The present paper reports on the effectiveness of Grammar-Translation Method, Communicative Language Teaching and Content Integrated Learning upon reading comprehension language awareness. study recruited a convenience sample 164 Spanish students from rural area in southern Spain who randomly received these three ESL/EFL methods. research was focused two hypotheses. Firstly, L2 learning is more...

This research article aims to examine the problem of comprehending Chinese diplomatic discourse. We argue that China’s discourse is a multilevel and complicated system underpinned by figurative symbolic semantics, divergent translations into foreign languages, multidimensionality cognitive sphere versatility communication. The discussions well-known scholars on issue comprehension are highlight...

In this study, we investigated the neural substrate involved in the comprehension of novel metaphoric sentences by comparing the findings to those obtained with literal and anomalous sentences using event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Stimuli consisted of 63 copula sentences ("An A is a B") in Japanese with metaphorical, literal, or anomalous meanings. Thirteen normal pa...

Theories of early learning of nouns in children's vocabularies divide into those that emphasize input (language and non-linguistic aspects) and those that emphasize child conceptualisation. Most data though come from production alone, assuming that learning a word equals speaking it. Methodological issues can mean production and comprehension data within or across input languages are not compar...

Background. Up to the age of 6, children have been shown to experience difficulties in the interpretation of pronouns (but not reflexives) by incorrectly allowing the pronoun to corefer with the local subject about half the time (e.g., Chien & Wexler, 1990). Explanations for this Delay of Principle B-Effect (DPBE) range from a deficiency in pragmatic skills (Thornton & Wexler, 1999) and the eff...

This paper focuses on what electrical and magnetic recordings of human brain activity reveal about spoken language understanding. Based on the high temporal resolution of these recordings, a fine-grained temporal profile of different aspects of spoken language comprehension can be obtained. Crucial aspects of speech comprehension are lexical access, selection and semantic integration. Results s...

The present study aims to investigate the relative effectiveness of different types of pragmatic instruction including two collaborative translation tasks and two structured input tasks with and without explicit pragmatic instruction on the production of apologetic utterances by low-intermediate EFL learners. One hundred and fifty university students in four experimental groups and one control ...

We will argue that this construction combines semantic and syntactic quirks that necessitate a constructional analysis. Further, we will show that specifying the pragmatic properties of the construction (and in particular the presuppositions that introduces) allows for a particularly elegant account of the construction’s distribution. This, in turn, provides further support for the sign-based v...