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Adult second language (L2) learners have often been found to produce discourse that manifests limited and non-native-like use of multiword expressions. One explanation for this is that adult L2 learners are relatively unsuccessful (in the absence of pedagogic intervention) at transferring multiword expressions from input texts to their own output resources. The present article reports an exploratory study where ESL learners were asked to re-tell a short story which they had read and listened to twice. The learners' re-tells were subsequently examined for the extent to which they recycled multiword expressions from the original story. To gauge the influence of the input text on these learners' renderings of the story, a control group was asked to tell the story based exclusively on a series of pictures. The results of the experiment suggest that multiword expressions were recycled from the input text to some extent, but this stayed very marginal in real terms, especially in comparison with the recycling of single words. Moreover, when learners did borrow expressions from the input text, their reproductions were often non-target-like.

This study explores English for specific purposes learners' understanding of technical words in a previously-developed technical word list in Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM). The principal aim was to estimate what kind of technical terms pose problems to TCM learners and might therefore merit special attention in instruction. Of particular interest was the question whether there is a divergence in the understanding of technical vocabulary in TCM between Chinese and Western background learners. To achieve these aims, a combination of word association tasks and retrospective interviews was implemented with 11 Chinese and 10 Western background TCM learners. The data showed that both Chinese and Western learners encountered certain difficulties in understanding technical vocabulary in their study. However, their sources of difficulty were different. Comparisons of typical word associations between Chinese and Western learners indicated that there was a degree of divergence in the way these two participant groups understood TCM terms.