Advanced Learners

With the rise of corpus linguistics, corpus-based collocation studies have attracted the interest of scholars both domestically and internationally, yielding a wealth of research outcomes. Corpus linguistics takes real language phenomena as its research object and employs an empirical methodology, offering a new research perspective for linguistic studies. This paper provides an overview of corpus-based verb-noun collocation studies both domestically and internationally, aiming to elucidate their research characteristics and domains, while also identifying their shortcomings. This paper holds certain implications for further research on verb-noun collocations.

Lexical bundles, which serve as markers of fluent and appropriate language use, are referred to as "building blocks of discourse" because they occur frequently in written texts and help readers and writers process information more quickly. They also provide important linguistic functions. However, lexical bundles can vary across genres, domains and even sections of the same work, which can be challenging for novice and non-native writers. The purposes of this study are to explore how Thai L2 undergraduate students use lexical bundles in their academic papers written in English and to compare the use of lexical bundles with that in two written corpora: the British Academic Written English (BAWE) and Cambridge Academic English (CAE). A total of 53 research reports, or approximately 615,750 words, from Thai L2 students of English language studies and applied linguistics were systematically compiled and analysed. The most frequent four-word n-grams in the corpora were then ide...

The topic of this volume is English literature in language education in school settings. It is argued that an emphasis on the aesthetic value of literature, and its challenging, provocative content, is of great significance wherever the school curriculum requires meaningful content in addition to focusing on the language itself. Content-based learning is on the increase, as students now learn English in many countries worldwide throughout their school careers, and the content of instruction slips ever more into focus. In the language-literature classroom, young learners and teenagers take part in language-dependent activities that include reading, creative writing, viewing, talking around the texts and a multiplicity of text-related tasks. As this volume will show, literary texts afford wide educational benefits in addition to language benefits, for example intercultural understanding, empathy, multiple literacies, an understanding of the connectedness of the world and global issues, tolerance, cognitive and affective gains and self-reliance. English learning is a worldwide phenomenon, with hugely different stakeholders, contexts, needs and nuances, and a narrow understanding of English language teaching (ELT) should consequently be critically overhauled.

The present article discusses morphological priming in the context of second language acquisition. Morphological priming is a characteristic of both the core and cotextual items in a phraseological unit. It occurs when a word is repeatedly encountered in certain inflectional forms. Similarly to lexical priming on the whole (e.g. collocations and other cotextual qualities), it poses challenges for language learners. The paper focuses on atypicalities in morphophonological forms and, in addition, describes errors in inflection. It is hypothesized that learners of Finnish have problems in morphological priming, and that learners whose mother tongue is closely related to the target language and has inflection produce more target-language-like phraseological units.

The aim of this article is to survey the field of learner corpus research from its origins to the present day and to provide some future perspectives. Key aspects of the field-learner corpus design and collection, learner corpus methodology, statistical analysis, research focus and links with related fields, in particular SLA, FLT and NLP-are compared in first-generation LCR, which extends from the late 1980s to 2000, and second-generation LCR, which covers the period from the early 2000s until today. The survey shows that the field has undergone major theoretical and methodological changes and considerably extended its range of applications. Future developments that are likely to gain ground are grouped into three categories: increased diversity, increased interdisciplinarity and increased automation.

To achieve efficient reading comprehension, Chinese as a second language (L2) learners adopt various component skills and knowledge, including the aspects of vocabulary, grammar, and coherence. However, there is no consensus regarding the relative predictive powers of these three areas in L2 reading comprehension. Instead of employing direct measurement of student reading performance, this study aims to explore this issue by analyzing teacher perception data. Using a Likert-scale questionnaire, 95 experienced teachers rated L2 Chinese learners' reading comprehension, subskills, and sub-knowledge of reading. The results of structural equation modeling reveal that the three areas of subskills and sub-knowledge (i.e., Vocabulary, Grammar, and Coherence) all positively and significantly predicted reading comprehension. Grammar exhibits the strongest predictive power, followed by Coherence, and Vocabulary. This study enhances our understanding of the relative contributions of subskills and sub-knowledge to L2 Chinese reading. Implications for L2 Chinese instruction are provided.

This paper draws on an approach that conceptualizes L2 learning difficulty in terms of implicit and explicit knowledge. In a study with L1 Mexican Spanish university-level learners (n=30), their teachers (n=11) and applied linguistics experts (n=3), we investigated the relationship between (a) these groups' difficulty judgements of 13 selected L2 English structures and (b) perceived learning difficulty and learners' actual performance on measures

Digitalization produces increasingly multimodal and interactive literary forms. A major challenge for foreign language education in adopting such forms lies in deconstructing discursive borders between literary education and digital education (romance of the book vs. euphoric media heavens), thereby crossing over into a perspective in which digital and literary education are intertwined. In engaging with digital literary texts, it is additionally important to consider how different competencies and literary/literacy practices interact and inform each other, including: (1) a receptive perspective: reading digital narratives

The numerous large-scale research projects in progress focusing on the phraseology of modern languages evince the scholarly fascination for word-combinations because of their acknowledged relevance in both theoretical and applied linguistics. The reasons why some words tend to associate with others in a given order and at a given time in the history of a language are still a matter of conjecture. However, it is generally assumed that, whatever the circumstances of mental organisation turn out to be for speakers to associate some words, word-combinations must have ultimately developed in a cultural framework and been more dependent on lingo-cultural domains than on a statistical probability of co-occurrence. The aim of this paper is to study the collocational patterns of adverbs ending in-lī in a legal corpus of late Middle English. The findings will be contrasted with the data from a contemporary corpus of literary works. This literary corpus has been chosen as representative of a language which is supposed to be spoken and understood by lower and upper-middle classes alike by the end of the Middle English period. By comparing the legal corpus with the literary one, I intend to support the idea that the collocational evidence shown in this work also sets legalese apart from other varieties of Middle English. The study of set phrases, of which collocations are a subclass, introduces an interesting scholarly debate about the terminological character of the general categories and subcategories of phraseology. 1 With regard to the general categories of the phraseological system, Mel'čuk (1998: 24-30) uses the terms "set phrases" or "phrasemes" to refer to the total catalogue of word combinations. For Gläser (1998: 126) the whole inventory of idioms and phrases ("phrasicon") of a language is constituted by "phraseological units", whereas Cowie (1998: 5) and Howarth (1996) use the term "word combination". These general categories of the phraseological system may operate either as word-like units, organised at or below the level of the simple sentence, providing a specific semantic role, or as sentence-like units endowed with a pragmatic function. Mel'čuk (1988, 1998) considers that word-like units are "semantic phrasemes", Gläser (1988, 1998) includes them under the term of "nomination", whereas Cowie (1988) calls them "composite" and Howarth (1996) "composite units". In contrast, the sentence-like units are identified as "pragmatemes" (

This study investigated the impact of text length on reading comprehension. Three reading comprehension passages accompanied by 30 items were reduced to two thirds of their original lengths. The truncated versions along with the original version were randomly administered to 100 male and female college students of English (50) and non-English majors (50). Although the participants performed marginally better on the shortened version of the test, a two-way ANOVA revealed that the length of the text did not have any statistically significant effect on the students' performance on the two versions of the test. No interaction between the length of the test and the students' major was found either. Further analysis of the data indicated that sex did not have any significant effect on the performance of the students on the two versions of the test. The article concludes with suggestions for further investigations into the issue in question. Introduction Broadly speaking, factors a...

This study investigated the impact of text length on reading comprehension. Three reading comprehension passages accompanied by 30 items were reduced to two thirds of their original lengths. The truncated versions along with the original version were randomly administered to 100 male and female college students of English (50) and non-English majors (50). Although the participants performed marginally better on the shortened version of the test, a two-way ANOVA revealed that the length of the text did not have any statistically significant effect on the students' performance on the two versions of the test. No interaction between the length of the test and the students' major was found either. Further analysis of the data indicated that sex did not have any significant effect on the performance of the students on the two versions of the test. The article concludes with suggestions for further investigations into the issue in question.

Research in literature reports the importance of L2 vocabulary and syntactic knowledge on the learners' reading comprehension. In this regard, the current study investigated the role of vocabulary knowledge that is disunited into depth and breadth dimensions and syntactic knowledge in the reading comprehension scores of an advanced cohort of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners. In particular, this study examined the relationship of vocabulary knowledge (with its two dimensions) and syntactic knowledge with reading comprehension scores of 30 Turkish EFL learners and the extent to which these knowledge types explain the variance in reading comprehension scores. Measures of vocabulary breadth, vocabulary depth, syntactic knowledge and reading comprehension were used. The data analysis procedure included the descriptive statistics, Pearson product-moment correlations and multiple regression analysis. The results showed that the depth of vocabulary knowledge predicts the L2 reading comprehension the best when the effect of vocabulary size and syntactic knowledge is controlled. These findings are discussed at the end of the study with future research suggestions and limitations.

This study aimed at examining whether syntactic and lexical simplification affect listening comprehension at different levels. The participants were 180 female Iranian EFL students. They were learning English at an English language institute. A standardized test, namely, TOEFL was administered to choose the participants. Then the participants were divided into two groups (90 of low and 90 of high-proficiency level). The participants at high language proficiency level were randomly divided into three groups (one control group, two experimental groups). The participants at the low language proficiency level were randomly divided into three groups, too (one control group, two experimental groups). Two versions of a passage were prepared at a high language proficiency level. Two versions of a passage were prepared at a low language proficiency level, too. The obtained passages which were read by a native English teacher and recorded on a CD were played back at a normal speed rate. The participants were asked to answer the multiple-choice questions after listening to the passages. Then the answer sheets were scored. The means and the standard deviations of groups' performances were calculated. To determine whether or not there were overall significant differences between groups' performances, a t-test was separately applied within levels. The results of the t-test revealed that the groups exposed to syntactically and lexically simplified versions outperformed the other groups.

As a response to recent mass migratory movements, numerous children's novels about refugees have been published in the last decades. The paper analyses two of these novels, Alan Gratz's Refugee (2017) and Gillian Cross's After Tomorrow (2013), and puts them into the context of the 'transcultural turn' in cultural studies. The paper also presents the results of a survey among university lecturers of various countries about the benefits, challenges and teaching aims of including migrant and refugee literature into the courses they teach.

," in her final chapter the author considers the relationships of the three and "examines the historiography of the trio's canonization, and speculates on horizons"(15). Her appendix A will be of great help to scholars who want to know which Victorian periodicals (1875-1900) reviewed children's books. Her appendix B provides selected obituaries and memorials of the triumvirate. (Readers who want the most complete overview of Lundin's book might, after reading the introduction and chapter 1, Victorian Horizons, take the unusual step of reading the Conclusions chapterÂwhere additional motives and purposes are discov-eredÂ-before progressing to the chapters on the three authors.) Chapter 1 defines reception theory and establishes how the author will use it in her study, including documentary evidence from some seventy-five Victorian periodicals. In this chapter, Victorian Horizons, the author also discusses the key points that made up the Victorian horizons for children's books: in his debt in terms of influence (227). All three seemed to have felt uneasy about having their art brought together under the name of one color printer. Certainly modern collectors of prints, who collect the three as graphic artists without regard for their text, often think of Crane as belonging to the school of art nouveau, Caldecott as a cartoonist, even a caricaturist, and Greenaway as the quintessential "sentimental children's artist." For readers who prefer to see the three in more critical terms, and in a context both of their own time and ours, Lundin's book as a whole offers what we need for that, and her concluding chapter brings the three Victorian authors into the context of current illustrated children's books.

The current study was designed to identify the relative significance of syntactic and lexical knowledge in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) reading comprehension of 254 adult Turkish university students. The role of two dimensions of lexical knowledge, lexical depth and breadth in L2 reading comprehension were also examined in the current study. A Syntactic Knowledge Test (SKT), Reading Comprehension Test (RCT) composed of TOEFL, Vocabulary Levels Test (VLT) and Word Associates Test (WAT) were used in the data collection process. Correlation and multiple regression analyses were utilized to analyze the data. The data analyses showed that all variables of the study positively and significantly correlated with each other. Moreover, all independent variables together significantly predicted RCT scores of the participants. However, when each variable was examined separately, syntactic knowledge was the most contributive variable to L2 reading comprehension. Lexical breadth also signi...

offers case studies of intermediate level language learners who read young adult and adult fiction successfully as an argument against explicit vocabulary instruction. Case studies, as we noted in our joint response, provide useful insights into whatever is being investigated but may not always be generalizable. Uden, Schmitt, and Schmitt (2014), for example, qualified their findings by stressing their 4 participants were "highly motivated" (p. 19) while noting that, even so, one participant found the shift to ungraded novel reading "difficult". These, it is worth noting, were Uden et al.'s conclusions, not ours. It is also worth noting that they were not suggesting all intermediate language learners could do this.

In language testing bibliography, it has been suggested that L2 grammar and vocabulary scores strongly and positively correlate with L2 reading comprehension. Jeon and Yamashita (2014), conducting a large-scale meta-analysis study, found strong correlations among these two variables: r=.85 for grammar and r=.79 for vocabulary in different tasks. Following this paradigm, the current study examines this relationship (performance on reading skills and language use-grammar and vocabulary) integrated into a single testlet/paper. The hypothesis is tested by examining scores in reading skills and language use (in which grammar an..d vocabulary items are included) extracted from a large authentic sample in Greece with Italian as the target language. Further, any correlation between the acquisition or learning of these sub-skills is assessed. It was found that the two variables do indeed correlate statistically, although the strength of the correlation is not very high. In that respect, this work confirms findings of earlier studies reported in the literature review. This analysis results in several hypotheses which relate to the possible interpretations of the results. This study wishes to contribute to the discussion by adding results from a Greek context using Italian as the target L2.

Digitalization produces increasingly multimodal and interactive literary forms. A major challenge for foreign language education in adopting such forms lies in deconstructing discursive borders between literary education and digital education (romance of the book vs. euphoric media heavens), thereby crossing over into a perspective in which digital and literary education are intertwined. In engaging with digital literary texts, it is additionally important to consider how different competencies and literary/literacy practices interact and inform each other, including: (1) a receptive perspective: reading digital narratives and digital literature can become a space for literary aesthetic experience, and (2) a productive perspective: learners can become “produsers” (Bruns, 2008) of their own digital narratives by drawing on existing genre conventions and redesigning “available designs” (New London Group, 1996). Consequently, we propose a typology of digital literatures, incorporating ...

Recently, literary dystopias have seen a considerable rise on the book market, especially in young adult literature. In this context, dystopian discourses have also entered the picturebook, creating a notable subgenre of dystopian picturebooks. Even though picturebook dystopias constitute a particularly compelling variant of dystopian writing for both the youngest of readers and readers of all ages in which the dystopia is constructed and negotiated by multimodal texts, dystopian picturebooks have not yet been conceptualized and analyzed as a (sub)genre in its own right. In the first part of this thesis, possible ways of defining dystopian picturebooks are discussed, drawing on Darko Suvin's theory of 'estrangement' and Miguel Abensour's concept of '(radical) alterity'. In the second part, the thesis investigates two dystopian picturebooks that connect processes of colonization with environmental and ecological developments like industrialization, urbanizatio...

This Element provides a systematic overview and synthesis of corpus-based research into collocations focusing on the learning and use of collocations by second language (L2) users. Underlining the importance of collocation as a key notion within the field of corpus linguistics, the text offers a state-of-the-art account of the main findings related to the applications of corpora and corpus-based measures for defining, identifying and analysing collocations as related to second language acquisition. Emphasising the quality of L2 collocation research, the Element illustrates key methodological issues to be considered when conducting this type of corpus analysis. It also discusses examples of pertinent research questions and points to representative studies treated as models of good practice. Aiming at researchers both new and experienced, the Element also points to avenues for future work and shows the relevance of corpus-based analysis for improving the process of learning and teaching of L2 collocations.

The 1990s experienced an accumulation of research studies investigating the relationships between L1 and L2 reading. Many studies included readers’ L2 linguistic proficiency as a predicting variable and attempted to identify its effect on the relationship between reading ability in two languages. This design seems to have been motivated by Alderson’s (1984) review article in which he examined a broad range of research relevant to this topic and suggested future research directions. Alderson articulated two sources of difficulties in L2 reading: L1 reading ability and L2 linguistic proficiency, and he raised a question concerning which of the two factors causes problems in L2 reading. In dealing with this question, two hypotheses were introduced: the linguistic interdependence hypothesis (or readinguniversal hypothesis) and the linguistic threshold hypothesis (or short-circuit hypothesis). The former, in its simplest form, proposes that L1 reading ability transfers to L2 reading, whi...

The study of linguistic devices variously referred to as stance expressions is one of the best means by which the relationship between the writer, the reader, and propositional meaning could be examined. This paper looks at a particular structural group of lexical bundles encoding stance expressions. These are bundles starting with an anticipatory it followed by is, a predicative adjective and finally ending with infinitival to or complementizer that (e.g. it is important to, it is possible that). The use of these bundles is compared in three corpora of research articles, doctoral dissertations, and master theses in the discipline of applied linguistics to explore possible generic variations and identify possible differences between published students writing. Using Hewings and Hewings's functional typology of interpersonal roles of it clauses (2002), this group of bundles is found to have three stance expressions of hedging, marking attitude, and stressing emphasis. The major d...

Languages largely consist of prefabricated expressions (prefabs), more broadly known by the term formulaic language. Accumulating more data in this field of study benefits second- and foreign language acquisition, and more specifically, EFL learners’ comprehension and language production in terms of recognising and learning these formulaic patterns. The aim of this thesis is to analyse the usage of prefabs in written academic English between Estonian EFL learners and native English speakers. To achieve this, a corpus-based study was conducted, which utilised the corpus of Estonian Academic Learner English (EALE) and the corpus of British Academic Written English (BAWE).https://www.ester.ee/record=b5460884*es

Grammar teaching has been a topic of debate for a considerably long time. Researchers and teachers discussed the benefits and shortcomings of its explicit instruction, which entails students’ awareness of metalanguage. Although much research has investigated metalanguage, its effect on improving students’ grammatical accuracy is still an unresolved issue, and the research concerning it is relatively limited. Nevertheless, it is widely recognised that metalanguage is beneficial for grammar teaching. Responding to this research gap, the present study investigated the relationship between EFL students’ metalinguistic knowledge and their grammatical accuracy. The researcher adopted a descriptive quantitative research design where two tests were administered to undergraduate participants (n=124). The tests scores were analysed using the Blackboard item-analysis tool and SPSS software to generate statistical information regarding the participants’ scores. The study findings revealed a sig...

Following Nation' (2009) proposal of 40-50 empty spaces as an optimum length of a cloze test, this study examined whether this length would work according to proficiency level. Three cloze tests, adjusted for each proficiency level, were developed by the researcher for the use at beginning, intermediate and advanced levels. The cloze tests measured participants' reading comprehension and included 40, 45 and 50 empty spaces for the beginning, intermediate and advanced levels respectively. Problematic items of each cloze test were identified over several pilot studies. Then they were administered to three groups of L1 Persian EFL learners at the beginning (56), intermediate (43), and advanced (41) levels. Results of the study suggest that an optimum length of a cloze test could vary according to the proficiency level. While the test could be long (including 50 empty spaces) and reliable at the advanced level, a shorter length of the test including 20-25 empty spaces could be more reliable at the beginning and intermediate levels.

Digitalization produces increasingly multimodal and interactive literary forms. A major challenge for foreign language education in adopting such forms lies in deconstructing discursive borders between literary education and digital education (romance of the book vs. euphoric media heavens), thereby crossing over into a perspective in which digital and literary education are intertwined. In engaging with digital literary texts, it is additionally important to consider how different competencies and literary/literacy practices interact and inform each other, including: (1) a receptive perspective: reading digital narratives and digital literature can become a space for literary aesthetic experience, and (2) a productive perspective: learners can become “produsers” (Bruns, 2008) of their own digital narratives by drawing on existing genre conventions and redesigning “available designs” (New London Group, 1996). Consequently, we propose a typology of digital literatures, incorporating ...

The role of reading comprehension and its correlation and prediction to other skills in terms of enhancing the proficiency level of students in English language has been widely recognized by researchers. However, research conducted on reading comprehension in roughly the last fifteen to twenty years shows no concrete evidence of identifying the knowledge of the transition words with the understanding of reading comprehension. This study was particularly designed to fill that gap and to measure students’ ability to differentiate among various categories of expressions in English language, such as descriptive, narrative, sequence, comparison and contrast, and cause and effect, and to identity the functions of their derivative transitions in the reading comprehension task. The current study adapted a quantitative method and collected data from 100 male and female EFL students at the tertiary level in a Bangladeshi university to conduct this study. To be specific, this research used tra...

The current study was designed to identify the relative significance of syntactic and lexical knowledge in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) reading comprehension of 254 adult Turkish university students. The role of two dimensions of lexical knowledge, lexical depth and breadth in L2 reading comprehension were also examined in the current study. A Syntactic Knowledge Test (SKT), Reading Comprehension Test (RCT) composed of TOEFL, Vocabulary Levels Test (VLT) and Word Associates Test (WAT) were used in the data collection process. Correlation and multiple regression analyses were utilized to analyze the data. The data analyses showed that all variables of the study positively and significantly correlated with each other. Moreover, all independent variables together significantly predicted RCT scores of the participants. However, when each variable was examined separately, syntactic knowledge was the most contributive variable to L2 reading comprehension. Lexical breadth also significantly explained L2 reading comprehension of EFL learners. The unique contribution of lexical depth to L2 reading comprehension was very low and not significant. Moreover, the independent variables were also correlated with each other. The findings of the current study were compared with the previous findings, discussed and justified in accordance with them. Pedagogical implications were offered.

Following Nation' (2009) proposal of 40-50 empty spaces as an optimum length of a cloze test, this study examined whether this length would work according to proficiency level. Three cloze tests, adjusted for each proficiency level, were developed by the researcher for the use at beginning, intermediate and advanced levels. The cloze tests measured participants' reading comprehension and included 40, 45 and 50 empty spaces for the beginning, intermediate and advanced levels respectively. Problematic items of each cloze test were identified over several pilot studies. Then they were administered to three groups of L1 Persian EFL learners at the beginning (56), intermediate (43), and advanced (41) levels. Results of the study suggest that an optimum length of a cloze test could vary according to the proficiency level. While the test could be long (including 50 empty spaces) and reliable at the advanced level, a shorter length of the test including 20-25 empty spaces could be more reliable at the beginning and intermediate levels.

Jeff McQuillan offers case studies of intermediate level language learners who read young adult and adult fiction successfully as an argument against explicit vocabulary instruction. Case studies, as we noted in our joint response, provide useful insights into whatever is being investigated but may not always be generalizable. Uden, Schmitt, and Schmitt (2014), for example, qualified their findings by stressing their 4 participants were “highly motivated” (p. 19) while noting that, even so, one participant found the shift to ungraded novel reading “difficult”. These, it is worth noting, were Uden et al.’s conclusions, not ours. It is also worth noting that they were not suggesting all intermediate language learners could do this.

Watching movies can help language learners improve their proficiency. However, important in this regard are what kinds of movies learners perceive as beneficial and how they benefit from watching movies. This study intended to discover advanced English learners’ perceptions and strategies regarding watching movies. To this aim, the researchers selected 34 advanced English learners in Iran. The participants completed a questionnaire and then the researchers interviewed them to find out their perceptions and strategies with regard to watching English movies. The findings suggested that the most favourite genres were comedy, documentary and animated movies, in the order given. Furthermore, the most common strategies used by the learners were writing down new vocabularies, reviewing them and using them in everyday situations. Moreover, advanced learners preferred to watch movies with English or no subtitles. The findings can aid English learners and teachers to become familiar with effe...

The present study explored the association among vocabulary breadth/size, depth/quality of vocabulary knowledge, and reading comprehension in English as a foreign language. The main intention of this research was to explore the association of vocabulary knowledge depth/quality and reading comprehension performance. This study was also intended to find out which aspects of vocabulary knowledge, breadth/size or depth/quality, has more significant association with determining EFL learners' reading comprehension performance. The Vocabulary Level Test (VLT), Word Associates Test (WAT), and Reading Comprehension test (IELTS) have been administered among all the respondents. The participants were 220 adult male and female EFL learners who were learning English in advanced level in BAHAR institute, Shiraz, Iran. The findings revealed that 1) test scores on vocabulary size/ breadth, depth/ quality of vocabulary knowledge, and reading comprehension were positively correlated, 2) vocabulary size/ breadth was a stronger predictor of reading comprehension than depth/ Quality of vocabulary knowledge.

This study investigated the impact of text length on reading comprehension. Three reading comprehension passages accompanied by 30 items were reduced to two thirds of their original lengths. The truncated versions along with the original version were randomly administered to 100 male and female college students of English (50) and non-English majors (50). Although the participants performed marginally better on the shortened version of the test, a two-way ANOVA revealed that the length of the text did not have any statistically significant effect on the students' performance on the two versions of the test. No interaction between the length of the test and the students' major was found either. Further analysis of the data indicated that sex did not have any significant effect on the performance of the students on the two versions of the test. The article concludes with suggestions for further investigations into the issue in question. Introduction Broadly speaking, factors a...

The present study examines L2 reading proficiency effects on the relative contribution of vocabulary knowledge and grammar knowledge to L2 reading comprehension for Korean high school EFL learners. To this end, 200 high school students were asked to take a vocabulary knowledge test, a grammar test, and a reading comprehension test. The participants were divided into three subgroups by L2 reading ability in order to examine L2 proficiency effects. Multiple regression analyses for the subgroups indicated the relationships among the three variables as distinctive. The results showed that syntactic knowledge had a predictive power for reading performance in the high reading group, but vocabulary had the same quality in the intermediate reading group. For the low reading group, neither vocabulary nor grammar could significantly account for the L2 reading variance. Theoretical implications and directions for further studies are discussed.

Watching movies can help language learners improve their proficiency. However, important in this regard are what kinds of movies learners perceive as beneficial and how they benefit from watching movies. This study intended to discover advanced English learners’ perceptions and strategies regarding watching movies. To this aim, the researchers selected 34 advanced English learners in Iran. The participants completed a questionnaire and then the researchers interviewed them to find out their perceptions and strategies with regard to watching English movies. The findings suggested that the most favourite genres were comedy, documentary and animated movies, in the order given. Furthermore, the most common strategies used by the learners were writing down new vocabularies, reviewing them and using them in everyday situations. Moreover, advanced learners preferred to watch movies with English or no subtitles. The findings can aid English learners and teachers to become familiar with effe...

AbstractThis research investigated whether or not using animated learning video as teaching media was effective in teaching vocabulary. This was a pre-experimental research with one group pre-test and post-test design. The population was the seventh grade students of SMPN 1 Sungai Ambawang and the sample was the VII A which consists of 17 students. The data were collected using objective tests and analyzed by t-test and effect size formula. The obtained t-value (12.57) was bigger than the critical value of r (1.746) by the degree of freedom 16 meaning that animated learning video increased the students’ vocabulary. The effect size was categorized as high effect since the ES value (2.76)was bigger than the reliability coefficient of the test (0.8). So, based on the research findings, the null hypothesis (Ho) was rejected, while the alternative hypothesis (Ha) which states that “Teaching vocabulary by using animated learning video is significantly effective” was accepted. To conclude,...

Nowadays, almost 65 years after the publication of the first advanced learner’s dictionary, this particular consultation source is considered “a useful addition to any [language] course” (Sharma & Barret, 2007: 52). However, as it was remarked by Leany (2007: 1), the ability to successfully utilize advanced learner’s dictionaries requires a considerable amount of practice on the part of students. Thus, dictionary skills appear to constitute one of the key aspects of EFL education. Therefore, the aim of this article is to identify key dictionary skills and describe how they are promoted in advanced learner’s coursebooks. Following the set of guidelines described in Leany (2007) and Welker (2010), the authors developed criteria that were used to assess the dictionary-oriented contents of selected teaching materials. It is hoped that this article highlights the advantages and exposes the shortcomings of dictionary-oriented materials and activities included in EFL coursebooks.

The present article discusses morphological priming in the context of second language acquisition. Morphological priming is a characteristic of both the core and cotextual items in a phraseological unit. It occurs when a word is repeatedly encountered in certain inflectional forms. Similarly to lexical priming on the whole (e.g. collocations and other cotextual qualities), it poses challenges for language learners. The paper focuses on atypicalities in morphophonological forms and, in addition, describes errors in inflection. It is hypothesized that learners of Finnish have problems in morphological priming, and that learners whose mother tongue is closely related to the target language and has inflection produce more target-language-like phraseological units.

The English as a Foreign Language unit at the Centre for Language Learning at the UWI St. Augustine campus is strategic to the institution's goal of global reach and impact in its provision of EFL to international corporations and students, in particular to those who matriculate into the university. Its policies match established standards in the field, its courses are delivered by qualified staff, and its involvement in the postgraduate TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) Diploma predisposes it to reflective practice. This study at the Centre for Language Learning investigated the ways in which EFL learners (n=26) processed and retrieved SE periphrastic verbs in the communicative language classroom where, based on an understanding of SLA (second language acquisition) as a complex and dynamic system, errors signal language development. Using a grounded action research methodology, formal and informal written assessments were examined. Results showed that lear...

Grammar teaching has been a topic of debate for a considerably long time. Researchers and teachers discussed the benefits and shortcomings of its explicit instruction, which entails students' awareness of metalanguage. Although much research has investigated metalanguage, its effect on improving students' grammatical accuracy is still an unresolved issue, and the research concerning it is relatively limited. Nevertheless, it is widely recognised that metalanguage is beneficial for grammar teaching. Responding to this research gap, the present study investigated the relationship between EFL students' metalinguistic knowledge and their grammatical accuracy. The researcher adopted a descriptive quantitative research design where two tests were administered to undergraduate participants (n=124). The tests scores were analysed using the Blackboard item-analysis tool and SPSS software to generate statistical information regarding the participants' scores. The study findings revealed a significant positive correlation between the scores. This correlation was moderate and occurred at the students' overall score level. Moreover, the study revealed a proper level of metalinguistic knowledge that was not in perfect parallel with students' grammatical accuracy. The generated findings can provide insightful implications for grammar teaching. This finding is significant for EFL teachers as it supports claims on the importance of explicit grammar instruction. It is also essential for learners as they can use metalanguage to develop their learning. Moreover, the study suggests areas that may be helpful for researchers to further explore the issue.

Morphological complexity (MC) is a relatively new construct in second language acquisition (SLA). After critically discussing existing approaches to calculating MC in first-and secondlanguage acquisition research, this article presents a new operationalization of the construct, the Morphological Complexity Index (MCI). The MCI is applied in two case studies based on argumentative written texts produced by native and non-native speakers of Italian and English. Study 1 shows that morphological complexity varies between native and non-native speakers of Italian, and that it is significantly lower in learners with lower proficiency levels. The MCI is strongly correlated to proficiency, measured with a C-test, and also shows significant correlations with other measures of linguistic complexity, such as lexical diversity and sentence length. Quite a different picture emerges from Study 2, on advanced English learners. Here, morphological complexity remains constant across natives and non-natives, and is not significantly correlated to other text complexity measures. These results point to the fact that morphological complexity in texts is a function of speakers' proficiency and the specific language under investigation; for some linguistic systems with a relatively simple inflectional morphology, such as English, learners will soon reach a threshold level after which inflectional diversity remains constant.

Using structural equation modeling analysis, this study examined the contribution of vocabulary and grammatical knowledge to second language reading comprehension among 190 advanced Chinese English as a foreign language learners. Vocabulary knowledge was measured in both breadth (Vocabulary Levels Test) and depth (Word Associates Test); grammatical measures focused on learners' implicit (timed grammaticality judgment task), as well as explicit knowledge (grammatical error correction task); reading comprehension had three indicators, namely, coreference, textual inference, and gist. Vocabulary knowledge related significantly to reading comprehension; grammatical knowledge showed a weak contribution to reading comprehension after controlling for the effect of vocabulary knowledge. In addition, learners' implicit knowledge of grammar had a stronger relationship to reading comprehension than explicit knowledge, over and above the effect of vocabulary size.