In this study, an instrument for measuring proper name (PN) familiarity was developed for a psycholinguistic experiment investigating the effect of PNs on Japanese university students' English reading fluency. Familiarity has previously been operationalized in disparate ways, producing contradictory results. Furthermore, authors of previous…

A challenge in reading research, and particularly extensive reading research, is how to manage the transition from the top of graded reading schemes to authentic texts which may be separated from each other by up to 5,000 word families. While texts written for native-speaker children have been recommended at times, recent research has shown that…

There are numerous studies demonstrating facilitated processing of cognates relative to noncognates for bilinguals, providing evidence that bilingual lexical access is language nonselective. We tested whether cross-language activation affects comprehension of larger units of meaning, focusing specifically on comprehension of anaphoric references.…

This study investigates the effects of early second-language (L2) acquisition on introduction of characters in narrative discourse by comparing 5- and 7-year-old monolingual (first-language [L1] = Turkish) and bilingual (L1 = Turkish, L2 = English) children. Turkish does not have a grammaticalized article system like English which enables to…

Significant variation exists in how native speakers respond to word association tasks and challenges the usage of nativelikeness as a benchmark to gauge second language (L2) performance. However, the influence of word class and trials of elicitation is not sufficiently addressed in previous work. With controlled stimuli from multiple word classes,…

This study intends to contribute to L2 emotion vocabulary research by looking at the words that primary-school English as foreign language learners produce in response to prompts in a lexical availability task. Specifically, it aims to ascertain whether emotion prompts (Love, Hate, Happy and Sad) generate a greater number of words than non-emotion…

Different genres of writing entail various levels of syntactic and lexical complexity, and how this complexity influences the results of Automatic Writing Evaluation (AWE) programs like Grammarly in second language (L2) writing is unknown. This study explored the use of Grammarly in the L2 writing context by comparing error frequency, error types…

In this study we explored variation in the countability of nouns in Outer Circle, Expanding Circle and lingua franca Englishes, a phenomenon which is frequently cited as a marker of Inner Circle norms in TESOL and of endonormative and emerging varieties in the Outer and Expanding Circles. We inspected a set of mass nouns like "information" and…

The study reported in this article investigated the use of input-based tasks with young, beginner learners of English as a second language by examining both learning outcomes (i.e. acquisition) and the interactions that resulted from implementing the tasks. The participants were 15 learners, aged six, with no experience of second language (L2)…

The importance of repetition in the acquisition of lexical items has been widely acknowledged in single-word vocabulary research but has been relatively neglected in collocation studies. Since collocations are considered one key to achieving language fluency, and because learners spend a great amount of time interacting with their textbooks, the…

The interpretation of nonlexicalized compound words in English by speakers of English as a second language (ESL) was investigated. Three types of competence used in interpreting noun compounds are identified: pragmatic, linguistic, and textual. The use of these three types of competence by Hebrew speaking college students enrolled in ESL reading…

Several basic problems in the field of the selection of vocabulary for teaching English as a foreign language are discussed. The nature of word frequency and word availability are considered, along with their limitations as measures of the usefulness of concrete nouns. Word familiarity is proposed as a psycholinguistic measure for noun selection,…

The ability of English as a second language (ESL) readers to comprehend different types of nominal compounds in English technical literature was investigated. College students were asked to recover the meaning of 73 nominal compounds in two technical English language articles on occupational health and safety. The intermediate and advanced ESL…

For over 20 years, SLA research has been investigating the role of negotiation in second language acquisition. While much attention has been given to an examination of the conditions that are necessary for acquisition and the factors that can facilitate opportunities for negotiation, limited attention has been given to a longitudinal study of the…

Presents a description of a major class of vocabulary, signalling nouns, that have important discourse functions in establishing links across and within clauses. The description provides a framework useful to materials writers, teachers, and learners of English for academic purposes. (Author/VWL)