As an important practice for researchers, citing sources is a challenging task for undergraduate students as they deal with the types of citation forms, the variety of reporting verbs and their tenses, and the writer stances through reporting verbs. Therefore, the current research is aimed at investigating the surface forms, reporting verb tenses,…

Broadly defined, academic language (AL) is a set of lexical-grammatical norms and registers commonly used in educational and academic discourse. Mastery of academic language in writing is an important aspect of writing instruction and assessment. The purpose of this study was to use Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools to examine the extent to…

In order to facilitate the instruction and acquisition of EFL writing, this paper compares the uses of the light verb "get" in English writing by Chinese and L1 undergraduates by drawing on insights from the theory of norms and exploitations (TNE). Corpus pattern analysis (CPA) is conducted to analyze the data taken from two comparable…

This study aims to examine the relationship between the productive knowledge of some lexical and phraseological indices and the quality of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners' writing. A sample of 120 expository essays, written by semesters 1 and 5 university students in a less proficient EFL context, are rated by human evaluators and…

Corpus-based studies of lexical bundles have opened new avenues for language teaching research. The fact that naturally occurring language consists of patterns of lexical repetition and multi-word units has given rise to the question of chunkiness in learner language. This study was designed to examine lexical bundles and their functions in a…

Metaphor of modality in the Hallidayan linguistic framework is manifested through a transition from implicit modal expressions to explicit modal expressions, encompassing metaphor of modalization and metaphor of modulation. This article conducts a corpus-based investigation to examine the prevalence of metaphors of modalization in English academic…

This corpus-based study investigates lexical richness in English writing by Chinese senior high school students. Lexical uses in 303 compositions were compared across three grades in terms of lexical sophistication, variation, density and errors. Timed compositions were sampled from Writing Corpus of English Learners, and the sample sizes of three…

Lexical bundles are recurrent multiword combinations and often function as discourse building blocks. Lexical bundles have been analysed in university students' writing to detect linguistic errors, measure writing competence, and investigate the divergence between L1 and L2 writing. Few studies, however, have focused on the high-stakes genre of…

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…

With the dramatic improvement in quality, machine translation has emerged as a tool widely adopted by language learners. Its use, however, has been a divisive issue in language education. We conducted an approximate replication of Lee (2020) about the impact of machine translation on EFL writing. This study used a mixed-methods approach with…

It has been widely recognised that plurilingual pedagogy offers many benefits both for language learning and learning in general. However, in contexts where the linguistic profile of students is diverse, it can still be challenging for teachers to view working with the language resources of their students as feasible. In this article, we discuss…

This true longitudinal study explored the lexical development of L2 university English major students in Thailand using two learner corpora. This study analyzed the natural learners' English language writing assignments from two writing courses and tracked their lexical development over a relatively long period (three years with five batches of…

The present study examined the effect of language background and topic on productive formulaic competence. Guided by usage-based theory of language learning, this study used a distribution-based approach to the examination of the native-likeness of formulaic usage in English timed argumentative writing. Six indices informed by a large-scale native…

Research in metadiscourse has foregrounded the multiple ways in which writers build a relationship with readers through internal discourse. Yet, few studies consider the relationship between the texts writers create and the metalinguistic thinking which informs their decision-making as writers. This paper draws on data from a larger study which…

This study analyzes the linguistic features of counter-arguments and support arguments using two computational linguistic tools: Coh-Metrix and Gramulator. The research question investigates whether counter-argument paragraphs and support paragraphs are different in terms of their linguistic features. To conduct this study, a corpus of 78…