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…

This article analyses a specific strategy designed to include generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) tools in students' written assignments. While we recognise that GenAI tools represent a challenge for teachers in terms of their classroom use and the development of digital literacy among students, we believe that banning them is not a viable…

Students' writing proficiency is measured through holistic and analytical ratings in writing assessment; however, recent studies suggest that measurement of syntactic complexity in second language writing research has become an effective measure of writing proficiency. Within this paradigm, we investigated how automated measurement of syntactic…

University students, especially language learners, have increasingly been using machine translation (MT) systems in the last decade and for all kinds of texts, including homework, assignments and exams. This ubiquity does not translate into visibility as few teachers address the subject in class. Several researchers have shown that MT systems,…

The aim of the present paper is to focus on the language of Human Resources (HR) as one of the subfields of English for business purposes in respect of positive evaluation and stancetaking and to identify to what extent evaluative language common in real-life situations is reflected in currently available textbooks of English for HR (EHR).…

Syntactic complexity has been extensively approached in the fields of corpus linguistics and academic discourse studies. However, works focusing on disciplinary variation in terms of linguistic complexity and comparison of professional and novice academic writing are scarce. Addressing these issues is likely to have important implications for…

This paper will present a translation project with second-year bachelor students together with some observational data. The students firstly translated an academic abstract from Italian (their first language) to English by using the language resources they were acquainted with. Then they translated a second abstract by using a pre-compiled offline…

This work is a contribution to the usefulness of climate-related authentic material for pedagogical purposes in Higher Education. The two case studies had the aim of raising environmental awareness of a sustainable future among university students, while encouraging them to explore language use and draw their own conclusions and considerations…

Translanguaging, the movement between communicative modes and features of different languages, is becoming an established research tradition in content-focused second language learning contexts. Pedagogic translanguaging practices nevertheless remain under-applied and under-researched in foreign language instructional settings, whether…

Increasingly, professionally-oriented tertiary institutions are concerned with equipping their students with the English language skills needed in today's global professional world. The recently extended 2018 Common European Framework (CEFR) provides useful guidance to help institutions develop curricula to achieve this goal. This paper describes…

Opportunities for language learners to access authentic input and engage in consequential interactions with native speakers of their target language abound in this era of computer mediated communication. Synchronous audio/video calling software represents one opportunity to access such input and address the challenges of developing pragmatic and…

In our study we analyse how the same interactional dynamic is produced in two different pedagogical settings exploiting a desktop videoconference system. We propose to focus our attention on a specific type of conversational side sequence, known in the Francophone literature as sequences of normative evaluation. More particularly, we analyse data…

The purpose of this lexicological study is to present a typology of patients' euphemizing lay denominations of medical terms illustrated by examples in English and French. Various textbooks and lexicons dealing with English and French for medical purposes served as corpora. The euphemisms were classified according to the three semantic processes…

In the process of internationalization of their teaching programmes many universities all over the world are now offering courses in English. This is a typical English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) situation in which both lecturers and students--although they are not native speakers of English--use this language as a common means of communication and…

Higher education institutions are increasingly interested in offering more flexible teaching and learning delivery methods that are often independent of place. Where foreign language learning is concerned, telecollaboration is gaining ground. This paper focuses on synchronous webconferencing-supported teaching and examines how different semiotic…