Through consultations with the online version of the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English (LDOCE) and the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), this study focuses on distinguishing between the two synonymous verbs "restrict" and "constrain," both part of Coxhead's (2000) Academic Word List, in terms of formality…

Despite the widely used word lists in English as a second or foreign language learning, few attempts have been made to create an academic spoken collocation list, which holds significant potential for enhancing learners' aural and oral abilities in academic communication. This study created a list of the most frequently used and pedagogically…

This research was prompted by the phenomenon of binge-watching Korean television series (K-drama) amongst college students in Taiwan, where English as a foreign language (EFL) is a required course. The researcher-teacher sought to create a pedagogically useful list of the frequent semantically non-compositional multi-word expressions (MWEs) for…

Purpose: This study attempts to evaluate the effect of the corpus-based inductive teaching approach with multiple academic corpora (PICA, CAEC and Oxford Corpus of Academic English) and conventional deductive teaching approach (i.e., multiple-choice items, filling the gap, matching and underlining) on learning academic collocations by Iranian…

This study outlines the steps taken to create an academic multi-word unit list derived from corpus data. It gives details on the procedure used and the rationale behind why certain approaches were utilised. It also compares existing resources and makes some suggestions for practical use of the resulting resource.

This study emerged as a result of insufficient knowledge and descriptions of the behavioural profiles of the near-synonym English verbs, "increase" and "rise," by non-corpus-based traditional reference sources used by students. We explored the behavioural characteristics of this group of near-synonym verbs using the British…

Saudi Vision 2030 is a plan to steer the country towards prosperity through diversified economy, better government services and conducive environment for all to thrive. The study of wordlists, keyword lists, collocation analyses, identification of core issues on the basis of lexical fields and their reflection in 2018 English newspapers in Saudi…

In this article, we present the results of an eight-week in-class intervention, during which binomial expressions comprised of academic vocabulary (results and conclusions, facts and circumstances) were presented to intermediate-level learners of English. Constraints that govern the preferred order of highly fixed binomials were explained as the…

Acquiring collocations is widely considered to be essential in language learning. The question arises, however, as to what collocations merit students' and teachers' attention in ESP classes at a tertiary level. Thus, this corpus-based study aims to systematically develop an academic collocation list for undergraduate mechanical engineering…

The present investigation focuses on first language (L1) and second language (L2) speakers' sensitivity to lexical fixedness and compositionality of Italian word combinations. Two studies explored language users' intuitions about three types of word combinations: free combinations, collocations, and idioms. In Study 1, Italian Verb+Noun…

The traditional approach to presenting idioms relies mainly on teachers' or materials writers' judgement, one-by-one and quite incidentally; and the existing teaching materials and references for idioms are mostly intuition-based. However, a more recent approach to better teaching and learning idioms is to present them under categories of their…

Corpora have given rise to a wide range of lexicographic resources aimed at helping novice users of academic English with their writing. This includes academic vocabulary lists, a variety of textbooks, and even a bespoke academic English dictionary. However, writers may not be familiar with these resources or may not be sufficiently aware of the…

English phrasal verbs (PVs) are ubiquitous and often polysemous. These lexical items are thus very important, but also challenging for ESL/EFL learners. Substantial research that can inform instructional approaches to PVs has already been conducted. One strand of this research has focused on identifying PVs that merit prioritization in learning.…

Phrasal verbs are a notoriously difficult feature of English for most second language and foreign language learners to master. Different sources, such as movies, music, games and books, can provide learners with exposure to the most common phrasal verbs in English. This study aims to investigate the degree to which music can play a role in…

Corpora are well-known for the affordance to make linguistic regularities salient. Since the coinage of the term 'data-driven learning' (DDL) in the 1990s, much has been done to investigate the effects of DDL on learning vocabulary, most notably lexico-grammatical patterns. However, less researched is how learners construct vocabulary knowledge…