With the increasing use of mobile phones among young people, there is growing public concern about possible detrimental effects of digital writing on learners' literacy and language skills. We ask whether and to what extent nonstandard forms typical of spoken Hebrew and of digital communication are also found in the formal writing of high-school…

The words in a language or language variety are often rank ordered in lists that are meant to reflect the relative importance of those words to language users and learners of a language. This rank ordering is done on the basis of the relative prevalence of words in a corpus. Lexical prevalence is often operationalized as measures of frequency,…

One of the important components in second language (L2) development is to produce clause-level units of form-meaning pairings or argument structure constructions. Based on the usage-based constructionist approach that language development entails an ability to use more diverse, more complex, and less frequent constructions, this study tested…

In this article, we suggest that using R, a statistical software environment, is advantageous for quantitative researchers in applied linguistics. We first provide a brief overview of the reasons why R is popular among researchers in other fields and why we recommend its use for analyses in applied linguistics. In order to illustrate these…

Computational techniques and software applications for the quantitative content analysis of texts are now well established, and many qualitative data software applications enable the manipulation of input variables and the visualization of complex relations between them via interactive and informative graphical interfaces. Although advances in…

This article studies the Western perceptions of and relations with Hong Kong a decade after the reversion of the sovereignty from Britain to China in 1997. Previous studies have demonstrated that the West had a significantly negative view on the future of Hong Kong with respect to the handover. According to recent observations, however, the…

The relationship between language and identity has been explored in a number of ways in applied linguistics, and this article focuses on a particular aspect of it: self-representation in the oral history interview. People from a wide range of backgrounds, currently resident in one large city in England, were asked to reflect on their lives as part…

This article makes a contribution to understanding informal argumentation by focusing on the discourse of reading groups. Reading groups, an important cultural phenomenon in Britain and other countries, regularly meet in members' houses, in pubs or restaurants, in bookshops, workplaces, schools or prisons to share their experiences of reading…

This article discusses issues in measuring lexical diversity, before outlining an approach based on mathematical modelling that produces a measure, D, designed to address these problems. The procedure for obtaining values for D directly from transcripts using software (vocd) is introduced, and then applied to thirty-two children from the Bristol…