There are few published estimates of vocabulary sizes amongst students in tertiary education. Research does not offer estimates of the vocabulary size tertiary students might be expected to possess, though estimates exist for K-12 education, some EFL contexts, and the general population. Such research is important. For reading comprehension during…

As a key component of fluent linguistic production, multi-word sequences called lexical bundles are considered an important distinguishing feature of discourse in different registers, genres, and disciplines. They are also an important aspect of empirically correct and proficient language use in a corpus of natural language because they enable…

This short article reviews key corpus-based pedagogic initiatives in the spirit of the Swalesian tradition of genre analysis. Pedagogic genres covered include report writing, thesis writing, writing a grant proposal and legal essay writing. More recently, attention has been paid to the writing of research articles by postgraduate students for whom…

This study was conducted to examine the lexical bundles used by nonnative speakers of English and explore any potential L1 influence on L2 lexical bundle use. Following a corpus-based approach, the frequency and types of English four-word lexical bundles in the postgraduate academic writing of Turkish and American students were analyzed, and the…

Background: Graduate engineering students are required to write for academic audiences; however, very few engineering programs teach engineering academic writing, and similarly, little research has been conducted on graduate engineering student writing. Purpose/Hypothesis: The purposes of this study were to investigate the argumentation patterns…

This study is about student writers' development of their own approaches to using formulaic phrases from a compendium (Academic Phrasebank). While the essential role of formulaic phrases in academic texts has been well established in research, teaching about the effective use of these phrases is not widely available, and little attention has been…

Post-predicate that clauses are one of the indicators of evaluative language which shows the attitude, position, and personal evaluation of the writers in academic discourse. Therefore, this study aims to investigate the distribution and frequently used controlling verbs of post-predicate that clauses controlled by verb (VTHAT) in academic…

By employing Chen and Kuo's (2012) framework, this study comparatively investigated the rhetorical differences/similarities existing in the Literature Review chapters of Master of Arts (MA) theses authored by international and Iraqi MA students in the field of applied linguistics. The results showed that almost half of the international LR…

Knowledge of collocations is essential for English academic writing. However, there are few academic collocation referencing tools available and there is a pressing need to develop more. In this paper, we will introduce the ACOP (Academic Collocations and Phrases Search Engine), a newly developed corpus-based tool to search large academic corpora.…

This paper describes the rationale, design and implementation of a short private online course (SPOC) on data-driven learning (DDL) (Johns, 1991), focusing on L2 error correction in postgraduate academic writing and involving over 300 registered users. I discuss the affordances of using a SPOC platform (namely "EdX") for online DDL…

The general question this research investigates concerns the difference between the use of lexical bundles in a corpus of abstracts for theses in the liberal arts written by Chinese undergraduate students and a corpus of abstracts written by American master's degree students. The undergraduate abstracts were first written in Chinese and then…

Data-driven learning (DDL; Johns, 1991), involving students' hands-on use of corpora for self-guided language learning, is a methodology now increasingly used in many tertiary contexts to enhance the teaching of disciplinary postgraduate thesis writing. However, there are still few studies tracking students' actual engagement with corpora for DDL.…

This study explores the ways in which master thesis writers position their research in the field of English language teaching in a context where academic literacies are still a developing field. From a social semiotic perspective, this paper aims to identify the resources writers use to represent their object of study and provide a context and…

This study investigated the efficacy of explicit lexical collocation instruction via the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). To improve competence in lexical collocation and writing performance and to examine whether collocational competence and writing performance have a linear interrelation, 16 international English for Academic…

This corpus-driven longitudinal study investigates the structural use of lexical bundles in published research article (RA) introductions in applied linguistics written by English experts and Korean graduate students across two different levels of study. Frequency-based bundles were retrieved from a corpus of 200 published RA introductions and two…