The vocabulary research of the 1980s and 1990s brought a breath of fresh air into the language classroom. Teachers in many remote EFL locations had long suspected that vocabulary was their learners' main challenge, but there was little research evidence to confirm this or say what to do about it. Then, suddenly, work by Nation, Laufer, Meara,…

Schmitt and Schmitt (2014) labelled the first 4,000 to 9,000 word families as mid-frequency vocabulary and highlighted its essential nature based on Nation's (2006) estimate that knowledge of the first 9,000 word families would provide 98% coverage of various texts. To attain this goal, this study first measured the vocabulary level of Voice of…

The article is devoted to the trends and transformations of philological education in the context of modern technologies development. The purpose of the research is to study the preparation specifics of philology students and to develop a new approach to their training, based on an effective educational methodology of literary and linguistic…

We examine the syntactic structures exhibited by persons with dementia in conversation. Traditionally, research on the linguistic abilities of persons with dementia is either observational (reports kept by caregivers) or experimental (e.g. based on comprehension tasks), and the focus is not on the syntactic competence of the speaker. We combine…

Parameter setting is either precipitous (Gibson & Wexler, 1994) or it is gradual in response to input frequency (Yang, 2002, 2004). In this study, we compare these models against the empirical domain of subject and (direct) object drop in Mandarin. We conducted a corpus-based study of the speech of 47 Mandarin-speaking children aged 1;2-6;5,…

Based on the Communicative Action Theory, intersubjectivity theory and the interpersonal classification of metadiscourse, this study makes a comparison between the source texts and the English-translated texts of Chinese company profiles with a self-built parallel corpus, along the dimensions of lexical variation, lexical density, grammatical…

This paper will carry out a theoretical and empirical inquiry into the ways in which the 'discourse of thirdness' is constituted within the field of intercultural studies. It will firstly critically review the autochthonous conceptualisations of the Third Space and other metaphors of 'thirdness' in language education. It will then use corpus…

Cognition is not just 'in the head'; it extends well beyond the skull and the skin. Non-Cartesian Cognitive Science views cognition as being embodied, environmentally embedded, enacted, encultured, and socially distributed. The Douglas Fir Group (2016) likewise recognizes languages as emergent, social, integrated phenomena. Language is the…

While research demonstrates the importance of vocabulary knowledge for reading comprehension (Anderson & Freebody, 1981; Guo, Roehrig, & Williams, 2011), many studies suggest wide reading exposure for vocabulary acquisition (Nagy, Herman, & Anderson, 1985; Stahl & Nagy, 2006). However, there is compelling evidence for the benefits…

Multi-word sequences are important components of language because they are building blocks that can be used to create long stretches of discourse. They are word combinations that have particular importance because of their co-occurrence and function in discourse that suggest that they are stored and retrieved from memory as a whole rather than as…

Child language acquisition research has provided ample evidence of lexical frequency effects. This corpus-based analysis introduces a novel frequency measure shown to significantly constrain adult language variation, but heretofore unexplored in child language acquisition research. Among adults, frequent occurrence of a form in a particular…

Material development is important for training beginner student interpreters, as it guides the direction of interpreting learning. One key principle is difficulty progression, which requires a good knowledge of the indicators of difficulty. Since text structure outweighs words and sentences in the information processing of consecutive…

This paper reports on an exploratory qualitative investigation of the discourses of plurilingual children's parents, with a view to developing an understanding of their family language policy. Drawing loosely on Spolsky [2004. "Language Policy." Cambridge: Cambridge University Press], family language policy was conceptualised as having…

The increasing prevalence of students' use of Google Translate has been the catalyst for re-developing the language classroom. Through progressive adaptations, Google Translate has been integrated to help support meaningful language learning, academic rigor and intellectual curiosity. Five key steps form the foundation of the ADAPT approach:…

This article reports a study about how the discourse of standard English exercises disciplinary power in five international scholarships programs. This research interest arises from problematizing the discourse of standard English present in the requisite of proficiency certification through so-called valid tests. Adapting Fairclough's critical…