Decades of psycholinguistics research have shown that human sentence processing is highly incremental and predictive. This has provided evidence for expectation-based theories of sentence processing, which posit that the processing difficulty of linguistic material is modulated by its probability in context. However, these theories do not make…

Graded reading is one of the important ways of English learning. How to automatically judge and grade the difficulty of the English reading corpus is of great significance for precision teaching and personalized learning. However, the current rule-based readability assessment methods have some limitations, such as low efficiency and poor accuracy.…

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…

This study explores the similarities and differences between English and Arabic numeral-based formulaic expressions, and difficulties that student-translators have with them. A corpus of English and Arabic numeral-based formulaic expressions containing zero, two, three, twenty, sixty, hundred, thousand…etc., and another corpus of specialized…

Translators employ an array of tools to streamline the translation process, ensuring precision and coherence. The necessity of these tools is particularly pronounced when tackling authentic materials, such as texts from the United Nations (UN). Among these tools, corpora stand out as a pivotal resource. In light of this, this study undertook a…

This study aims to: (i) describe the different meanings and contexts in which Arabic "dar" and "bayt" and English "house" and "home" expressions are used; (ii) compare "dar," "bayt," "house" and "home" expressions and give examples of expressions that are identical in…

It is well known that article usage is difficult for learners of English to acquire. Indeed, learner errors such as "*many of people" are not uncommon. A closer look at similar multiword sequences reveals why learners might have difficulty using articles properly in such expressions: No definite article is required in phrases like…

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…

This study aims to exemplify how language teaching can benefit from learner corpus research (LCR). To this end, this study determines how L1 and L2 English speakers with diverse L1 backgrounds differ with respect to adjective amplification, based on the "International Corpus of Learner English" (ICLE) and the "Louvain Corpus of…

Grammatical and lexical cohesion are necessary conditions to guarantee a text's coherence (Halliday and Hasan 1976). Grammatical cohesion is classified into four types of relation: reference, conjunction, substitution, and ellipsis. This study aims to investigate the use of the cohesive device of reference in written discourse produced by…

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…

Vocabulary learning materials and vocabulary learning research have a common objective of promoting effective vocabulary instruction (Schmitt, 2008), but in practice vocabulary learning materials tend to reflect materials writers' repertoire and intuition primarily (Tomlinson, 2011). In an effort to develop a stronger interface between research…

This study examined the influence of formulaic language on second language (L2) listeners' lower-level processing, in terms of their ability to accurately identify the words in texts. On the one hand, there were reasons for expecting the presence of the formulas to advantage the learners, because the learners would process these formulaic words…

We report three studies (one corpus, two experimental) that investigated the acquisition of relative clauses (RCs) in Finnish-speaking children. Study 1 found that Finnish children's naturalistic exposure to RCs predominantly consists of non-subject relatives (i.e. oblique, object) which typically have inanimate head nouns. Study 2 tested…

Developing small learner and native corpora, this case study examines how Korean L2 learners used six types of lexical collocations in L2 writing to address (a) the frequency and acceptability of learner collocations, (b) problematic constituents of deviant collocations, and (c) possible sources of the learner difficulties. The overall frequency…