Language proficiency policies act as critical gatekeepers for multilingual international students (MIS) who intend to pursue an education at English-medium universities. The current study revisits the question of the predictive validity of a standardized English proficiency exam--International English Language Testing System (IELTS)--in comparison…

This dissertation is composed of three interlinked studies that pilot new methods for combining corpus linguistics and semantic network analysis (SNA) to understand and teach academic language. Findings indicate that this approach leads to a deeper understanding of technical writing and offers an exciting new avenue for writing curriculum. The…

Developing effective aptitude test batteries for conference interpreting is highly relevant for China given its large and fast-growing interpreting trainee population. This paper reports on the aptitude tests implemented to 23 first-year students at a CIUTI member and UN MOU university in China. We compared the validity of recall, a test commonly…

While previous investigations on online machine translation (MT) in language learning have analyzed how second language (L2) learners use and post-edit MT output, no study as of yet has investigated how the learners process MT errors and what factors affect this process using response and reading times. The present study thus investigates L2…

With the change in socio-political and educational contexts in global academia, the trend of writing academic papers has arisen among Nepali students and educators in higher education. However, many of them are still unfamiliar with the basic standard to be incorporated in an academic paper. In this context, this study examined the post-graduate…

The Bottleneck Hypothesis argues that properties of inflectional morphology explain why second-language learners may face persistent difficulties in articulating meaning in target-language forms. In particular, the acquisition task proves even harder when first and second languages differ in the way they organize the mapping of functional features…

The goal of this study was to investigate the impact of repeated use of a metacognitive self-regulation inventory (MSRI) in translator self-training. Designed by the researchers, the MSRI includes the cognitive management strategies of planning, monitoring and evaluation. A pre-post comparison study was conducted with two groups of students. The…

Data-driven learning (DDL; Johns, 1991), involving students' hands-on use of corpora for self-guided language learning, is a methodology now increasingly used in many tertiary contexts to enhance the teaching of disciplinary postgraduate thesis writing. However, there are still few studies tracking students' actual engagement with corpora for DDL.…

The perfective aspect marker in Chinese is partly functionally similar to inflectional suffixes in Indo-European languages but is non-inflectional and lexical in nature, lying thus at the semantics-syntax interface. This provides us with the opportunity to compare directly the syntactic and semantic constraints during second language (L2) sentence…

Adopting Hyland's (2002) framework of reporting words (RVs), the paper investigates the use of RVs in Master's theses written in English by students of two disciplines, Economics and Management and Natural Resources. The data were drawn from two sub-corpora, each consisting of 82 Literature Reviews, where other authors' research is summarised and…

The purpose of this study is to shed light on the ways in which experts in foreign affairs project their scholarly identities on panel presentations. While previous research has focused on the ways in which researchers in various disciplines assert their scholarly identities in written discourse and in conference presentations, no study has…

This article reports on the first results of a large-scale research programme that aims to define and circumscribe the construct of phraseological complexity and to theoretically and empirically demonstrate its relevance for second language theory. Within this broad agenda, the study has two main objectives. First, it investigates to what extent…

Task repetition facilitates learners' performance, at least temporarily: Since learners are already familiar with the content of the task at the initial enactment, they are capable of focusing their attention on linguistic form during the following enactment. However, the analysis in previous studies treated various aspects of "form" as…

It has been found that translation is an efficient means to teach/learn grammar, syntax, and lexis of a foreign language. Meanwhile, translation is good for beginners who do not still enjoy the critical level of proficiency in their target language for expression. This study was conducted to examine the teachers' and learners' perceptions of…

An increasing number of studies have looked at the value of corpus-based data-driven learning (DDL) for second language (L2) written error correction, with generally positive results. However, a potential conundrum for language teachers involved in the process is how to provide feedback on students' written production for DDL. The study looks at…