Theoretically grounded in Vygotsky's sociocultural theory of mind, Dynamic Assessment (DA) provides researchers with the opportunity to investigate different aspects of learners' developmental trajectory, including the ways they overcome their errors. As a qualitative inquiry into the nature of errors reflecting learners' development in academic…

While there is widespread agreement on the expected benefits of hands-on access to corpora for language learners, reports abound of the difficulties involved in realising those benefits in practice. A particular focus of discussion is the challenge of transferring the skills of the corpus linguist to learners, so that they can explore this type of…

Software can facilitate English as a Foreign Language (EFL) students' self-correction of their free-form writing by detecting errors; this article examines the proportion of errors which software can detect. A corpus of 13,644 words of written English was created, comprising 90 compositions written by Spanish-speaking students at levels A2-B2…

Although it remains controversial, machine translation (MT) has gained popularity both inside and outside of the classroom. Despite the growing number of students using MT, little is known about its use as a pedagogical tool in the EFL classroom. The present study investigated the role of MT as a CALL tool in EFL writing. Most studies on MT as a…

Automated written corrective feedback (AWCF) has qualities that distinguish it from teacher-provided WCF and potentially undermine claims about its value for L2 student writers, including disparities in the amounts of useful information it provides across error types and the fact that inaccuracies in error-flagging must be anticipated. It remains…

This study examines the frequency and usage patterns of linking adverbials in Korean students' essay writing in comparison with native English writing. The learner corpus used in the present study is composed of 105 essays that were produced by first-year university students in Korea. The control corpus was taken from the American LOCNESS…

Paraphrasing, or restating information using different words, is critical to successful writing. However, EFL learners have difficulty in making paraphrases to meet their writing demands, and there has been little research on developing automatic reference tools to assist these learners' paraphrasing skills for better writing quality. In this…

Expressing causal relations plays a central role in academic writing. While it is important that writing instructors assess and provide feedback on learners' causal discourse, it could be a very time-consuming task. In this respect, automated writing evaluation (AWE) tools may be helpful. However, to date, there have been no AWE tools capable of…

Usage-based theories of language learning suggest that native speakers of a language are acutely aware of formulaic language due in large part to frequency effects. Corpora and data-driven learning can offer useful insights into frequent patterns of naturally occurring language to second/foreign language learners who, unlike native speakers, are…

A number of studies have suggested the possible benefits of using concordancers in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) writing. To date, however, there is still limited understanding of how EFL writers may make use of such tools along with dictionaries when engaging in a writing task. To better understand the question, this study investigated a…

Data-driven learning (DDL), or corpus-based language learning, involves the learner in an exploratory task to discover appropriate expressions or collocates regarding his writing. However, the problematic units of meaning in each learner's writing are so diverse that conventional corpora often prove futile. The search engine Google with the…

Previous work in the literature reveals that EFL learners were deficient in collocations that are a hallmark of near native fluency in learner's writing. Among different types of collocations, the verb-noun (V-N) one was found to be particularly difficult to master, and learners' first language was also found to heavily influence their collocation…