In the path of academic writing, authors accomplish certain interactions with their readers through the means of meta-discourse markers such as hedges and boosters. There have been many studies that dwell on the function of meta-discourse markers (Abdi, Rizi, & Tavakoli, 2010; Crismore, 1984; Hyland, 1999, 2000, 2001; Longo, 1994). However,…

In student-teachers' education, it is fundamental to foster the intercultural communicative competence for them to express their views on cultural concepts and phenomena in written and orally, with native and non-native speakers of a foreign language. In the same vein, future foreign language teachers, particularly at an early stage of their…

The present study compared the performance of two groups of second language learners processing three linguistic structures in Spanish. The linguistic targets were passives, object pronouns in O[subscript pro]VS sentences, and gender-cued null subjects in subordinate clauses. The primary differences between the two groups were language experience…

This article examines how the radio drama, or "Hörspiel", might be successfully implemented in the German classroom to train students' ability to listen for context. "Hörspiele" can help students reduce their dependency on visual stimuli, develop critical and discerning listening skills, and acquire familiarity with a…

This study explores how Arab L2 learners of English acquire mass nouns. The mass/count distinction is a morphosyntactically encoded grammatical distinction. Arabic and English have different morphosyntactic realisations of mass nouns. English mass nouns take the form of bare singular whereas Arabic mass nouns can take the definite singular form or…

Depending on the degree to which the original study context is accessible, selective memory retrieval can be detrimental or beneficial for the recall of other memories (Bäuml & Samenieh, 2012). Prior work has shown that the detrimental effect of memory retrieval is typically recall specific and does not arise after restudy trials, whereas…

Although a group of people working together remembers more than any one individual, they recall less than their predicted potential. This finding is known as collaborative inhibition and is generally thought to arise due to retrieval disruption. However, there is growing evidence that is inconsistent with the retrieval disruption account,…

To what extent can second language (L2) speakers acquire a syntactic representation for an L2 structure absent in the first language (L1)? Findings from L2 structural priming studies are in conflict inasmuch as evidence for and against continuity between L1 and L2 sentence production has been shown. Furthermore, previous investigations have not…

Abstract as a summary of a dissertation harbours important information where it serves to attract readers to consider reading the entire passage or to abandon it. This study seeks to investigate the "backward translation" of abstracts made by 10 randomly selected postgraduate students. This research serves as a guideline for students in…

Three source-memory experiments were conducted with Spanish-English bilinguals and monolingual English speakers matched on age, education, nonverbal cognitive ability and socioeconomic status. Bilingual language proficiency and dominance were assessed using standardized objective measures. In Experiment 1, source was manipulated visuo-spatially,…

A sample of political expressions that have been common in Arab media since the Arab Spring in 2011 was collected from TV newscasts, online news websites and social media pages. Analysis of their structure, denotative and connotative meanings revealed the following features: (i) Use of lexical hybrids ([foreign characters omitted]; (ii) revival of…

The difficulty in learning vocabulary is a problem that lies in not anchoring the new items to relevant established entities in cognitive structure. Different categories of associations have been reported to aid facilitating vocabulary acquisition. Collocating vocabulary items is a type of association that is considered to be more efficient in…

This study investigates the second language (L2) acquisition of the English count/mass distinction by speakers of Korean and Mandarin Chinese, with a focus on the semantics of atomicity. It is hypothesized that L1-Korean and L1-Mandarin L2-English learners are influenced by atomicity in the use of the count/mass morphosyntax in English. This…

Prior research has shown that readers are sensitive to causal relations between sentences. In addition, the extent to which readers put weight on causal relations seems to depend on their reading skill. Very little attention, however, has been given to the perception of causal relations linguistically expressed by different types of causal verbs…

Multiple test tasks are available for assessing L2 collocation knowledge. However, few studies have investigated the characteristics of a variety of recognition and recall tasks of collocation simultaneously, and most research on L2 collocations has focused on verb-noun and adjective-noun collocations. This study investigates (1) the relative…