This research explores the sequence of content in ESP curricula to our learners' linguistic development and to authentic situations. This study has been conducted in Alahsa College of Technology, Saudi Arabia. Methodology used was an analysis of an ESP textbook in corpus-based approach and matching the units of the textbook to students' needs…

This study investigates relations between second language (L2) lexical input and output in terms of word information properties (i.e., lexical salience; Ellis, 2006a). The data for this study come from a longitudinal corpus of naturalistic spoken data between L2 learners and first language (L1) interlocutors collected over a year's time. The…

This research work aimed at making use of Machine Translation to help students avoid some syntactic, semantic and pragmatic common errors in translation from English into Arabic. Participants were a hundred and five freshmen who studied the "Translation Common Errors Remedial Program" prepared by the researchers. A testing kit that…

This paper addresses the process of transcribing and annotating spontaneous non-native speech with the aim of compiling a training corpus for the development of Computer Assisted Pronunciation Training (CAPT) applications, enhanced with Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) technology. To better adapt ASR technology to CAPT tools, the recognition…

The dominance of syntactic studies in linguistics has caused lexis and grammar to be perceived as two distinct categories. With introduction of the paradigm of cognitive linguistics, the studies in syntax have been replaced by those in lexis and concepts. Semantics has come to the fore through the studies in cognitive linguistics, and there has…

Previous contrastive studies between the English gerund and its Spanish counterparts present serious limitations in the analysis of these constructions. The main objection is the absence of a cognitive approach. In addition, the traditional characterization of the English gerund seems to be inappropriate to determine its nature. We propose that in…

The CEFR French profiles have been widely used to teach and evaluate language instruction over the past decade. The profiles were specifications of vocabulary that have been largely untested from a corpus-based, empirical perspective. The purpose of this dissertation was to evaluate the CEFR profiles by comparing their content with two sizable…

Dependency structures represent a sentence as a set of dependency relations. Normally the dependency structures from a tree connect all the words in a sentence. One of the most defining characters of dependency structures is the ability to bring long distance dependency between words to local dependency structures. Another the main attraction of…

Teachers can reflect on and analyze their classroom discourse to inform their instructional practice. When teachers try to do so however, they often face analytic difficulties, which include the data set (e.g., data input, data transformation, and utterances by unknown speakers), coding (e.g., coding complexity, reliability, and efficiency),…

The digital mediation resources used in Distance Education can hinder the teacher's perception about the student's state of mind. However, the textual expression in natural language is widely encouraged in most Distance Education courses, through the use of Virtual Learning Environments and other digital tools. This fact has motivated research…

Recent studies have used Coh-Metrix, an automated text analyzer, to assess differences in language characteristics across different genres and academic disciplines (Graesser, McNamara, & Kulikowich, 2011; McNamara, Graesser, McCarthy, & Cai, 2014). Coh-Metrix analyzes text on many constructs at different levels, including Word Concreteness…

The study aims to investigate to what extent Chinese EFL learners' language use is influenced by English textbooks. Such influence may suggest the existence of lexical priming effects. Based on detailed and systematic analysis of a learner English corpus, in comparison with a textbook corpus, the present study revealed striking similarities of the…

Since modal auxiliary verbs have been proved to be one of the most troublesome grammatical structures in English, the researchers of this study decided to do an analysis on the ways in which advanced EFL Iranian students use modal auxiliaries focusing specially on nine modals' semantic functions. Consequently, was conducted based on the following…

This dissertation examines Spanish Direct Object clitic pronouns in Argentine spoken Spanish of adults and children (ages 4;0-7;0). It concentrates on (Finite verb + Nonfinite verb) constructions that allow both pre-verbal (Proclisis) and a postverbal (Enclisis) clitic placement. Previous corpus studies have shown that lexical (finite verb),…

Several recent studies have explored the applicability of the preferential attachment principle to account for vocabulary growth. According to this principle, network growth can be described by a process in which existing nodes recruit new nodes with a probability that is an increasing function of their connectivity within the existing network.…