Through consultations with the online version of the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English (LDOCE) and the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), this study focuses on distinguishing between the two synonymous verbs "restrict" and "constrain," both part of Coxhead's (2000) Academic Word List, in terms of formality…

Finite complement clauses (FCCs) are an understudied syntactic structure of L2 advanced academic writing. The present study cross-investigated FCCs in qualitative (QUALI) and quantitative (QUANTI) research articles written by Filipino academic writers (FAWs) in Applied Linguistics (APPLING), Communication (COMM), and Measurement and Evaluation…

The purpose of this article is to synthesize and analyse the most frequently occurring, widely dispersed and pedagogically useful lexical bundles in mathematical texts. Drawing on a five-million-word corpus of graduate-level textbooks, a total of 65 academic sequences meeting a predefined set of length, frequency and distribution criteria are…

Research on academic stance and evaluation has been prolific over the past few decades. Few studies, however, have focused on exploring the evaluative potential of that-constructions in shaping the structure of academic arguments. To address this lacuna, the current study aimed at exploring the potential impact of the distinct communicative…

This contrastive corpus-based study aims to analyze the similarities and differences of two synonyms "important" and "significant" concerning on the degree of formality in their distribution across genres as well as their collocations and semantic preference. The corpus data derived from the Corpus of Contemporary American…

Language immersion programs seek to develop multilingual, multiliterate individuals able to engage with academic content. Studies of immersion students' language development provide details regarding language proficiency and accuracy, yet they generally do not address how features of written, academic language, for example, syntactic and lexical…

Complex noun phrases (NP) are central to mature academic writing and often a focus of explicit teaching. The National Curriculum in England, for example, requires specific components of NP complexity to be taught at specific educational stages. However, the evidence base for such practices is unclear. Research on the emergence of NP components is…

This empirical investigation rigorously evaluated the teaching potential of Data-Driven Learning (DDL) for enhancing the ability of learners to apply 30 near-synonymous change-of-state verbs in two EFL Freshman English courses in a college setting across two semesters. In the study, 32 participants in the experimental group and 22 in the control…

Background/purpose: This study examined Vietnamese English majors' competence and perception of academic collocations to determine the need for targeted instruction. The research aimed to identify specific challenges these learners face in learning and using academic collocations in their writing. Methods: The study involved 199 Vietnamese English…

This study intended to explore the different types of phraseological units in IELTS academic writing task 2 and probe into the IELTS candidates' perceptions of phraseological competence. To this end, a corpus entailing 100 essays (26,423 words) written for IELTS writing task 2 was scrutinized, through which phraseological units were extracted and…

Writing an English research article for novice English as an additional language (EAL) writers is a challenging task that requires experience and training at both the sentence and meaning levels. One strategy that EAL writers employ when writing a research article is the use of formulaic sequences (FSs). However, available FS corpora are general…

This study compared syntactic complexity between undergraduate students' research papers and published research papers. A 2 (Groups: experts, students) × 4 (Sections: introduction, methods, results, discussions) mixed factorial analysis of variance (ANOVA) was conducted on each of the following variables: T-unit length, clause density, the…

The study aims to investigate phrasal complexity measures that can predict EFL students' academic writing proficiency. Academic English written test responses were derived from written responses from the Khon Kaen University Academic English Language Test (KKU-AELT). Five hundred and thirty written responses were separated into groups based on…

The purpose of this study is two-fold: 1) to investigate the effects of Data-Driven Learning (DDL) framed within the Involvement Load Hypothesis (ILH) on Thai learners' use of academic collocations and 2) to examine how Thai learners utilized the involvement load (IL) components (need, search, and evaluation) to master academic collocations. It is…

Corpus-based studies of lexical bundles have opened new avenues for language teaching research. The fact that naturally occurring language consists of patterns of lexical repetition and multi-word units has given rise to the question of chunkiness in learner language. This study was designed to examine lexical bundles and their functions in a…