The present study attempts to identify difficulties that Japanese students encounter with metadiscursive nouns in writing second language (L2) argumentation essays. Metadiscursive nouns are abstract and unspecific nouns which can serve as cohesive markers by retrieving their meanings in the text where they occur. Using a selected number of nouns…

Reviews of literature made manifest that native English speakers who were research participants in many studies on disagreements were Americans (e.g., Beebe & Takahashi, 1989; Takahashi & Beebe, 1993; Dogacay-Aktuna & Kamisli 1996; Rees-Miller, 2000; Guodong & Jing, 2005; Chen, 2006). The excessive use of Americans as research…

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…

Genre analysis is today's dominant approach for textual analysis, especially in the ESP learning and teaching profession. Adopting this approach, the present study compares the Introduction chapters of MA theses in ELT (English Language Teaching) written by Thai students to those written by American university students based on the move-step…

The main purpose of this study was to explore the perceived social distance among a small Arab community residing in a college town in the Midwest of the USA. The study examines its possible impact on the process of learning/acquiring English as a second language (ESL). It draws on the findings and contentions of the acculturation model as…