Opportunities for incidental vocabulary acquisition were explored in a 121,000-word corpus of teacher talk addressed to advanced adult learners of English as a second language (ESL) in a communicatively-oriented conversation class. In contrast to previous studies that relied on short excerpts, the corpus contained all of the teacher speech the…

This paper looked into the interplay between language and culture based on the metatext categories utilized by the writers in three speech communities: Philippines, Iran, and Taiwan. Specifically, it answered the following subproblems: (1) What metatext categories exist in the results-and-discussion section of ESL/EFL research articles written in…

This book highlights the potential and the challenges of corpora in language education with a particular focus on the teacher's perspective. For this purpose, the study explores the relevance of the corpus approach to central paradigms underlying contemporary language education. Furthermore, a critical analysis investigates the persisting gap…

There has been increasing interest in the possible applications of corpora to both linguistic research and pedagogy. This study takes a corpus-based, genre-analytic approach to discipline-specific materials development. Combining corpus analysis with genre analysis makes it possible to develop teaching materials that are not only authentic but…

This investigation intends to assess the effectiveness of a lexical recognition test (Meara & Buxton, 1987) as a placement tool that distinguishes among levels of two groups of students: Spanish heritage language learners (HLL) and second language learners (SLL). Three hundred and thirty university students from four different levels completed a…

The purpose of this study is to track the diachronic development of exemplar clusters formed by the adjectives in the Spanish expression of becoming "quedar(se)" + ADJ (e.g. "quedar(se) solo" "to be left alone", "quedar(se) espantado" "to get scared"). This approach applies the same system of analysis used by Bybee & Eddington (2006) in their…

This article presents an analysis of interactions in the usage, structure, cognition, coadaptation of conversational partners, and emergence of linguistic constructions. It focuses on second language development of English verb-argument constructions (VACs: VL, verb locative; VOL, verb object locative; VOO, ditransitive) with particular reference…

Language has a fundamentally social function. Processes of human interaction along with domain-general cognitive processes shape the structure and knowledge of language. Recent research in the cognitive sciences has demonstrated that patterns of use strongly affect how language is acquired, is used, and changes. These processes are not independent…

Computer corpora have many potential applications in teaching and learning languages, the most direct of which--when the learners explore a corpus themselves--has become known as data-driven learning (DDL). Despite considerable enthusiasm in the research community and interest in higher education, the approach has not made major inroads to…

Because many of the forms participating in inherent variability are not attested in the standard language, they are often construed as evidence of change. We test this assumption by confronting the standard, as instantiated by a unique corpus covering five centuries of French grammatical injunctions, with data on the evolution of spontaneous…

This paper explores how contact between English and Chinese has resulted in the incorporation of Chinese borrowings into the lexicon of Malaysian English (ME). Using a corpus-based approach, this study analyses a comprehensive range of borrowed features extracted from the Malaysian English Newspaper Corpus (MEN Corpus). Based on the contexts of…

Semantic accounts of verb pattern alternations often rely on observations about "verb disposition": the preference of verbs with particular lexical semantic characteristics for one of two competing constructions is taken as a clue to the semantic differences between the two constructions. For instance, it has been observed with regard to the…

This exploratory study investigates the impact of class size on the rhetorical move structures and lexico-grammatical features of academic lecture introductions. From the MICASE corpus (The Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English), two small corpora of lecture introductions of small- and large-class lectures were compiled. Using a genre-based…

The use of authentic text has been argued to increase learner awareness of lexical form, function, and meaning (for example, Willis 1990; Johns 1994). The Web provides ready-made material and tools for both learner-centred reading and vocabulary tasks. This study reports on the results of a project in which Japanese university EFL students made…

The influence of English on German has been an ongoing subject of intense popular and academic interest in the German sphere. In order to better understand this language contact situation, this research project investigates anglicisms--instances of English language material in a German language context--in the German hip hop community, where the…