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…

Learning collocations poses difficulties for foreign language learners despite their importance for fluency in the target language. Collocation learning and teaching should therefore be an integral part of foreign language instruction. With a focus on the receptive knowledge of collocations, this 5-week-long pretest/posttest quasi-experimental…

To achieve a high level of language fluency, learners need to possess sufficient collocational competence. However, collocation is considered a problematic area for many EFL learners, partly because of its arbitrariness. To gain more insight into the problems involving learners' productive collocational skills, the current study examines lexical…

This article hypothesizes that one of the reasons for Chinese EFL learners' rigid use of nominalization and insufficient use of hedging in academic writing can be attributed to the unclear understanding of the relationship between these two expressions. The aim of the research is to first prove and then explain the possible co-occurrence of…

Syntactic complexity is a crucial aspect of linguistic proficiency and thus understanding and supporting such development in learners is a keen concern for language teachers. Research conducted has shown growing sophistication of noun phrase structures by writers of different abilities in academic writing (Biber & Gray, 2010; Liu & Li,…

Grammatical and lexical cohesion are necessary conditions to guarantee a text's coherence (Halliday and Hasan 1976). Grammatical cohesion is classified into four types of relation: reference, conjunction, substitution, and ellipsis. This study aims to investigate the use of the cohesive device of reference in written discourse produced by…

By replicating Cho (2017), this article investigates how second language (L2) learners with an article-less first language acquire two types of English definiteness, anaphoric and nonanaphoric. Mandarin Chinese, as an article-less language, has a demonstrative determiner that shares the same feature set as the English definite article…

Collocations are word combinations essential for achieving fluency in a given language. Considerable emphasis should therefore be placed on teaching collocations as a part of vocabulary instruction in language teaching. However, there is no current consensus on how best to teach collocations, and few studies have addressed the issue. This…

This paper examines the effects of attended and unattended demonstratives on text processing, comprehension, and writing quality in two studies. In the first study, participants (n = 45) read 64 mini-stories in a self-paced reading task and identified the main referent in the clauses. The sentences varied in the type of demonstratives (i.e., this,…

Frequency and contingency (i.e., co-occurrence probability of words in multiword sequences [MWS]) are two driving forces of language acquisition and processing. Previous research has demonstrated that L1 and advanced L2 speakers are sensitive to phrasal frequency and contingency when processing larger-than-word units. However, it remains unclear…

Definite discourse-new bridging reference (e.g., a school … "the teacher"; Clark, 1975) is a complex syntax-pragmatic component of referential movement, one that is subject to relatively opaque form-function contingency compared with forms used for discourse-old reference, and one that is especially prone to crosslinguistic influence.…

The purposes of this study were to investigate the levels of receptive and productive knowledge of English collocations of Thai EFL university students and identify the types of grammatical and lexical collocations reported as most and least known by the students. The participants were 286 third-year regular students affiliated with four academic…

Statements containing quantity information are commonplace. Although there is literature explaining the way in which quantities themselves are conveyed in numbers or words (e.g., "many", "probably"), there is less on the effects of different types of quantity description on the processing of surrounding text. Given that…

Based on Larsen-Freeman's (2001) three-dimensional (form-meaning-use) framework of grammar teaching, this study aimed to investigate which type of clause (noun, adjective or adverbial) was the most challenging for second/foreign language (L2) learners in writing skills. Depending on the results of a diagnostic test prepared in accordance with the…

Over the last few decades, it has become obligatory to publish academic research to survive in the academic world. In academic writing skill, lexical bundles (LBs) usage is marked as a master ability to build well-organized paragraphs or essays and are essential instruments to sound more natural and be fluent in English. The current study aimed to…