Despite the widely used word lists in English as a second or foreign language learning, few attempts have been made to create an academic spoken collocation list, which holds significant potential for enhancing learners' aural and oral abilities in academic communication. This study created a list of the most frequently used and pedagogically…

The purpose of this article is to synthesize and analyse the most frequently occurring, widely dispersed and pedagogically useful lexical bundles in mathematical texts. Drawing on a five-million-word corpus of graduate-level textbooks, a total of 65 academic sequences meeting a predefined set of length, frequency and distribution criteria are…

Background/purpose: This study examined Vietnamese English majors' competence and perception of academic collocations to determine the need for targeted instruction. The research aimed to identify specific challenges these learners face in learning and using academic collocations in their writing. Methods: The study involved 199 Vietnamese English…

A growing number of studies have probed the effectiveness of certain exercise formats in the learning of multi-word expressions (MWEs) in classroom settings. However, a number of important variables, such as MWE retention over an extended period of time and the role of repetition, have so far not been considered. Furthermore, studies have focused…

This research was prompted by the phenomenon of binge-watching Korean television series (K-drama) amongst college students in Taiwan, where English as a foreign language (EFL) is a required course. The researcher-teacher sought to create a pedagogically useful list of the frequent semantically non-compositional multi-word expressions (MWEs) for…

Knowledge of vocabulary is essential for learners of any language, and unfortunately, it has become clear recently the learners of English in a variety of contexts have not scored well on vocabulary tests. Low scores are problematic for language use and success in general, but they cause particular problems when it comes to the vocabulary needed…

Purpose: This study attempts to evaluate the effect of the corpus-based inductive teaching approach with multiple academic corpora (PICA, CAEC and Oxford Corpus of Academic English) and conventional deductive teaching approach (i.e., multiple-choice items, filling the gap, matching and underlining) on learning academic collocations by Iranian…

The study explored the correlation between teaching lexical bundles and improving writing skills in English composition courses. The study addressed two research questions. First, to what extent can the explicit teaching of lexical bundles facilitate greater comprehension and retention of the elements of the bundles? Second, the study investigated…

In this article, we present the results of an eight-week in-class intervention, during which binomial expressions comprised of academic vocabulary (results and conclusions, facts and circumstances) were presented to intermediate-level learners of English. Constraints that govern the preferred order of highly fixed binomials were explained as the…

Acquiring collocations is widely considered to be essential in language learning. The question arises, however, as to what collocations merit students' and teachers' attention in ESP classes at a tertiary level. Thus, this corpus-based study aims to systematically develop an academic collocation list for undergraduate mechanical engineering…

The traditional approach to presenting idioms relies mainly on teachers' or materials writers' judgement, one-by-one and quite incidentally; and the existing teaching materials and references for idioms are mostly intuition-based. However, a more recent approach to better teaching and learning idioms is to present them under categories of their…

Formulaic language, such as lexical phrases as hot as hell or pass the buck, in English is common in daily usage. Although formulaic language is common, the lexical phrases are often excluded from word lists. Second language learners of English need to use formulaic language to enhance their proficiency level. Beyond incorporating lexical phrases…

English phrasal verbs (PVs) are ubiquitous and often polysemous. These lexical items are thus very important, but also challenging for ESL/EFL learners. Substantial research that can inform instructional approaches to PVs has already been conducted. One strand of this research has focused on identifying PVs that merit prioritization in learning.…

Phrasal verbs are a notoriously difficult feature of English for most second language and foreign language learners to master. Different sources, such as movies, music, games and books, can provide learners with exposure to the most common phrasal verbs in English. This study aims to investigate the degree to which music can play a role in…

Corpora are well-known for the affordance to make linguistic regularities salient. Since the coinage of the term 'data-driven learning' (DDL) in the 1990s, much has been done to investigate the effects of DDL on learning vocabulary, most notably lexico-grammatical patterns. However, less researched is how learners construct vocabulary knowledge…