The purpose of this article is to help ESL (English as a Second Language) students or English language learners (ELLs) how to express or use moods correctly when they study English. The expression of moods was summarized and illustrated from various examples cited or given, on the basis of the writer's more than twenty years' teaching experience…

The use of the infinitive was summarized and illustrated from various examples, on the basis of the writer's teaching experience, and extensive review of different English grammar books, reference books, magazines, newspapers, books, and English dictionaries, in order for English language learners (whose native language is not English) to further…

What teachers write about students has enormous potential to affect their lives. Lauren Porosoff encourages teachers to use their words to empower students to take an active role in their own learning. When teachers use adjectives to describe students, they may be attaching certain fixed characteristics to those students. Verbs, on the other hand,…

This study reviews the difficulties that learners of English as a second or foreign language encounter in the use of English articles and puts forward some suggestions that can help advanced learners overcome their problems. It has been observed that learner performance may be deceptive and accurate article selections may be led by inappropriate…

Social media networks have evolved as a large repository of short documents and gives the greater challenges to effectively retrieve the content out of it. Many factors were involved in this process such as restricted length of a content, informal use of language (i.e., slangs, abbreviations, styles, etc.) and low contextualization of the user…

"English Grammar and Teaching Strategies" aims to demystify grammar and equip any teacher to teach it in the classroom. Carefully set out for ease of reference, this book covers every aspect of grammar, from nouns, adjectives and verbs to punctuation and prepositions. Each grammatical term is clearly defined and accompanied by varieties…

One of the challenges of learning Japanese as a Second Language (JSL) is finding the appropriate word for a particular usage. To address this challenge, we developed a collocational aid designed to suggest more appropriate collocations in Japanese. In particular, we address the problem of generating and ranking noun and verb candidates for…

This article aims to provide better metaphors for thinking and speaking about culture, identity and values. In terms of human behaviour, the words culture, identity and values are viewed as useful reifications which have allowed us to discuss human action in terms of nouns. However, the terms have been used over many years in various theoretical…

This article discusses some apparently paradoxical behavior of the English demonstratives "this/these" and "that/those" as determiners of proper nouns and as metaphorical signals of epistemic and affective stance within the proximal-distal opposition. It is argued that the apparent paradoxes are actually cases of shifting perspectives or points of…

Our study of seven first-year college-level German textbooks surveys how these texts deal with the challenge of representing gender-inclusive language. Specifically, we look at gender marking in human nouns to see whether they occur as single-gender forms (e.g., "Student"), as morphological pairs in either full form (e.g., "Student/Studentin") or…

A relatively common way to establish a new verb is to give verbal form to a noun, but it also exposes some irregularities of the language, and the rules that govern it. Although this is largely a phenomenon of the twentieth century, evidence of it appears in Rabelais' work. (MSE)

Developing academic, or school-based, literacy poses a significant challenge for many students, because the language through which academic subjects are presented is markedly different from the social language that students use in everyday ordinary life. This article focuses on one aspect of academic language, the functions of nouns and nominal…

Recipes exhibit a phenomenon nonexistent in other commonly studied varieties, (for example, conversational discourse), namely, zero anaphors as direct objects. This article examines this phenomenon and explores its consequences for linguistic theory. Results reveal that stylistic, semantic, and discourse factors are the most important in the…

Reports on two studies examining the effects of object size, container size, sex, and language group on the use of counts in prescriptive and descriptive grammar. Results indicate that people's selection of noun forms in a measure partitive noun phrase is influenced by nonlinguistic factors, such as their gender and the food size relative to…

Test results for final-year French students in Canadian universities show they have not mastered the gender of some of the most frequent French nouns. Two recommendations are to continue to seek simplification of the learning of gender and to require students to use the full range of syntactic transformations. (MSE)