Background: German is exceptional in its use of noun capitalisation. It has been suggested that sentence-internal capitalisation as in German may benefit processing by specifically marking a noun and thus a noun phrase (NP). However, other cues, such as a determiner, can also indicate an NP. The influence of capitalisation on processing may thus…

Complex noun phrases (NP) are central to mature academic writing and often a focus of explicit teaching. The National Curriculum in England, for example, requires specific components of NP complexity to be taught at specific educational stages. However, the evidence base for such practices is unclear. Research on the emergence of NP components is…

This study investigated L1 Chinese learners' acquisition of the English "Noun + Relative Clause (N + RC)" based on Structural Priming (SP)(Bock,1986; Bock & Griffin, 2000) and Lexical Residual Activation (LRA)(Cleland, 2003). It was hypothesized that, based on SP, when L1 Chinese learners were primed by the English "N +…

The aim of the study was to investigate the effectiveness of mind mapping on Ethiopian secondary school students' English collocation learning. The study specifically tried to check the effectiveness of mind mapping on adjective-preposition and verb-noun combination collocations. A sample of 110 grade 12 students who were learning in two sections…

In this article, we describe an online English collocation explorer developed to help English L2 learners produce correct and appropriate collocations. Our tool, which is able to visually represent relevant correct/incorrect collocations on a single webpage, was designed based on the notions of collocation clusters and intercollocability proposed…

The present study implements a corpus-assisted approach with data-driven learning (DDL) in the EFL classroom to investigate its effectiveness in learning target grammatical collocations (verb-, adjective-, and noun-preposition collocations) of Thai undergraduate students and to examine the extent to which the students incorporate the collocational…

Complex noun phrases (CNP) are a major vehicle of academic written discourse (Halliday, 1988/2004). However, despite the view that they pose significant challenges to English language learners, they are rarely taught in college-based English for Academic Purposes (EAP) programs, especially for the purposes of improving reading comprehension. This…

A growing number of studies have probed the effectiveness of certain exercise formats in the learning of multi-word expressions (MWEs) in classroom settings. However, a number of important variables, such as MWE retention over an extended period of time and the role of repetition, have so far not been considered. Furthermore, studies have focused…

This article focuses on the role of crosslinguistic patterns with verbs in the mapping of noun phrases/semantic roles to positions in morphosyntax, with a particular focus on second language (L2) development of Spanish "se." The data set derives from high school learners of Spanish in the United States under broadly deductive and…

There has been plenty of observational evidence displaying that L2 English learners whose L1 do not have article systems undergo persistent difficulties. It is known that functional categories of grammar are especially difficult for L2 learners, and the Korean language does not have a functional equivalent to English articles. The current study…

The present study investigates collocational profiles that appear in the English textbook series for Vietnamese students from elementary to high school grades by identifying how the series covers collocations in terms of frequency and how the mode of collocation presentation aligns with recommendations in the existing literature. A total of 30,005…

This article examines the use of prompt-based lexical collocations in opinion essays by Vietnamese English as a foreign language (EFL) students. Fifty second-year English majors at a Vietnamese university wrote 100 opinion essays on two topics as progress tests. The AntConc programme (Anthony, 2020) was employed to identify the frequencies of use…

The article deals with teaching Russian intonation of declarative sentences to foreign students. The emphasis is placed on the way teaching materials are presented. In particular, the variable rows for intonation patterns in declarative sentences have been developed, as well as the teaching of syntagmatic segmentation and intonation patterns in…

Experimental research on the interface between second language vocabulary knowledge, including collocations, and translation competence is scarce. The present study investigates the role played by three determinants of collocation knowledge (knowledge level -- recall versus recognition, congruency, and constituent word types) in the accuracy of…

This study addresses the lack of comprehension data in second language acquisition research by focusing on English existential "there"-constructions (ETCs) with a locative extension (e.g., "there is an X on the Y"). The post-copular noun X used in the present study consisted of two types: actual and nonsense. Participants…