Modifying and hedging one's claims appropriately is an important characteristic of academic writing. This study focuses on the three main English modal verbs used to express "epistemic possibility" to avoid making strong statements, viz., "may", "might", and "could". The purpose of this corpus-based study is…

Academic vocabulary is regarded as an important vocabulary set for students at the tertiary to master's levels. Besides academic vocabulary, field-specific vocabulary is another important set that students in different fields of study should be required to explore. The physical education and sports science English word list was created to assist…

This study explored words in materials science research articles using New Academic Word List (NAWL) and New General Service List (NGSL) created by Browne at al. (2013) as reference lists. The objectives of this research were to explore the frequency and coverage of the NAWL and the NGSL in materials science research articles and identify…

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…

In recent years, there has been a growing trend of using informal styles in academic writing, including research articles. To examine the degree of formality in students' writing, this corpus-based study aimed to analyze the formal linguistic features in the academic writing assignments of English-major students at a Thai university. The learner…

In this commentary, we begin with the discussion on a brief history of academic wordlists. Adopting a comparative perspective, then, the merits and demerits of the Academic Word List (AWL) (Coxhead, 2000) and its competing counterpart the Academic Vocabulary List (AVL) (Gardner & Davies, 2014) are presented. We also explore whether the AWL can…

Research into vocabulary knowledge often differentiates between breadth (how many words a person knows) and depth (how well the words are known). Both theoretical categories are essential for understanding language learners' lexical development, but how the different aspects of vocabulary knowledge interconnect has not received the same attention…

Language borrowing from sources is a phenomenon used by developing writers as they are learning academic language, though there is much to be learned about how younger students borrow from sources. This study explores student writing, from a sample of 166 diverse middle graders, across topics to determine patterns in borrowing from instructional…

To date, attempts at empirically validating a construct of academic vocabulary in the form of a frequency list in languages other than English remain conspicuously absent in peer-reviewed journals. This study aims to close this gap by using Russian as a case study to develop an academic vocabulary list and prove its viability through a variety of…

This study outlines the steps taken to create an academic multi-word unit list derived from corpus data. It gives details on the procedure used and the rationale behind why certain approaches were utilised. It also compares existing resources and makes some suggestions for practical use of the resulting resource.

Word frequency has a long history of being considered the most important predictor of word difficulty and has served as a guideline for several aspects of second language vocabulary teaching, learning, and assessment. However, recent empirical research has challenged the supremacy of frequency as a predictor of word difficulty. Accordingly,…

Given that formulaic sequences play an important role in enhancing L2 learners' academic writing skills and that phraseological sequences constitute a large proportion of written discourse, the current study was an attempt to draw up a list of key phrase frames--phraseological sequences with a variable slot--in a corpus of research articles (RAs)…

When students of English deliver oral presentations at university on academic topics, there is often a dilemma as to whether to incorporate academic vocabulary into their monologues or not. Academic vocabulary can help students to present their ideas concisely and be a 'badge of identity' to the academic community. However, acquiring a productive…

To have more information about the English words known by second language (L2) speakers, we ran a large-scale crowdsourcing vocabulary test, which yielded 17 million useful responses. It provided us with a list of 445 words known to nearly all participants. The list was compared to various existing lists of words advised to include in the first…

The quality of any academic essay highly depends on cohesion and coherence since they affect the overall quality and the tone of the writing to a great extent. Conjunctive adverbials are among the types of devices which logically help linking sentences into paragraphs and paragraphs into essays. Conjunctive Adverbials ultimately affect the…