The purpose of this research was to investigate the representation of black students in contemporary American English. Two questions were addressed, what is the semantic prosody of Black students, and what are the semantic roles for Black students. All the concordance lines containing the phrase Black students were downloaded from the Corpus of…

Concordancer tools have been used to help students learn aspects of written English by engaging them to access, examine, and analyze language examples in a corpus. Nonetheless, their efficacy remains uncertain when compared to other tools. This study compared a concordancer tool to Grammarly, QuillBot, Google search, online dictionaries, and…

The present study investigates the Thai quantifier 'laay' ([Thai characters omitted]) and its two major English lexical equivalents: 'several' and 'many', using data from an English-Thai parallel corpus, the Thai and British National Corpora. An examination of the parallel corpus reveals that the quantifier 'laay' has a broad semantic property as…

This study aims to explore cross-language intensification in affirmative sentences by examining the translation of standard amplifiers, words that scale upward towards an assumed norm to emphasize a quality of any entities, from Thai into English. The data comprises 602 parallel concordance lines with 17 intensifying patterns, which were drawn…

The purpose of this study was to analyze six English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners' trajectories of discriminating near-synonyms in a data-driven learning task. Since the learners find it considerably difficult to learn subtle meaning differences of near-synonyms, corpus-based data-driven learning may provide an opportunity for them to…

As an important yet intricate linguistic feature in English language, synonymy poses a great challenge for second language learners. Using the 100 million-word British National Corpus (BNC) as data and the software Sketch Engine (SkE) as an analyzing tool, this article compares the usage of "learn" and "acquire" used in natural…

Corpora have been used for pedagogical purposes for more than two decades but empirical studies are relatively rare, particularly in the context of grammar teaching. The present study focuses on students' attitudes towards grammar and how these attitudes are affected by the introduction of concordancing. The principal aims of the project were to…

This paper reports on a paper to develop two computer text corpora, called Hong Kong Texts on Hong Kong," at the University of Hong Kong English Centre. These corpora are intended to serve as a resource for teachers and researchers who need information on English usage in published text in Hong Kong. The aim of the report is to disseminate…