The purpose of this study was to determine if first-grade English Learners made patterns of language related errors when reading, and if so, to identify those patterns and how teachers coded language related errors when analyzing English Learners' running records. Using research from the fields of both literacy and Second Language Acquisition, we…

This study investigated Vietnamese EFL learners' knowledge of verb-noun and adjective-noun collocations at the first three 1,000 word frequency levels, and the extent to which five factors (node word frequency, collocation frequency, mutual information score, congruency, and part of speech) predicted receptive knowledge of collocation. Knowledge…

Learning a foreign language is a critical skill in the current context of globalization and multicultural communication. Present secondary and post-secondary foreign language classes admit increasing numbers of students with learning disabilities (LD). Given the particular challenges faced by these students in the area of language processing,…

Lexical bundles such as "on the other hand" and "as a result of" are extremely common and important in academic discourse. The appropriate use of lexical bundles typical of a specific academic discipline is important for writers and the absence of such bundles may not sound fluent and native-like. Recent studies (e.g. Adel…

This study examined the effectiveness of Zipfian frequency at facilitating the acquisition of English prenominal past participles. Chinese middle school students (N = 103) were randomly assigned to a sequenced Zipfian frequency (SZF) group, a random Zipfian frequency (RZF) group, a balanced frequency (BF) group, and a control group. A mixed…

Which conditional verb forms proved most difficult for Thai secondary school students to produce, and what errors resulted in written and spoken English, were studied. Data was collected from two tasks: 1) a gap-fill task by 68 twelfth-grade students in an integrated English program at a public high school in Bangkok, Thailand and 2) a spoken task…

This article reports the findings of a comparative analysis of two English teaching course book series which are widely used in school years 4-6 in Sweden: Good Stuff and New Champion. The analysis comprises comparisons of the vocabulary component in the teaching materials and examines the extent to which words -- adjectives, nouns and verbs --…

This study aims to clearly diagnose EFL "students' writing strengths and weaknesses." I adapted a diagnostic framework which comprises multiple writing components associated with three main dimensions of second language writing. The essays of 304 English learners who enrolled in an English language program were double-rated by 13…

Two experiments examined Czech children's comprehension of grammatical number marking in verbs. Children were presented with picture pairs involving one or multiple participants in the same action, and were asked to point to the picture described by a recorded sentence. Experiment 1 (N = 72, age 3;0-4;7) tested four types of sentences, some of…

This article reports on a classroom-based experiment that tested the effects of three vocabulary teaching constructs (involvement load, spacing, and intentionality) on the learning of English verb-noun collocations--for example, "shelve a plan." Laufer and Hulstijn's (2001) "involvement load" predicts that the higher the…

This study compares monolinguals and different kinds of bilinguals with respect to their knowledge of the type of lexical phenomenon known as collocation. Collocations are word combinations that speakers use recurrently, forming the basis of conventionalized lexical patterns that are shared by a linguistic community. Examples of collocations…

Learning a language is more than learning its vocabulary and grammar. For example, compared with English, Spanish uses many more path verbs such as "ascender" ("to move upward") and "salir" ("to go out"), and expresses manner of motion optionally. English, in contrast, has many manner verbs (e.g., "run,…

This study extends the evidence for implicit second language (L2) learning, which comes largely from (semi-)artificial language research, to German. Upper-intermediate L2 German learners were flooded with spoken exemplars of a difficult morphological structure, namely strong, vowel-changing verbs. Toward the end of exposure, the mandatory vowel…

Interest in using mobile applications to enhance students' learning in Spanish classrooms runs high; however, little empirical research about their effects has been conducted. Using intentionally designed classroom activities to promote meaningful learning with a mobile application, we investigated the extent to which students of Spanish as a…

This study examined the effects of an adapted alternating treatments design (AATD) consisting of teacher-facilitated and iPad-facilitated instruction on at-risk preschool children's vocabulary. Instruction was provided on 42 verbs, divided equally between treatments, across five participants over the course of 7 weeks. Dependent variables included…