Over the past decade, sociologists have become increasingly interested in the formal study of semantic relations within text. Most contemporary studies focus either on mapping concept co-occurrences or on measuring semantic associations via word embeddings. Although conducive to many research goals, these approaches share an important limitation:…

This short article reviews key corpus-based pedagogic initiatives in the spirit of the Swalesian tradition of genre analysis. Pedagogic genres covered include report writing, thesis writing, writing a grant proposal and legal essay writing. More recently, attention has been paid to the writing of research articles by postgraduate students for whom…

We propose five research tasks targeting grammar teaching and learning, focusing on extending previous research and exploring under-studied features and contexts. The first two tasks outline replications and extensions of seminal studies on pedagogical grammar, Toth (2008) and Samuda (2001), designed to advance our understanding of the teacher…

Using a corpora approach involves using a series of texts in the language under study as a type of corpus on which to base acquisition. Languages in all forms (written, spoken, performed, formal, informal, etc.) are captured all the time through online and digital platforms, apps, etc. making them highly accessible. Applying corpora in teaching…

Purpose: This article summarizes the shared principles and evidence underpinning methods employed in the three sentence-level (syntactic) grammatical intervention approaches developed by the authors. We discuss associated clinical resources and map a way forward for clinically useful research in this area. Method: We provide an overview of the…

Lexical knowledge is complex, multidimensional, and difficult to pin down to a set of defined components. The development, organization, and use of lexical knowledge in the first and additional languages are studied in a number of neighbouring disciplines beyond second language acquisition and applied linguistics, including psycholinguistics,…

What almost all accounts of standardisation histories have in common is a focus on printed, formal or literary texts from writing elites. While Haugen identified the written form of a language as "a significant and probably crucial requirement for a standard language" (Haugen in Am Anthropol 68:922-935, 1966a; Haugen, in: Bright (ed)…

The vocabulary research of the 1980s and 1990s brought a breath of fresh air into the language classroom. Teachers in many remote EFL locations had long suspected that vocabulary was their learners' main challenge, but there was little research evidence to confirm this or say what to do about it. Then, suddenly, work by Nation, Laufer, Meara,…

The Discontinuity Model (DM) described in this article proposes that adults can learn part of L2 morphosyntax twice, in two different ways. The same item can be learned as the product of generation by a rule or as a modification of a template already stored in memory. These learning modalities, which are often seen as opposed in language theory,…

Machine translation (MT) provides a seemingly accelerated alternative way to communicate in the target language (L2). A convenient service to the public, MT renders a potential disservice to language learners. In this pedagogically focused article, we show concrete and detailed examples of how language instructors can turn MT and other electronic…

Viewing its use in language teaching mainly as a text corpus, this article examines the problem of the assessment of suitability of this material for use in the Greek language course in Cyprus schooling. The suitability of texts for use in language teaching is defined by four parameters, which are described in detail in this article: text…

Strong claims are made regarding the significant role that multiword sequences play in the comprehension and production of speech and writing. Although the literature is replete with research-informed, evidence-based guidelines on how to maximize the learning of such sequences, such guidelines need to be synthesized, analyzed and evaluated for…

Tetun Dili, an Austronesian language spoken in East Timor, was until 1999 primarily an oral language of intercultural communication. Since the 1999 vote on independence from Indonesia, Tetun Dili has become the dominant language of public life, including the government, education and the media, as well as becoming an official language alongside…

This paper will present a translation project with second-year bachelor students together with some observational data. The students firstly translated an academic abstract from Italian (their first language) to English by using the language resources they were acquainted with. Then they translated a second abstract by using a pre-compiled offline…

We present SimpleApprenant, a platform aiming to improve French L2 learners' knowledge of Multi Word Expressions (MWEs). SimpleApprenant integrates an MWE database annotated with the Common European Framework of Reference for languages (CEFR) level and several Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools: a spelling checker, a parser, and a set of…