The construct of reading is presented in language assessment. Previous studies have focused on reading issues encountered by English learners, most of which are manifested by certain linguistic features: lexical bundles (LBs). Addressing this, the study aims to analyze LBs in reading comprehension passages in the Chinese National Matriculation…

Research has shown that learning a known-and-unknown word combination leads to greater learning than learning an unknown word alone (Kasahara, 2010, 2011). These studies found that attaching a known adjective to an unknown noun can help learners remember the unknown noun. Kasahara (2015) found that a known verb can serve as an effective cue to…

According to rational adaptation approaches of language processing, readers adjust their expectations of upcoming information depending on the distributional properties of the preceding language input. However, adaptation to sentence structures has not been systematically attested, especially not in second-language (L2) processing. To further our…

While previous research has provided insights into vocabulary learning through extensive reading, the differential effects of word frequency and word class on active form and passive meaning word recognition remain less understood. By evaluating learners' post-test performance in active form recognition and passive meaning recognition, this study…

We investigate whether second language (L2) learners of English rely on first language (L1) transfer and atomicity in the acquisition of the count/mass distinction by examining L1-French and L1-Chinese learners of English. Atomicity encodes whether a noun contains 'atoms' or minimal elements that retain the property of the noun. As a semantic…

The present study sets out to measure Turkish EFL learners' receptive affix knowledge and productive derivative vocabulary knowledge. More specifically, the extent to which Turkish EFL learners recognize written form of affixes, know the meaning of affixes and determine the part of speech of the derivatives produced by means of affixes and how…

For elementary learners of Japanese, one of the main difficulties in reading is to distinguish words written in kana. This paper reports on a survey of elementary level learners with two different levels of proficiency to investigate the effectiveness of Japanese graded readers with parts of speech color-coded to distinguish nouns, verbs,…

The current study explores the effects of processing demands and proficiency on second language (L2) learners' acceptability judgment of wh-island sentences. A total of 65 adult Korean learners of English and ten native speakers (NSs) of English participated in an experiment that combined self-paced reading and acceptability judgment. They were…

Experimental research on the interface between second language vocabulary knowledge, including collocations, and translation competence is scarce. The present study investigates the role played by three determinants of collocation knowledge (knowledge level -- recall versus recognition, congruency, and constituent word types) in the accuracy of…

This study aimed to explore the types of pronunciation errors that student interpreters make in pronouncing foreign Proper Nouns during English-Arabic and Arabic-English Liaison Interpreting, the pronunciation error strategies that students utilize when they encounter unfamiliar Proper Nouns in media discourse, and the factors that affect…

English articles are thought to be complex, ambiguous and not salient in spoken language, which is why second language (L2) learners of English exhibit usage variability. Much of the L2 acquisition literature seems to agree that L2 learners are affected, one way or another, by their first language (L1). However, the debatable and controversial…

This study examines the difficulty shown by Spanish-speaking university students in decoding pre-modified noun phrases (NPs) in English. NPs carry a heavy lexical and conceptual load and foreign language (L2) readers may be challenged by first language (L1) crosslinguistic influence triggered by cognate NPs. Therefore, this study also attempts to…

The study was conducted to investigate the L2 acquisition of English generics by L1 Arabic speakers. The present study considered the two types of genericity (NP-level vs. sentence-level). Since generics in Arabic are always definite, the study investigated whether L1 Arabic speakers perform similarly in both types. The study recruited 43…

Background: Individuals with dyslexia demonstrate syntactic difficulties on tasks of language comprehension, yet little is known about spoken language production in this population. Aims: To investigate whether spoken sentence production in college students with dyslexia is less proficient than in typical readers, and to determine whether group…

Grammatical and lexical cohesion are necessary conditions to guarantee a text's coherence (Halliday and Hasan 1976). Grammatical cohesion is classified into four types of relation: reference, conjunction, substitution, and ellipsis. This study aims to investigate the use of the cohesive device of reference in written discourse produced by…