This is a corpus-based investigation of "also" and "too" in 11 registers of Indian English. The corpus used for this study is a combination of a Corpus of Contemporary Indian English (CCIE), and certain sections of ICE-India. The study: (1) determines the proportions of "also" and "too" with respect to each…

The purpose of this study was to determine whether it is possible to distinguish between "difficult" and "easy" constructions for second language (L2) learners by examining characteristics of the structures as they occur in aural input. In a multidimensional analysis of 3 English structures with different acquisition profiles--the simple past,…

Two-year-olds assign appropriate interpretations to verbs presented in two English transitivity alternations, the causal and unspecified-object alternations (Naigles, 1996). Here we explored how they might do so. Causal and unspecified-object verbs are syntactically similar. They can be either transitive or intransitive, but differ in the semantic…

The analysis of circumstance adverbials in this paper was based on L1 and L2 corpora of student presentations, each of which consisting of approximately 30,000 words. The overall goal of the investigation was to identify specific functions L1 and L2 college students attributed to circumstance adverbials (the most frequently used adverbial class in…

This paper describes a corpus-based approach to teaching and learning spoken grammar for English for Academic Purposes with reference to Bhatia's (2002) multi-perspective model for discourse analysis: a textual perspective, a genre perspective and a social perspective. From a textual perspective, corpus-informed instruction helps students identify…

Motivated by a long-term goal in education for measuring Taiwanese civic scientific literacy in media (SLiM), this work reports the detailed techniques to efficiently mine a concept map from 2 years of Chinese news articles (901,446 in total) for SLiM instrument development. From the Chinese news stories, key terms (important words or phrases),…

The advance of digital video technology in the past two decades facilitates empirical investigation of learning in real time. The focus of this paper is the combined use of real-time digital video and a networked linguistic corpus for exploring the ways in which these technologies enhance our capability to investigate the cognitive process of…

This study reports on the design and testing of an integrated suite of vocabulary training games for Nintendo[TM] collectively designated "My Word Coach" (Ubisoft, 2008). The games' design is based on a wide range of learning research, from classic studies on recycling patterns to frequency studies of modern corpora. Its general usage…

Based on a review of the historical and current studies on modality, this paper aims at interpreting metaphor of modality and its functions in advertising English according to theories of modality system and metaphor of modality in systemic-functional linguistics with a corpus we have collected. It is pointed out that metaphor of modality, a usual…

This article presents a corpus-based investigation on English prepositions which are presented in three English language textbooks used by lower secondary schools in Malaysia. The aims were to find out the distributions of prepositions, its frequency order in comparison with the British National Corpus (BNC) and the differences in terms of their…

Reading is an essential skill towards literacy development, and should be provided so that children can master the skill at their early ages. For dyslexic children, mastering the skill is a challenge. It has been widely agreed that the theory behind such difficulties in reading for dyslexic lies in the phonological-core deficits. Support has been…

The authors report the results of a study that provides bases for comparison between the time necessary to participate in courses delivered asynchronously online and courses delivered in a traditional classroom setting. Weekly discussion threads from 21 sections of six courses offered as part of online, degree-granting, accredited, graduate…

This article describes research undertaken in order to design a methodology for the reticular representation of knowledge of a specific discourse community. To achieve this goal, a representative corpus of the scientific production of the members of this discourse community (Universidad Politecnica de Valencia, UPV) was created. This article…

The purpose of this paper is to provide a detailed analysis of how lexical differences related to cohesion and connectionist models can distinguish first language (L1) writers of English from second language (L2) writers of English. Key to this analysis is the use of the computational tool Coh-Metrix, which measures cohesion and text difficulty at…

This paper reports the findings of a study which forms part of a larger-scale research project investigating the use of English in the documents of the European Union (EU). The documents of the EU show various features of texts written for legal, business and other specific purposes. Moreover, the translation services of the EU institutions often…