Since its emergence, generative AI has significantly impacted various fields, including English language education. Numerous academic studies have investigated its capabilities in grammar correction, writing evaluation, and dynamics of user interaction. However, there have been insufficient investigations into whether texts generated by such AI…

Semantic variables enable L2 researchers and materials creators to quantify and control the effects of meaning on cognition. However, in recent years, many variables have been normed and published. Parsing the methods employed in norming this myriad of variables and which disparate theories informed their creation can be an opaque and arduous…

Material development is important for training beginner student interpreters, as it guides the direction of interpreting learning. One key principle is difficulty progression, which requires a good knowledge of the indicators of difficulty. Since text structure outweighs words and sentences in the information processing of consecutive…

The present study adopts a corpus-driven perspective to an analysis of the 'current relevance' meaning, a central meaning of the present perfect, in general and textbook corpora. The term 'current relevance' refers to a meaning of the present perfect, in which a past action or event is shown to be connected with the present time in some ways. The…

The teaching and acquisition of foreign language pragmatics as a part of the communicative competence paradigm has been reported as essential since the deviation from the Chomskian competence-based model to a more performative one in the '80s. Despite this change, only a few course books include or are designed on a teaching pragmatics basis. As…

Large Language Models (LLMs) are a powerful type of Artificial Intelligence (AI) that simulates how humans organize language and are able to interpret, predict, and generate text. This allows for contextual understanding of natural human language which enables the LLM to understand conversational human input and respond in a natural manner. Recent…

Corpus linguistics is a new branch of linguistics but its status is still debatable - either as a theory or a methodology. This article aims to give an overview of the different approaches and perspectives of corpus linguistics. The neo-Firthians contend that corpus linguistics is a method, while other prominent corpus linguists claim that it is a…

In recent years, the use of English corpora to instruct grammar in writing classes has become increasingly popular. In English for Specific Purposes classes, such a novel approach is critically important since it not only allows teachers to achieve a profound understanding of which syntactic structures should be instructed, but it also increases…

Linking adverbials are important for creating textual cohesion in both written and spoken English. While there are reference grammar books describing the usage patterns of linking adverbials and studies investigating learners' difficulties in using these cohesive devices, there is little discussion on how to effectively teach and learn them. By…

In this study, the resemblance of the language learning course books used in Turkey to authentic language spoken by native speakers is explored by using a corpus-based approach. For this, the 10-million-word spoken part of the British National Corpus was selected as reference corpus. After that, all language learning course books used in high…

As learner corpora have presently become readily accessible, it is practicable to examine interlanguage errors and carry out error analysis (EA) on learner-generated texts. The data available in a learner corpus enable researchers to investigate authentic learner errors and their respective frequencies in terms of types and tokens as well as…

This study reports on a corpus analysis of samples of spoken discourse between a group of British and Taiwanese adolescents, with the aim of exploring the statistically significant differences in the use of grammatical categories between the two groups of participants. The key word method extended to a part-of-speech level using the web-based…

CHALLENGE is generally perceived as a negative word synonymous with "dispute," "defy," "confrontation," and "contest." However, when resorting to dictionary definitions, CHALLENGE has unexpectedly been found to possess positive senses such as "stimulating" and "arousing competitive…

This study compares the effect of using corpus-based materials and activities for the instruction of pragmatic routines under two conditions: implementing direct corpus searches by learners during classroom instruction and working with teacher-developed corpus-based materials. The outcome is compared to a repeated-test control group. Pragmatic…

The present study investigates the collocational profiles of (1) three series of graded textbooks for English as a foreign language (EFL) commonly used in Taiwan, (2) the written productions of EFL learners, and (3) the written productions of native speakers (NS) of English. These texts were examined against a purpose-built collocation list. Based…