In the present study, two sets of scripts from primary school students were collected, one written in English and the other in their native Chinese on the same topic. The Chinese scripts were translated into English by Google Translate (GT) and compared with the scripts written in English. Sentences in the two sets of passages that were clearly…

Based on the cross-channel connections between auditory and pictorial representations, it has been proposed that the presentation of coherent narration along with the picture and text content may enhance children's story comprehension and vocabulary learning. The authors tested 40 four- to five-year-old Malaysian prereaders (17 Malays, 23 Chinese)…

The adoption of computer-mediated communication (CMC) has been growing as an effective approach to facilitating second language (L2) and foreign language (FL) acquisition. Existing literature implementing CMC has investigated the efficacy of various devices, including video conferencing, emails, and virtual worlds. Nevertheless, few studies have…

The advent of technology has facilitated the study of language development and writing development in the form of learner corpora. While learner corpus studies have flourished in recent years, few consider evaluative language development. This paper reports on a study which examines the use of evaluative that-clauses, a linguistic structure that…

Learning collocations is one of the most challenging aspects of language learning as there are literally hundreds of thousands of possibilities for combining words. Corpus consultation with concordancers has been recognized in the literature as an established way for language learners to study and explore collocations at their own pace and in…

This study reveals the impact of using parallel corpora on EFL students' writing, and how students perceive it. Female undergraduates (n=46) in an EFL writing course in Saudi Arabia were divided randomly into experimental and control groups taught by the same instructor, using the same materials. Students in the experimental group were introduced…

This study extracts the comments from a large scale of Chinese EFL learners' translation corpus to study the taxonomy of translation errors. Two unsupervised machine learning approaches are used to obtain the computational evidences of translation error taxonomy. After manually revision, ten types of English to Chinese (E2C) and eight types…

Although the ESL Composition Profile (CP) has been widely used by scholars as a well-balanced rubric for learner essay evaluation, it is not necessarily easy for L2 teachers to rate students' essays based on the five criteria of the CP. This indicates the necessity to explore reliable alternatives to the CP. This article, therefore, compares three…

This article reports on a language learning system and a program designed to help students with academic vocabulary in the New Zealand university computer science department. The system is a learner-friendly corpus-based tool that allows students to look up lexico-grammatical patterns of a given word in academic writing. The program, based on a…