To have more information about the English words known by second language (L2) speakers, we ran a large-scale crowdsourcing vocabulary test, which yielded 17 million useful responses. It provided us with a list of 445 words known to nearly all participants. The list was compared to various existing lists of words advised to include in the first…

Placing non-native speakers of English into appropriate classes involves mapping placement test scores onto proficiency levels based on predetermined cut scores. However, studies on how to set boundaries for different levels of proficiency have been lacking in the language testing literature. A top-down approach to standard setting in which a…

Acquiring collocations is widely considered to be essential in language learning. The question arises, however, as to what collocations merit students' and teachers' attention in ESP classes at a tertiary level. Thus, this corpus-based study aims to systematically develop an academic collocation list for undergraduate mechanical engineering…

Reflection is a key component of the transformative learning process. In this study, we take steps to define components of reflection and link them to a computer-based, quantitative method of content analysis called Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC). This method can be used to evaluate common forms of reflective writing such as journals,…

The choice of word counting units (i.e. word family, flemma, or lemma) is of great importance in vocabulary list and test creation, as there are assumptions underpinning the use of each. Flemma-based counting assumes that if a learner can understand the meaning of a word in one part of speech (POS), they can also understand its meaning when the…

Several sign languages of the world utilize a construction that consists of a question followed by an answer, both of which are produced by the same signer. For American Sign Language, this construction has been analyzed as a discourse-level rhetorical question construction (Hoza et al. 1997), as a single-sentence question-answer pair (Caponigro…

The marriage between language and the law is apparent in any legal document of whatever purpose. Hence, at present, studies on the language of the law are definitely in vogue. Grounded on Quirk et al. (1985) and Matulewska's (2010) description of deontic modality, this corpus-based linguistic study aimed at analyzing the use of deontic modals in…

The rapid growth of e-commerce has contributed to the development of website localization activity as a major professional industry. Despite the high volume of website localization practices, there is little research on translators participating in website localization projects. The purpose of this qualitative study was to explore the position of…

This study investigates a strategy based on predictability of consecutive sub-lexical units in learning to segment a continuous speech stream into lexical units using computational modeling and simulations. Lexical segmentation is one of the early challenges during language acquisition, and it has been studied extensively through psycholinguistic…

Text classification typically performs best with large training sets, but short texts are very common on the World Wide Web. Can we use resampling and data augmentation to construct larger texts using similar terms? Several current methods exist for working with short text that rely on using external data and contexts, or workarounds. Our focus is…

Ambiguity in discourse is pervasive, yet mechanisms of production and processing suggest that it tends to be compensated in context. The present study sets out to analyze the combination of discourse markers (such as "but" or "moreover") with other discourse signals (such as semantic relations or punctuation marks) across three…

In this article, we present the results of an eight-week in-class intervention, during which binomial expressions comprised of academic vocabulary (results and conclusions, facts and circumstances) were presented to intermediate-level learners of English. Constraints that govern the preferred order of highly fixed binomials were explained as the…

Reaching an understanding of how scholarly writers manage linguistic recycling remains a focus of many studies in applied linguistics, bibliometrics, and the sociology of science. The value apportioned to citations in research assessment protocols is one factor in this sustained interest, the challenges that managing intertextuality present for…

The organization of our knowledge about the world into an interconnected network of concepts linked by relations profoundly impacts many facets of cognition, including attention, memory retrieval, reasoning, and learning. It is therefore crucial to understand how organized semantic representations are acquired. The present experiment investigated…

This study explored how Iranian EFL learners and native English speakers conceptualized the impolite use of "please" in interaction. Moreover, attempts were made to examine whether Iranian EFL learners and native English speakers differ in using the impolite version of please in their communications. To this end, informal conversations…