Based on the Communicative Action Theory, intersubjectivity theory and the interpersonal classification of metadiscourse, this study makes a comparison between the source texts and the English-translated texts of Chinese company profiles with a self-built parallel corpus, along the dimensions of lexical variation, lexical density, grammatical…

This article discusses the features, reasons, and values of the mushrooming Chinese English neologisms (CENs). Generally speaking, CENs are a variety of English words, namely Chinese English words, some of which have entered Oxford English Dictionary (OED). Based on data from Web Corp Live, the author finds that: (1) CENs take on the grammatical…

Writing is one of productive skills and a way of conveying information considered to be the most complex and the most challenging skill for EFL English learners to acquire, hence many studies have been conducted on the revelation of the characteristic of writings of EFL learners and how to improve them. Among them, pronoun study has attracted…

Strong claims are made regarding the significant role that multiword sequences play in the comprehension and production of speech and writing. Although the literature is replete with research-informed, evidence-based guidelines on how to maximize the learning of such sequences, such guidelines need to be synthesized, analyzed and evaluated for…

This study was designed to investigate whether contemporary corpus-informed grammar textbooks written for English language learners and teachers presented the progressive use of stative verbs and if yes, which stative verbs were presented to occur with the progressive aspect and for which functions they took this aspect. A corpus of six electronic…

As an interactional encounter between a journalist and one or more newsworthy public figures, an interview program is a special type of discourse that is full of evaluative language. This paper sets out to explore evaluation in interview programs from the perspective of appraisal system. The corpus software used in this study is UAM CorpusTool…

While more Chinese students are going abroad to persue their further academic study, how to help them improve academic writing competence has received wide attention. Modality, as one of the complex areas of English grammar, reflects the writer's attitude and is extremely important in academic written discourse. Therefore, it is necessary to…

This study focused on the grammatical accuracy of Japanese students who were learning English. The database for the errors came from the Japanese University Student Corpus (JUSC) comprising 61 transcripts containing 51,061 words. An inventory, containing 400 errors in context, was taken from this corpus. The first research question related to the…

English language learners may be confused in identifying the grammatical category of such conjunctive expressions as "before," "after" and "since" introducing non-finite "-ing" clauses. In this article, we will conduct a corpus-based investigation of hypotactic conjunctions and conjunctive prepositions…

Central to argumentative writing is the proper use of epistemic devices (EDs), which distinguish writers' opinions from facts and evaluate the degree of certainty expressed in their statements. Important as these devices are, they turn out to constitute a thorny area for non-native speakers (NNS). Previous research indicates that Chinese EFL…

The study aims to investigate to what extent Chinese EFL learners' language use is influenced by English textbooks. Such influence may suggest the existence of lexical priming effects. Based on detailed and systematic analysis of a learner English corpus, in comparison with a textbook corpus, the present study revealed striking similarities of the…

Using corpora in language teaching has revolutionized language research with its "authentic" appeal. Corpus tools have enabled linguistic researchers and teachers to investigate actual usages and the characteristics of certain genres in order to improve syllabus design and infer more effective classroom exercises. From this perspective,…

In order to develop effective teaching methods and computer-assisted language teaching systems for learners of English as a foreign language who need to study the basic linguistic competences for writing, pronunciation, reading, and listening, it is necessary to first investigate which vocabulary and grammar they have or have not yet learned.…

Using corpus approach, a growing number of researchers blamed textbooks for neglecting important information on the use of grammatical structures in natural English. Likewise, the prescribed Malaysian English textbooks used in schools are reportedly prepared through a process of material development that involves intuition. Hence, a corpus-based…

The study aimed to investigate the distribution patterns of the English grammar articles (a, an, and the) as well as the distributions of their colligation patterns in written compositions of English among Malaysian ESL learners. This paper reports the results of a corpus-based study on articles used by these learners. The method used in this…