Recent critical views on the usefulness of a general academic vocabulary have heightened the relevance of developing discipline specific academic wordlists to meet the needs of non-native English writers who must read and publish articles in English. Using Coxhead's (2000) Academic Word List, we set out to identify the academic words in a corpus…

This article reports on the variable omission of the French negative particle "ne" (the first marker of verbal negation) in synchronous (i.e., real-time) electronic communication environments. Patterns of variation in a corpus of non-educational chat (i.e., free, public-access Internet chat) are analyzed and compared to data produced by first-,…

One aspect of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) involves examining how metaphors in texts, particularly hard news texts (reports of very recent conflicts, crimes, etc.), imply certain values. The usual theoretical basis for such analysis is Lakoff and Johnson (1980). My article shows problems with transplanting Lakoff and Johnson's discourse-level…

We examine the use of film subtitles as an approximation of word frequencies in human interactions. Because subtitle files are widely available on the Internet, they may present a fast and easy way to obtain word frequency measures in language registers other than text writing. We compiled a corpus of 52 million French words, coming from a variety…

The purpose of this study is to introduce a new method of evaluating human comprehension in the context of machine translation using a language translation program known as the FALCon (Forward Area Language Converter). The FALCon works by converting documents into digital images via scanner, and then converting those images to electronic text by…

In psycholinguistic research, there is still considerable debate about whether the type or token count of the frequency of a particular unit of language better predicts word recognition performance. The present study extends this distinction of type and token measures to the investigation of possible causes underlying syllable frequency effects.…

Essays are an important measure of complex learning, but pronouns can confound an author's intended meaning for both readers and text analysis software. This descriptive investigation considers the effect of pronouns on a computer-based text analysis approach, "ALA-Reader," which uses students' essays as the data source for deriving individual and…

Although "annotation" is a widely-researched topic in Corpus Linguistics (CL), its potential role in Data Driven Learning (DDL) has not been addressed in depth by Foreign Language Teaching (FLT) practitioners. Furthermore, most of the research in the use of DDL methods pays little attention to annotation in the design and implementation…

This paper discusses the use of a web-based concordancing program using an interface design similar to the one used at the MICASE concordancing site to help students appropriately choose reporting verbs. Appropriate reporting verbs are important for asserting credible claims in academic papers. An interface was created that asked the students to…

The paper presents preliminary findings of a project which investigated whether learner background, in terms of instruction mode (i.e., school or intensive first-year course at university) and first language (i.e., character based or non-character based), has an impact on the development of writing skills in Japanese as a second language (JSL).…

"QuickAssist," the program presented in this paper, uses natural language processing (NLP) technologies. It places a range of NLP tools at the disposal of learners, intended to enable them to independently read and comprehend a German text of their choice while they extend their vocabulary, learn about different uses of particular words,…

By means of an analysis of the genre of the audit report, this study highlights the respective roles of linguistic and contextual analysis in genre analysis, if the results are to be of maximum use in ESP course design. On the one hand, based on a corpus of current and authentic written auditors' reports produced in a large international Hong Kong…

This paper provides an account of the ways in which literacy, in different languages, was embedded in the East Timorese struggle against the Indonesian invasion and subsequent occupation, from 1975 to 1999. Our account is primarily historiographical in nature and is based on a corpus of written texts gathered during four phases of the struggle, on…

Metalinguistic awareness (an awareness about the structure of orthography) had been considered vital for reading acquisition. The awareness of phonological regularity and consistency had been found in advanced readers in recent research. Evidence based on simplified Chinese suggested the effect of semantic transparency on reading in school…