Foundational skills are often viewed as necessary components for automaticity in reading and writing. In this study, we draw on teacher interviews to explore what secondary English/language arts teachers identify as necessary language for successful school writing. Findings suggest that teachers believe White mainstream English is a necessary…

This contrastive corpus-based study aims to analyze the similarities and differences of two synonyms "important" and "significant" concerning on the degree of formality in their distribution across genres as well as their collocations and semantic preference. The corpus data derived from the Corpus of Contemporary American…

Usage-based theories hold that mental representation of language is shaped by a lifetime of usage. Both input to which first language (L1) and second language (L2) users are exposed and their own language production affect their construction learning and entrenchment. The present study investigates L2 users' knowledge of two…

This research project involved a mixed-methods study investigating language-related challenges of first-year students at an English Medium Instruction (EMI) university in Hong Kong. The two-phased sequential study employed a questionnaire survey and semi-structured student interviews. The survey and interview findings indicate that first-year…

Until now, there has been very little unified analysis of metadiscourse across speech and writing. Drawing on a reflexive metadiscourse model, this article conducts a multidimensional analysis of metadiscourse across 10 spoken and written registers in a corpus of 626 texts. Two metadiscourse dimensions, participants' interaction and discourse…

In multilingual instructional spaces, language use can reinforce or ­disrupt gender disparities. This self-study, situated in the context of a university developmental English writing course, examines how an instructor sought to raise L2 learners' critical language awareness, operationalized as consciousness of ways that gender disparity is…

Background/purpose: Academic writing in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) poses challenges for graduate students, particularly in achieving coherence and organization. Thematic choices play a crucial role in guiding readers and ensuring textual cohesion. While Theme selection has been explored in various contexts, little research has examined…

This true longitudinal study explored the lexical development of L2 university English major students in Thailand using two learner corpora. This study analyzed the natural learners' English language writing assignments from two writing courses and tracked their lexical development over a relatively long period (three years with five batches of…

Many bilingual preservice teachers in Texas are not able to get certified because of language limitations. Although they have grown up listening and speaking their native language at home, with family and friends, many face challenges when using academic language in a formal setting. There is a mismatch between their language level and their…

Classrooms are not always linguistically permeable, and instruction focused on bolstering English reading comprehension too often neglects students' additional linguistic resources in languages other than English. However, to the task of comprehending English text, multilingual readers bring a host of communicative resources across multiple…

This corpus-based study explores the expression of gratitude in the acknowledgement section of doctoral dissertations in both English and Arabic. The objective is to analyse how gratitude in academic discourse is structured in these languages and to explore any differences related to gender. The study examines 80 dissertations (40 in English and…

The observation of informalities in academic writing has become tremendous in recent years, as revealed by a plethora of cross-cultural and diachronic studies. Different users of English have already been explored; however, none has centered on the case of English as a Second Language (henceforth ESL) writers, such as Filipino academic writing…

"Vos" is regularly used in "paisa" (of Antioquia) Spanish, although written "vos" is considered non- normative. Recent research shows an augmented presence of written "vos" in public domains (Weyers 2016a, 2016b), which is viewed favorably by a majority of "paisas" (Weyers, forthcoming). So, what…

The study compares the uses of the native-speaker concept as a legitimizing resource in language-standard ideologies and normative discourse in five languages of European origin. Much research and international discussion has focused on the native speaker of English, a symbolically international language. We aim to show how the native-speaker…

Soon after Kachru (1992) promoted the notion of the World of English(es) through his 'inner-outer-expanding circle' principle, academic audiences started to recognize that the number of English nonnative speakers had noticeably surpassed that of native speakers. Such a phenomenon has encouraged English learners of diverse lingua-cultural…