This quasi-experimental study seeks to improve the conceptual quality of summary essays by comparing two conditions, essay prompts with or without a list of 13 broad concepts, the concepts were selected across a continuum of the 100 most frequent words in the lesson materials. It is anticipated that only the most central concepts will be used as…

The importance of input on language learning cannot be overstated. One method of providing input to learners at a level that is appropriate for them is called extensive reading, in which learners read an abundance of texts. In practice, for learners of English as a second or foreign language, these texts are often books that have been written and…

Semantic variables enable L2 researchers and materials creators to quantify and control the effects of meaning on cognition. However, in recent years, many variables have been normed and published. Parsing the methods employed in norming this myriad of variables and which disparate theories informed their creation can be an opaque and arduous…

Understanding what students mean by lecturer competence can be crucial in order to recognise indicators with which to assess these competences, improve the quality of university teaching and support lecturers in undertaking their role appropriately. This qualitative pilot study aimed to explore the meaning of competence in a convenience sample of…

This article revisits a moment in the recent history of education in Aotearoa New Zealand when te reo Maori as a language of the university came under intense scrutiny. The original incident took place in 1991 in Hamilton, Aotearoa New Zealand, when two students of Waikato Law School wrote answers in te reo Maori to an examination question…

Despite attempts to discourage the use of machine translation (MT), we have observed that students continue to rely on it. Are teachers powerless? We believe not! Consistent with a range of solutions proposed in previous publications, we hypothesized that a "hands-on" approach would be effective in helping students raise awareness of the…

The use of machine translation (MT) in the academic context has increased in recent years. Hence, language teachers have found it difficult to ignore MT, which has led to some concerns. Among the concerns, its accuracy has become a major factor that shapes language teachers' pedagogical decision to use MT in their language classrooms. Despite the…

The purpose of the current study was to examine the frequently used boosters in academic articles written by Native (NESs) and Non-native (NNESs) Speakers of English (Turkish researchers) in the field of English Language Teaching. Investigating whether differences exist in the use of these markers between NESs and NNESs' academic articles was…

This paper explores contradictory constructions of teacher work across policy discourse and professional practice. It draws from a corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis of 363 political speeches published on England's Department for Education website between 2010 and 2018, and qualitative interviews with two executive leaders working in…

To trace the evolution of research strands in published Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL) papers over time, a corpus of 426 highly-cited papers in four major CALL journals ("ReCALL," "CALL," "LL&T," and "CALICO Journal") was compiled and coded using NVivo 12. All identified aspects of…

Standards of academic writing are documented in style guides adopted by academic disciplines, style guides such as the "Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association and Scientific Style and Format." Some of the standards in these style guides are expressed as prescriptive or proscriptive rules that provide academic…

This dissertation studies the acquisition of Mandarin relative clauses (RCs), including the distributional pattern of different RC types in adult child-directed speech (study 1) and four-year-old Mandarin-speaking children's comprehension of different RC types (study 2). An RC is a subordinate clause that modifies a noun and is embedded within a…

This study is about student writers' development of their own approaches to using formulaic phrases from a compendium (Academic Phrasebank). While the essential role of formulaic phrases in academic texts has been well established in research, teaching about the effective use of these phrases is not widely available, and little attention has been…

This study investigated the macro discourse markers used by TED speakers to signal ideas to listeners. 150 TED transcripts from six talk genres: technology, entertainment, design, business, science, and global issues were compiled to identify the frequency and distribution of macro discourse markers. This investigation was conducted to confirm the…

We argue that coherence relations (relations between propositions, such as "Concession" or "Purpose") are signalled more frequently and by more means than is generally believed. We examine how coherence relations in text are indicated by all possible textual signals, and whether every relation is signalled. To that end, we…