learning idioms is to present them under categories of their…

This study examines the variable occurrence of preposition duplication in contexts of coordination in Spanish (e.g., "Fui con mi madre y (con) mi padre"). We build on previous research on this variable morphosyntactic phenomenon (namely, prepositions in contexts of coordination) by expanding the type of data and the independent variables…

This paper aimed at investigating humor in text-based computer mediated communication (CMC). To this end, 200 turns exchanged by a number of 50 English language teachers on Viber, a messaging application, were randomly selected and analyzed based on Adam's (2012) classification of humor to examine emoticons, punctuations (question mark,…

The goal of this article is to make the case for a radical exemplar account of child language acquisition, under which unwitnessed forms are produced and comprehended by on-the-fly analogy across multiple stored exemplars, weighted by their degree of similarity to the target with regard to the task at hand. Across the domains of (1) word meanings,…

By employing Chen and Kuo's (2012) framework, this study comparatively investigated the rhetorical differences/similarities existing in the Literature Review chapters of Master of Arts (MA) theses authored by international and Iraqi MA students in the field of applied linguistics. The results showed that almost half of the international LR…

Exploring interaction among Kurdish speaking family members, this paper investigates the use of discourse particles in Kurmanjî-Kurdish in relation to the contact phenomenon between the Kurdish and Turkish languages. Corpus analysis of data obtained from audio and video recordings of family talk on the phone was carried out to examine…

The amount of available digital data is increasing at a tremendous rate. These data, however, are of limited use unless converted into a user-friendly form. We took on this task and built a natural language generation (NLG) driven system that generates journalistic news stories about elections without human intervention. In this paper, after…

Metaphor research has always been conducted with various purposes in mind, among which the diachronic analysis of metaphor variation in discourse is outstanding. The current work followed a qualitative research mould to analyze the use of conceptual metaphors within the two novels "Persuasion" and "The Fault in Our Stars,"…