Quantitative text analysis tools have become increasingly popular methods for the operationalization of various types of discourse analysis. However, their application usually remains fairly simple and superficial, and fails to exploit the resources which the digital era holds for discourse analysis to their full extent. This paper discusses the…

This manuscript reports on a corpus-based comparison of native and nonnative graduate students' language production in an asynchronous learning environment. Using 486 discussion board postings from a five-year period (2009-2013), we analyzed the extent to which native and nonnative university students' writing differed in 10 measures of syntactic…

Analysis of teacher-to-teacher talk provides researchers with useful information regarding the teaching profession and teachers' perspectives. This article provides a description of a method, with accompanying example, examining teacher-to-teacher talk by incorporating semantic modality and examining trends of its usage in a quantitative manner.…

Several studies have analysed and assessed online performance and discourse using quantitative and qualitative methods. Quantitative measures have typically included the analysis of participation rates and learning outcomes in terms of grades. Qualitative measures of postings, discussions and context features aim to give insights into the nature…

Chat conversations and other types of online communication environments are widely used within CSCL educational scenarios. However, there is a lack of theoretical and methodological background for the analysis of collaboration. Manual assessing of non-moderated chat discussions is difficult and time-consuming, having as a consequence that learning…

A recent development in English teaching in Russia is the emergence of private online language-tutoring schools, which offer one-on-one lessons by means of audio/videoconferencing. It remains unclear: (1) how these new providers of educational services are presenting themselves to the potential learners; (2) what ideology they tend to drawn on and…

This paper examines discursive features of engagement (Hyland, 2009) demonstrated by native English- and Russian-speaking academics in their research articles. Pronoun choice, formation of directives, references to shared information, and use of rhetorical questions are identified in written academic discourse and analyzed quantitatively and…

Theories of reference assume that the referent's salience in the discourse context affects the choice between pronouns and definite noun phrases or names. We examined whether and how the referent's inherent properties affect the choice of expressions by investigating animacy. Experiment 1 showed that pronouns were more frequent for animates than…

This article explores the value of judiciously used first language (L1)-to-second language (L2) translation in meaning-focused, advanced-level academic language education. It examines languaging in the teacher-led discourse (TLD) that arises when translation tasks are used and compares it to languaging during the TLD engendered by 4 other…

The concept of "Ethnolinguistic Vitality" (EV) has received variable acceptance and support since its introduction by Giles, Bourhis, and Taylor. It has especially proven to be a valuable heuristic in studies of language maintenance and shift. However, the reliability and validity of the instruments used to investigate EV, especially…

This study explores interactional metadiscourse resources in master's dissertations (introductions and conclusions) of Turkish students written in Turkish and English. Interactional resources were identified according to Hyland and Tse's (2004) framework by using WordSmith Tools (5.0). A statistically significant difference between two groups of…

Comprehensibility, a major concept in second language (L2) pronunciation research that denotes listeners' perceptions of how easily they understand L2 speech, is central to interlocutors' communicative success in real-world contexts. Although comprehensibility has been modeled in several L2 oral proficiency scales--for example, the Test of English…

"Wireless" is the word selected to illustrate a model of analysis designed to determine the specialized character of a lexical unit. "Wireless" belongs to the repertoire of specialized vocabulary automatically extracted from a corpus of telecommunication engineering English (TEC). This paper describes the procedure followed in the analysis which…

Background/Context: In 2010, I was invited to give the annual lecture that honors Lawrence Cremin, the historian of American education who became the seventh president of Teachers College, Columbia University. To pay tribute to the way in which Cremin used an academic discipline to bring rigor and depth to educational research, I described my own…

This study investigated the effects of an instructional procedure which incorporated lexical cohesion and macrorules to promote main idea comprehension of Thai EFL students. One hundred and six undergraduate students taking a reading module were randomly assigned to one of three teaching conditions: the combined use of lexical cohesion and…