This study compared the five-word lexical bundles (LBs) expressing gratitude in acknowledgments of dissertations written by Chinese and American PhD students of linguistics. Two corpora were built: (1) The Chinese University Dissertation Acknowledgments Collection (CUC) which contained 700 acknowledgments with a total of 300,686 tokens, and (2)…

Recent linguistic landscape (LL) research has witnessed a change in focus to untypical, peripheral and fluid signs. Compared to typical (or permanent, fixed, etc.) signs which tend to be subject to strong policy intervention, language use on untypical signs is often more autonomous, thus could better reflect the "de facto" language…

The manner in which educators use commands, a form of language that serves to guide and regulate behaviour, constitutes an essential component of children's learning experiences in relation to language and social interactions. This study investigated nine Chinese and nine Japanese educators' use of commanding language in educator-child free play…

There has been substantial research on the effects of metacognitive instruction on improving L2 learners' language skills. However, little is known about the impact of such instruction on improving the effectiveness of L2 students' collaborative writing. To fill this research gap, we conducted a quasi-experimental study to investigate how such an…

Recent studies have accumulated to suggest that children, akin to adults, exhibit a processing advantage for formulaic language (e.g. "save energy") over novel language (e.g. "sell energy"), as well as sensitivity to phrase frequencies. The majority of these studies are based on formulaic sequences in their canonical form. In…

Traditional English education in China, with its emphasis on grammatical proficiency and written accuracy, often neglects public speaking, resulting in a notable deficiency in practical language application. This study investigated the potential of project-based learning to address this problem by promoting more interactive, student-centered…

National language planning and family language planning may converge or diverge. As 2019 marks the 70th anniversary of the establishment of the new China, we examined language planning at both the national level and the family level in China. We first revisited language policy and planning in China over the last seventy years through a policy…

This study addresses how Chinese learners of English as a second language (L2) perceive conversations in English materials as compared to speakers of English as a first language (L1). Data were collected through questionnaires completed by 48 participants (28 L2 English learners in China and 20 L1 English speakers in the UK), eliciting evaluations…

The study examines a corpus of 306 request emails written by 32 English-speaking (ES) teachers and 121 L2 learners from distinctive L1 backgrounds (i.e., Chinese, French, Spanish) and with different levels of L2 proficiency. Pragmatic competence is analyzed through the coding of direct and indirect request strategies used in formal and informal…

Concept-based language instruction (C-BLI) is a pedagogy guided by sociocultural theory, which has been shown to be effective in facilitating second language learning. Typical activities include materialization by using a schema for a complete orienting basis of an action (SCOBA) and languaging, through which learners' internalization of…

There is a long-standing interrelationship between the military and medical spheres in society. Military actions rely on medical services to tend to casualties, and medical advances often come from the pressure of military campaigns that generate large numbers of patients. That interrelationship is a linear one of simple paired interaction.…

Informed by two usage-based approaches, this study investigated to what extent different types of computer-based training facilitated English preposition learning among intermediate Chinese learners of English. The design of the pedagogical materials was informed by the cognitive linguistics (CL) framework while the training format was motivated…

This article reports on an experimental study that set out to investigate and compare the effectiveness of a direct and an indirect approach to data-driven learning (DDL) in facilitating Chinese learners' mastery of a challenging type of lexico-grammatical resource (i.e. hedges) in an undergraduate English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) writing…

This dissertation uses the Conceptual Blending Hypothesis from the socio-cognitive method presented and refined by Kecskes (2002, 2004, 2007, 2010, 2020) to explain how the lexical choice of bilinguals differs across sociocultural situations. Quantitative (lexical density, lexical diversity, and lexical sophistication) and qualitative (lexical…

This study investigates the implementation of peer feedback in an advanced English-Chinese translation course. Teacher scaffolding was provided to 20 students who completed two translation-feedback-revision cycles. A survey was then administered to the class, followed by a semi-structured interview with six students. The study yielded rather…