This study examines low-intermediate to advanced ESL learners' awareness of semantic prosody. Semantic prosody is a word/unit association that expresses an attitudinal meaning (described as favourable, neutral, unfavourable), which emerges from the word's typical lexical environment. Sensitivity to and awareness of such associations is an…

This study examined the responses of 39 first-year, 63 second-year, 20 third-year, and 19 fourth-year US college learners of German when they were asked what forms of L2 grammar they, respectively, find particularly difficult; do not expect to ever acquire fully; and believe are not necessary for self-expression. Nominal morphology--particularly…

Johns reports in his text "Kibbitzing one-to-ones" (1997) that corpus-informed metatalk with a foreign language expert helps apprentice writers to make progress in independent text revision. Expecting this progress to be based on the development of expert-like ways to observe language features, I integrated Johns' so-called kibbitzing…

In an analysis of learners' reflections taken in real time, this study attempts to unveil what learners attend to during a task session. A total of 110 Japanese learners of English noted rationales for their form selections of epistemic modal verbs. The data were then coded and tallied to enable quantitative analysis and to examine the association…

It has been suggested recently that it may be useful for language teaching practitioners to have some knowledge of cognitive linguistics. Cognitive linguistics (CL) provides tools that may help the language-teaching practitioner to gain insight into the semantic potential of words and communicate the meaning of lexical chunks in greater detail…

This study investigates learners' knowledge of word classes (i.e. noun, verb, adjective) in their second language (L2). Although some L2 studies have examined the problem of word class indirectly through a focus on vocabulary and the teaching of derivational morphology (Morin, 2003, 2006; Schmitt & Zimmerman, 2002), little is known about learners'…