In English as an additional language writing, error correction or error feedback is most commonly referred to as 'written corrective feedback (WCF)'. The emphasis on 'correctness' in 'WCF' suggests native-speakerist standards or norms, which are controversial in an increasingly globalized world. In this Forum article, I discuss the problems…

Until now, there has been very little unified analysis of metadiscourse across speech and writing. Drawing on a reflexive metadiscourse model, this article conducts a multidimensional analysis of metadiscourse across 10 spoken and written registers in a corpus of 626 texts. Two metadiscourse dimensions, participants' interaction and discourse…

In the present article, we explore the extent to which previous research on register variation can be used to predict spoken/written task-type variation as well as differences across score levels in the context of a major standardized language exam (TOEFL iBT). Specifically, we carry out two sets of linguistic analyses based on a large corpus of…

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…

This study examines the linguistic complexity and lexical diversity of both overt and covert L2 output produced during synchronous written computer-mediated communication, also referred to as chat. Video enhanced chatscripts produced by university learners of German (N = 23) engaged in dyadic task-based chat interaction were coded and analyzed for…

Corpus-based research has shown that the frequency of use of particular grammatical structures and lexis in English is not always congruent with the content or ordering of explicit rules in pedagogical materials. The present study provides an additional example from French, focusing on word-order rules related to adjective position and the…

Seeing language as a complex, dynamic system and language use/acquisition as dynamic adaptedness ("a make-do" solution) to a specific context proves a useful way of understanding change in progress, such as that which occurs with a developing L2 system. This emergentist shift of perspective provides another way of understanding previously observed…

Reviews the evolution of semicolon use in English, examining the frequency of semicolons, colons, and dashes in grammar, language, and linguistic books from the mid-16th century to the present. Concludes that after flourishing in the 17th and 18th centuries, the semicolon may have become a marginal component of the English punctuation system. (42…

Written apologies of deaf students were examined from data obtained from a discourse completion test. Results show that both word choice and word order give a routinized feel to the apologies, in part attributable to American Sign Language; and that strategy choices may reflect a culture-specific view of social offenses. (Contains 44 references.)…