Literature survey concerning the Learner Corpus Research (LCR) in the last 20 years has shown a paucity of studies involving specialised/discipline-specific text. Since the use of discipline-specific academic writing learner corpora is useful in determining the language pattern within the English for Specific Academic Purposes (ESAP) context, this…

Issues of intelligibility may arise amongst English learners when acquiring new words and phrases in North American academic settings, perhaps in part due to limited linguistic data available to the learner for understanding language use patterns. To this end, this paper examines the effects of Data-Driven Learning for Pronunciation (DDLfP) on…

While studies exploring the overall effectiveness of Data Driven Learning activities have been positive, learner participants often seem to report difficulties in deciding what to look up, and how to formulate appropriate queries for a search (Gabel, 2001; Sun, 2003; Yeh, Liou, & Li, 2007). "The Prime Machine" (Jeaco, 2015) was…

This study investigates the frequency and functions of "just" in British academic spoken English. It adopts the meanings of "just" established by Lindemann and Mauranen, 2001, taken from the occurrences of "just" across five speech events in the Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English (MICASE) to see if they also apply to occurrences of "just"…

This primarily methodological article makes a proposition for linguistic exploration of textual resources available through the "Google Scholar" search engine. These resources ("Google Scholar virtual corpus") are significantly larger than any existing corpus of academic writing. "Google Scholar", however, was not designed for linguistic searches…

This paper compares published writing produced by British and Sudanese medical researchers. Twenty research articles were examined, 10 by British and 10 by Sudanese writers. All had been published in highly regarded international journals. As expected, all 20 articles conformed to editorial requirements and followed the conventional IMRD structure…

A study of the discourse of book reviews in several academic disciplines examines how interaction of text and context varies across disciplines. Sixty academic book reviews in linguistics, chemistry, and economics were analyzed for rhetorical structure and for the communicative goal of the genre, that of evaluating knowledge production. The book…

This study analyzed the English discourse organization of sixty academic book reviews in three disciplines (linguistics, chemistry, economics) published in 1990, to help define book reviews as an academic written genre. Analysis revealed that although book reviews show regularities in information form, function, and content, some variation occurs…

This study investigated register features of 164 foreign students' English writing before and after full-time courses in English for academic purposes. Results indicate the major changes were from features of spoken English to those more typical of formal writing, both in surface detail and in more fundamental characteristics. Less change occurred…

A study was conducted at an American university to collect data on how native English-speaking students asked questions in class. The data were analyzed for use of syntactic forms, formulaic expressions or prefatory comments, terms of address, functions fulfilled by the questions, and politeness markers. The results were then compared with the…

Monographs on pragmatics and language learning include: "Do We All Apologize the Same?--An Empirical Study on the Act of Apologizing by Spanish Speakers Learning English" (Montserrat Mir); "Conversational Openings in Kiswahili: The Pragmatic Performance of Native and Non-Native Speakers" (Alwiya S. Omar); "Experimental and…