The article presents a typology of statements that can be made about discourse data. The classification is based on two parameters: level of generality and level of interpretation. Each of these is operationalized into three discrete levels, to yield a nine-cell table containing types of statements going from the presentation of a single case to…

Do adults learn the same syntactic second language (L2) form explicitly and implicitly simultaneously during meaning-based exposure, and does the type of learning (explicit and/or implicit) affect subsequent performance. In this study, 81 anglophones completed comprehension tasks providing incidental exposure to a semi-artificial language (English…

As demand for English-medium higher education continues to grow internationally and participation in higher education increases, the need for a better understanding of academic writing is pressing. Prior university wide taxonomies of student writing have relied on intuition, the opinions of faculty, or data from course documentation and task…

This article reports a study on metaphor comprehension by the international students whose first language is not English, while attending undergraduate lectures at a British university. Study participants identified words or multiword items that they found difficult in extracts from four academic lectures, and they interpreted metaphors from those…

This research creates an empirically derived, pedagogically useful list of formulaic sequences for academic speech and writing, comparable with the Academic Word List (Coxhead 2000), called the Academic Formulas List (AFL). The AFL includes formulaic sequences identified as (i) frequent recurrent patterns in corpora of written and spoken language,…

Argues that accuracy orders in morpheme acquisition by adult second language learners can be predicted by a model of morpheme classification, the 4-M model. The model identifies four types of morphemes; content morphemes, early system morphemes, and two types of late system morphemes. (Author/VWL)

Provides a survey of the second language literature on the role of formulaic language, focusing on communicative, production, and learning strategy functions of such language. The need to address the theoretical and methodological difficulties surrounding the definition and identification of formulaic language is discussed. (105 references) (MDM)

Examined language learning background features in relation to overall grade, rate of progress, and completion of an intensive English program. Determined extent to which success could be accurately predicted by an expert system when basing inferences on feature constellations including language learning background features only, entry proficiency…