Data-driven learning (DDL) is an inductive approach to language learning in which students study examples of authentic language and use them to find patterns of language use. This inductive approach to learning has the advantages of being learner-centered, encouraging hypothesis testing and learner autonomy, and helping develop learning skills.…

This analysis of 83 scoring rubrics and grade definitions from writing programs at U.S. public research universities captures the current state of the struggle to define and measure specific writing traits, and it enables an induction of the underlying theoretical construct of "academic writing" present at these writing programs. Findings suggest…

Using corpus approach, a growing number of researchers blamed textbooks for neglecting important information on the use of grammatical structures in natural English. Likewise, the prescribed Malaysian English textbooks used in schools are reportedly prepared through a process of material development that involves intuition. Hence, a corpus-based…

TV shows, especially soap operas and sitcoms, are usually considered by ESL practitioners as a source of authentic spoken conversational materials presumably because they reflect the linguistic features of natural conversation. However, practitioners might be faced with the dilemma of how to evaluate whether such conversational materials reflect…

Television shows, especially soap operas and sitcoms, are usually considered by English as a second language practitioners as a source of authentic spoken conversational materials presumably because they reflect the linguistic features of natural conversation. However, practitioners are faced with the dilemma of how to assess whether such…

Vocabulary is an essential element of every second/foreign language teaching and learning program. While the goal of language teaching programs is to focus on explicit vocabulary teaching to promote learning, "materials which provide visual and aural input such as movies may be conducive to incidental vocabulary learning." (Webb and Rodgers, 2009,…

Recent ESP research into academic writing has shown how writers convey their stance and interact with readers across different disciplines. However, little research has been carried out into the disciplinary writing practices of the pure mathematics academic community from an ESP genre analysis perspective. This study begins to address this gap by…

Much recent work argues that lexical frequency plays a central explanatory role in linguistic theory, but the status, predicted effects, and methodological treatment of frequency are controversial, especially so in the less-investigated area of syntactic variation. This article addresses these issues in a case study of lexical frequency effects on…

This article illustrates the pedagogical value of incorporating parallel corpora in foreign language education. It explores the development of a Chinese/English parallel corpus designed specifically for pedagogical application. The corpus tool was created to aid language learners in reading comprehension and writing development by making foreign…

Family, school, and community partnerships are a critical part of student achievement, but the successful establishment of meaningful partnerships with low-income and minority populations remains elusive. In 1994, legislators in the United States passed a version of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) that seeks to address this…

Abstract is of a pivotal genre in scientific communication, assisting not only highly selective readers with judgment of the pertinent articles but also researchers in disseminating new knowledge and intellectual discoveries. Difficult yet challenging, however, is the task of writing effective abstracts particularly among non-English speaking…

This study identifies multiple profiles of successful essays via a cluster analysis approach using linguistic features reported by a variety of natural language processing tools. The findings from the study indicate that there are four profiles of successful writers for the samples analyzed. These four profiles are linguistically distinct from one…

Much research has examined how different patterns of social interaction shape language learners' interactional roles (e.g., collaborative, dominant, passive) in peer-to-peer conversations. However, little or no research has investigated the co-construction of such roles in multiparty, online task-based dialogues within the framework of discursive…

Although researchers have called for the investigation of local vernacular learning and teaching practices in various ELT (English language teaching) contexts, studies conducted in the Periphery are fewer in number. This study attempts to understand English learning experiences of a group of students from the Periphery, who were studying English…

This research is a corpus-based study of secondary and college ESL Malaysian learner's written work by identifying and classifying the types of errors in the Past Tense Auxiliary "Be". This research studied the past tense auxiliary "be", types of past tense auxiliary "be" errors and frequency of past tense auxiliary…