This study proposes five components of corpus literacy skills (CL) based on a survey of previous studies to investigate in-service teachers' perceived CL skills. Subsequently, the relationships among these components will be explored. In addition, this study investigates whether age and teaching experience have an effect on perceived CL skills.…

While the use of machine translation (MT) in the classroom has been explored from various perspectives, the relationship between language proficiency and MT use regarding learners' behaviors and beliefs remains unclear in the research literature. This study focused on four Japanese learners with various language proficiencies from a fourth-year…

Recent calls from applied linguistics and from CALL have emphasized the importance of situating the understanding and use of digital tools for language learning within layered contexts. An important component of these layered contexts is societal discourses of technology, which are multiple and far from neutral. In response to these calls, this…

This article describes the steps we went through in designing and validating an item bank to diagnose linguistic problems in the English academic writing of university students in Hong Kong. Test items adopt traditional item formats (e.g., MCQ, grammatical judgment tasks, and error correction) but are based on authentic language materials…

This study investigated the efficacy of explicit lexical collocation instruction via the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). To improve competence in lexical collocation and writing performance and to examine whether collocational competence and writing performance have a linear interrelation, 16 international English for Academic…

Reading rate, usually measured in words per minute, is a common operationalization of reading fluency in second language (L2) research and pedagogy. However, the impact of word length is often not addressed. This paper presents two studies showing how the number of characters in a text influences L2 reading time, independent of word counts, within…

Although the ESL Composition Profile (CP) has been widely used by scholars as a well-balanced rubric for learner essay evaluation, it is not necessarily easy for L2 teachers to rate students' essays based on the five criteria of the CP. This indicates the necessity to explore reliable alternatives to the CP. This article, therefore, compares three…

The importance of functional adequacy as an essential component of L2 proficiency has been observed by several authors (Pallotti, 2009; De Jong, Steinel, Florijn, Schoonen, & Hulstijn, 2012a, b). The rationale underlying the present study is that the assessment of writing proficiency in L2 is not fully possible without taking into account the…

This article presents several empirical studies of syntactically encoded evidentiality in English. The first part of our study consists of an adult online experiment that confirms claims in Asudeh & Toivonen (2012) that raised Perception Verb Similatives (PVSs; e.g. "John looks like he is sick") encode direct evidentiality. We then…

A corpus of 313 freshman college essays was analyzed in order to better understand the forms and functions of humor in academic writing. Human ratings of humor and wordplay were statistically aggregated using Factor Analysis to provide an overall "Humor" component score for each essay in the corpus. In addition, the essays were also…

One of the major innovations of the "TOEFL iBT"® test is the incorporation of integrated tasks complementing the independent tasks to which examinees respond. In addition, examinees must produce discourse in both modes (speech and writing). The validity argument for the TOEFL iBT includes the claim that examinees vary their discourse in…