This study investigates the probable effect of a digital game-based vocabulary learning (DGBVL) task on the acquisition of some components of a word knowledge framework. In so doing, 124 Persian speakers (56 males and 68 females) were randomly assigned to either a control or an experimental group. The experimental group participants completed a…

Recent research in SLA indicates that collocations are an indispensable aspect of language learning. Its importance in learners' writing ability is, therefore, undeniable. Thus, the present study attempted to explore the effect of explicit teaching of collocations on learners' awareness and use of them in their writing. It differed from previous…

Following an emergentist approach, the authors examined the comprehension of four different types of restrictive relative clauses (direct object/oblique vs. subject/indirect object) with animate/inanimate referents by Iranian EFL learners. To this end, an Oxford placement test and two sets of comprehension tests within a week's interval were…

This mixed two-way experimental, cross-sectional study investigated fast-mapping (FM) of novel nouns and verbs in 63 Persian-speaking toddlers aged 30 months, including 31 late-talking (LT) and 32 typically developing (TD) matched with respect to age and maternal education. Toddlers were classified as LT if they had limited expressive vocabulary…

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…

This study investigates the Iranian EFL learners' Knowledge of Lexical Collocation at three academic levels: freshmen, sophomores, and juniors. The participants were forty three English majors doing their B.A. in English Translation studies in Chabahar Maritime University. They took a 50-item fill-in-the-blank test of lexical collocations. The…

This study investigated the developmental and fossilized prepositional errors in Persian EFL learners' compositions at three levels of proficiency; participants were divided into lower-intermediate, upper-intermediate, and advanced levels. For each participant, four compositions were collected, and after identifying the prepositional errors for…

An important aspect of native speakers' communicative competence is collocational competence which involves knowing which words usually come together and which do not. This paper investigates the possible relationship between knowledge of collocations and the use of verb noun collocation in writing stories because collocational knowledge…