Recent studies suggest that developing L2 receptive knowledge of single words is associated with increased receptive knowledge of collocations. However, no study to date has directly examined the interrelationship between productive word knowledge and productive collocation knowledge. To address this gap, the present study administered a…

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 +…

Native Arabic speakers used idiomatic expressions such as idioms, formulas, and collocations, in their daily communications. In learning Arabic as a second language (L2), effective communication requires "the ability to understand and use idioms appropriately and accurately in a variety of sociocultural contexts, in a manner like that of…

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…

Evidence from the contemporary translation services market and many centuries of translation practice demonstrate that translation into a non-native language (L2 translation) can be performed effectively, despite the once-strong resistance to it on the grounds of it being perceived as unprofessional and inherently deficient. L2 translation is in…

This study evaluates the development of L2 collocational competence in texts written by learners of differing proficiency levels, compared to native speaker collocation patterns from a reference corpus. We address: (1) whether learners develop their collocation competence as their proficiency grows; and (2) How is this development mediated by…

When it comes to teaching vocabulary in foreign language classes words are often taught in isolation, without regard to the context in which they appear. The paper draws attention to the importance of teaching words in context so that the meaning of a word often results from the meaning of a larger construction it is part of. After presenting the…

In this article, we present the results of an eight-week in-class intervention, during which binomial expressions comprised of academic vocabulary (results and conclusions, facts and circumstances) were presented to intermediate-level learners of English. Constraints that govern the preferred order of highly fixed binomials were explained as the…

Formulaic language is notoriously difficult for second language learners of French to master (Edmonds, 2014; Forsberg, 2010). Yet, no study has examined formulaic language in French textbooks despite the fact that in many contexts, textbooks represent a significant proportion of the input that learners receive. The current study addresses this…

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…

This study explored the relative effect of recasts on second language (L2) Korean learners' accuracy development of the object relative clauses (RCs) and the honorific subject-verb (S-V) agreement in Korean and its relationship with language analytic ability (LAA). Forty-five L2 Korean learners participated in the study and five Korean native…

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…

This article presents a rationale for making idioms and their use a mainstay of the second language (L2) curriculum. First, it offers a definition of the elusive term "idiom" as a point of departure for the ensuing discussion. Second, it offers five specific reasons why idiom instruction should be integrated into the L2 curriculum: here,…

This quasi-experimental research explores the difference between the pausing patterns of native English and nonnative Turkish speakers of English concerning their pause durations preceding and following English adverbial clause conjunctions. The findings reveal statistically significant differences between native and nonnative participants for two…

Constructionist research on L2 learning has focused on the degrees to which skewed frequency (Goldberg, Casenhiser & White, 2007; Casenhiser & Goldberg, 2005; Goldberg, Casenhiser, & Sethuraman 2004) in a person's linguistic environment can facilitate "entrenchment," "schematization," and "contingency…