Many contemporary textbooks for English as a foreign language (EFL) and books for vocabulary study contain exercises with a focus on collocations, with verb-noun collocations (e.g. "make a mistake") being particularly popular as targets for collocation learning. Common exercise formats used in textbooks and other pedagogic materials…

This study investigated Korean heritage speakers' Korean language proficiency (i.e. morphosyntax, collocation, and lexicon) in relation to their attitudes, motivation, and age at immigration (AI). Seventy-six adult Korean-Australians with Korean literacy participated. Overall, participants showed high levels of Korean proficiency in all three…

Qualitative research focusing primarily on advanced-proficiency second language (L2) learners suggests that online corpora can function as useful reference tools for language learners, especially when addressing phraseological issues. However, the feasibility and effectiveness of online corpus consultation for learners at a basic level of L2…

While it is a well-known fact that speakers of article-less mother tongues, such as Polish, experience problems with articles in English, this study seeks to investigate the problem from a different perspective. Namely, it poses the question of whether the correct use of the article system of the L2 is indeed a purely grammatical task (as it is…

The current study examines English-speaking learners of Spanish and their pragmatic development of request forms during a six-week immersion program in Madrid, Spain. Elicited production and intuition data were analyzed, focusing on personal deictic orientation, directness evidenced by clause type, and the use of "por favor"…

This paper aims to analyse the role of time concentration of instructional hours on the acquisition of formulaic sequences in English as a foreign language (EFL). Two programme types that offer the same amount of hours of instruction are considered: intensive (110 hours/1 month) and regular (110 hours/7 months). The EFL learners under study are…

This study investigates whether congruency (+/- literal translation equivalent), collocate-node relationship (adjective-noun, verb-noun, phrasal-verb-noun collocations), and word length influence the learning burden of EFL learners' learning collocations at the initial stage of form-meaning mapping. Eighteen collocations were selected on the basis…

In native speakers of gender-marking languages, mechanisms of gender production appear to be affected by the morphophonological cues to gender present in the noun phrase. This influence is manifested in higher levels of production accuracy when more transparent cues to gender are present in comparison to when they are not. The goal of the present…

Currently there is a general uncertainty about what makes collocations (i.e., fixed word combinations with specific, not easily interpreted relations between their components) hard for ESL learners to master, and about how to improve collocation recognition and learning process. This study explored and designed a comparative classification of…

The aim of this study is two-fold. Firstly, it attempts to determine the role of presenting collocations by organizing them based on (i) the keyword, (ii) topic related and (iii) grammatical aspect on retention of collocations. Secondly, it investigates the relationship between participants' general English proficiency and the presentation types…

Despite the high frequency of occurrences of "wh"-interrogatives in daily use, there are repeated negative comments about the poor mastery of the wh-interrogative structure among Hong Kong students. However, so far little attention has been paid to their difficulties in the acquisition of the structure. There is a strong need to…

Over the past decades, studies of EFL/ESL vocabulary acquisition have identified the significance of collocations in language learning. Due to the fact that collocations have been regarded as one of the major concerns of both EFL teachers and learners for many years, the present study attempts to shed light on the impact of corpus-based…

The proceedings of the first Language Testing Forum in 1980 were published in "ELT Documents 111: Issues in Language Testing" (Alderson & Hughes, 1981). Discussants at the 1980 Forum raised a number questions on Language for Specific Purposes (LSP) testing relating, notably, to test specificity, test content, the relationship between…

Previous research has furnished evidence that alliterative expressions (e.g. "a slippery slope") are comparatively memorable for second language learners, at least when these expressions are attended to as decontextualized items (Lindstromberg and Boers, 2008a; Boers et al., 2012). The present study investigates whether alliteration…

This article examines how form recall of target lexical items by learners of English as a foreign language (EFL) is affected (1) by repetition (1, 3 or 5 number of occurrences), (2) by the type of target item (single words versus collocations), and (3) by the time of post-test administration (immediately or one week after the learning session).…