A fundamental challenge for human cognition is perceiving and acting in a world in which the statistics that characterize available sensory data are non-stationary. This thesis focuses on this problem specifically in the domain of sentence comprehension, where linguistic variability poses computational challenges to the processes underlying…

This paper seeks to explore the extent of definite article usage variation in several varieties of English based on a classification of its usage types. An annotation scheme based on Hawkins and Prince was developed for this purpose. Using matching corpus data representing Inner Circle varieties and Outer Circle varieties, analysis was made on…

As demand for English-medium higher education continues to grow internationally and participation in higher education increases, the need for a better understanding of academic writing is pressing. Prior university wide taxonomies of student writing have relied on intuition, the opinions of faculty, or data from course documentation and task…

This paper analyses the discourse of science through the study of collocational patterns of high frequency noun keywords in science textbooks used by upper secondary students in Malaysia. Research has shown that one of the areas of difficulty in science discourse concerns lexis, especially that of collocations. This paper describes a corpus-based…

Brazilian Portuguese (henceforth BP) has for long been considered as a Null-subject language due to its variability in regards to subject expression (e.g. "Era bom porque eu diminuia de peso...era muito gordinha" "That was good because then I could lose some weight...(I) was a bit chubby." C33:179). Such variability has been…

The primary concern of this thesis is how we can achieve rigorous testability when we set the properties of the Computational System (hypothesized to be at the center of the language faculty) as our object of inquiry and informant judgments as a tool to construct and/or evaluate our hypotheses concerning the properties of the Computational System.…

Both reading and writing abstracts require specific language skills and conceptual capacities, which may challenge advanced learners. This paper draws explicitly upon the "Emergence" and "Scientext" research projects which focused on the lexis of scientific texts in French and English. The teaching objective of the project…

While considerable attention has been paid to collocation, and the development of the collocational competence of L2 learners in recent years, very little has been said about a related concept in teaching journals, namely semantic prosody, and L2 learner awareness of this phenomenon. In this paper the concept of semantic prosody is introduced, and…

This study was an examination of the relationship of lexical richness to the quality of English as a second language (ESL) learners' oral narratives. A computational system was designed to automate the measurement of 3 dimensions of lexical richness, that is, lexical density, sophistication, and variation, using 25 different metrics proposed in…

In an attempt to contribute to existing research on Generation 1.5 students, the current study uses quantitative and qualitative methods to compare error patterns in a corpus of Generation 1.5, L1, and L2 community college student writing. This error analysis provides one important way to determine if error patterns in Generation 1.5 student…

Several previous studies have investigated the use of questions to facilitate interactions in academic lectures in tertiary education. However, the issue of how disciplinary cultures influence the patterns of questions in lectures has received little attention. Therefore, this study aims to examine the interdisciplinary differences in professors'…

This article is an exploration of the available applications for speech to speech real-time translation software for use in the classroom. Three different types of machine language translation (MLT) software and devices are reviewed for their features and practical application in secondary education classrooms.

This is the book of abstracts for the conference held in 2017 entitled: ''METADISCOURSE ACROSS GENRES: MAPPING INTERACTION IN SPOKEN & WRITTEN DISCOURSES'', also known as MAG2017. The 1st International Conference on Metadiscourse Across Genres took place in METU Northern Cyprus Campus, Cyprus between 30 March-1 April 2017 with the…

This article reports on a study examining the language practice opportunities that occurred during a range of paired and small group interactive tasks in an intensive English as a Second Language (ESL) class of francophone Grade 6 students. The analysis focussed on the opportunities the tasks provided for the use of two complex and challenging…

Johns reports in his text "Kibbitzing one-to-ones" (1997) that corpus-informed metatalk with a foreign language expert helps apprentice writers to make progress in independent text revision. Expecting this progress to be based on the development of expert-like ways to observe language features, I integrated Johns' so-called kibbitzing…