The main objective of the current study is to carry out a critical stylistic analysis of Al Jazeera's online news reports of the 2017 Gulf crisis. The study specifically examines the linguistic strategies employed by Al Jazeera newsmakers in order to effectively communicate their ideological perspectives. The research employs Jeffries's critical…

Decades of psycholinguistics research have shown that human sentence processing is highly incremental and predictive. This has provided evidence for expectation-based theories of sentence processing, which posit that the processing difficulty of linguistic material is modulated by its probability in context. However, these theories do not make…

This paper explores the integration of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) feedback into higher education. Specifically, it examines the views of 11 experienced instructors on fine-tuned GenAI formative feedback of student works in an online graduate program in the United States. The participants assessed sample GenAI reviews, and their…

The use of large language model Generative AI (GenAI) systems by students and instructors is increasing rapidly, and there is little choice but to adapt to this new situation. Many, but not all, students are using GenAI for homework and assignments, which means that we need to provide equitable access for all students to AI systems that can…

Automated scoring of student responses to open-ended questions, including short-answer questions, has great potential to scale to a large number of responses. Recent approaches for automated scoring rely on supervised learning, i.e., training classifiers or fine-tuning language models on a small number of responses with human-provided score…

In this paper, we investigate how highly ranked business schools construct their legitimacy claims by analysing their online organisational communication. We argue that in the case of higher education institutions in general, and business schools in particular, the discursive formation of these legitimacy claims is strongly connected to the…

Based on Jef Verschueren's Adaptation Theory, Lakoff's definition and Prince et al.'s classification of hedges, this paper takes New York Times and China Daily from January 23rd to April 8th, 2020 as corpus sources, randomly selects 39 COVID-19 reports, and makes a contrastive study of hedges among them, aiming at exploring the similarities and…

Accurate description of language use is central to English for academic purposes (EAP) practice. Thanks to the development of corpus tools, it has been possible to undertake systematic studies of language in academic contexts. This line of research aims to provide detailed and accurate characterization of academic communication and to ultimately…

This replication study seeks to extend the generalizability of an exploratory study (McDonough et al., 2019) that identified holds (i.e., temporary cessation of dynamic movement by the listener) as a reliable visual cue of non-understanding. Conversations between second language (L2) English speakers in the Corpus of English as a Lingua Franca…

The thriving developer community has a significant impact on the widespread use of R software. To better understand this community, we conducted a study analyzing all R packages available on CRAN. We identified the most popular topics of R packages by text mining the package descriptions. Additionally, using network centrality measures, we…

Linguistic meaning is generated by the mind and can be expressed in multiple languages. One may assume that equivalent texts/utterances in two languages by means of translation generate equivalent meanings in their readers/hearers. This follows if we assume that meaning calculated from the linguistic input is solely objective in nature. However,…

The meaning of most words in language depends on their context. Understanding how the human brain extracts contextualized meaning, and identifying where in the brain this takes place, remain important scientific challenges. But technological and computational advances in neuroscience and artificial intelligence now provide unprecedented…

The analysis of spoken language has been integral to a breadth of research in social science and beyond. However, for analyses to occur with efficiency, language must be in the form of computer-readable text. Historically, the speech-to-text process has occurred manually using human transcriptionists. Automated speech recognition (ASR) is…

This paper discusses levels of access in language archives and their implications for assessment. In the absence of well-established criteria, part of the evaluation of language archives is often based on accessibility; roughly, the more "unrestricted" or "open access" content, the better the archive. In this paper, I argue…

Children's ability to write letters automatically has been linked to academic achievement. Despite the importance of handwriting, handwriting instruction is often neglected and teachers use inconsistent practices to teach handwriting. Specifically, the frequency that children are presented opportunities to write individual block letters in…