A study of advanced English learners' use or avoidance of English idioms is described. The investigation looked at whether the subjects would attempt to use English idioms in a translation task containing idioms, or would instead use non-idiomatic synonyms or paraphrase. It also looked at which idioms are used and which are avoided: those that are…

A review of the difficulties Spanish-Americans and Mexican-Americans encounter in learning English, caused by a lack of knowledge of common idioms and figures of speech in current usage, leads to a discussion of two pilot studies in which the frequency of occurrence of idiomatic and figurative constructions in the reading materials presented to…

This collection of papers is the first in a series that will highlight cutting-edge research in the area of second language learning and teaching. After an introduction, "The Second Language Educator's Challenge: Learning about Literacy" (JoAnn Hammadou Sullivan), 12 papers include the following: (1) "Theoretical Developments in…