Despite extensive research on assessing collocational knowledge, valid measures of academic collocations remain elusive. With the present study, we employ an argument-based approach to validate two Academic Collocation Tests (ACTs) that assess the ability to recognize and produce academic collocations (i.e., two-word units such as "key…

This case study investigates the effectiveness of paraphrasing guidelines taught in a graduate academic and research writing class at a Thai university. It evaluates the use of paraphrasing strategies, as taught through the guidelines, by students when paraphrasing English-language sources. The assessment considers the students' utilization of…

This study investigated the effects of digital and non-digital gamification on EFL learners' learning collocations, satisfaction, perceptions, and sense of flow. The participants divided into three groups of digitally gamified, non-digitally gamified, and non-gamified classes were 75 Iranian EFL students at B1 level. In each class, students were…

This study investigates the effects of native language experience and phonetic properties on the discrimination of labial-velar versus labial and velar contrasts, as well as voicing contrasts in labials, velars, and labial-velars. Research indicates that phonological perceptions are influenced by native language experience and the specific…

An anonymous survey was given to n = 73 students in an asynchronous online statistical literacy course at a mid-sized Hispanic Serving Institution. Informed by teaching experience, literature on lexical ambiguity, and everyday usage of statistics words and phrases, the first author designed the survey to yield insight into how students view…

We propose that negative clauses are generally interpreted as if the affirmative portion of the clause is under discussion, a likely topic. This predicts a preference for affirmative (topical) antecedents over negative antecedents of a following missing verb phrase (VP). Three experiments tested the predictions of this hypothesis in sentences…

This study explored how visual input enhancement impacts caption-reading behaviors, the acquisition of English collocations, and the recall of onscreen captions. The participants comprised 53 Korean undergraduate students at a high-intermediate level of English proficiency. They were assigned to either a baseline or an enhancement group. The…

Existing work on the acquisition of polarity-sensitive expressions (PSIs) suggests that children show an early sensitivity to the restricted distribution of negative polarity items (NPIs), but may be delayed in the acquisition of positive polarity items (PPIs). However, past studies primarily targeted PSIs that are highly frequent in children's…

The present study implements a corpus-assisted approach with data-driven learning (DDL) in the EFL classroom to investigate its effectiveness in learning target grammatical collocations (verb-, adjective-, and noun-preposition collocations) of Thai undergraduate students and to examine the extent to which the students incorporate the collocational…

While it is known that heritage speakers diverge from the homeland baseline, there is still no consensus on the mechanisms triggering this divergence. We investigate the impact of two potential factors shaping adult heritage language (HL) grammars: (1) cross-linguistic influence (CLI), originally proposed for second language acquisition (SLA), and…

Many students who study English as a foreign language (EFL) often find it challenging to paraphrase while writing from source texts. Lacking such an ability can lead to different meanings as well as copying another person's ideas, words or work. However, little research has been done to integrate tool consultation to assist students in…

Negative sentences are hard to process when they are presented out of context. When embedded in a context of plausible denial their processing difficulty decreases or is completely eliminated. We investigated in six behavioral experiments whether the processing of negation is eased in a denial context triggered by discourse markers (e.g.…

This study examined the pedagogical use of Google Translate (GT) and its associated text-to-speech synthesis (TTS) and automatic speech recognition (ASR) as tools to assist in the learning of second/foreign language Dutch vocabulary and pronunciation in an autonomous, self-directed learning setting. Thirty participants used GT (its translation,…

Pragmatic formulas have been recognized as linguistic building blocks necessary for successful speech act performance. Current approaches to speech act teaching overlook pragmatic formulas, promoting an incomplete view of pragmatics instruction. This paper reports on the results of a classroom-based study in which a formula-enhanced treatment…

A growing number of studies have probed the effectiveness of certain exercise formats in the learning of multi-word expressions (MWEs) in classroom settings. However, a number of important variables, such as MWE retention over an extended period of time and the role of repetition, have so far not been considered. Furthermore, studies have focused…