The present study analyzed how a group of young Spanish-speaking English as a foreign language (EFL) learners in a content and language integrated learning (CLIL) science class responded to an instructional unit integrating attention to functional language and an inquiry-oriented approach to science. Working in cooperation with the researchers, a…

Understanding the linguistic and rhetorical patterns of an academic discipline strengthens students' abilities to write in professional settings. Data-driven learning and corpus-linguistic methods can increase this understanding and should be considered valuable contributors to any writing curriculum. In this paper, I present a case history on…

Professional and academic discourse is characterised by a specific phraseology, which usually poses problems for students. This paper investigates atypical verb+noun collocations in a corpus of English technical writing of Spanish students. I focus on the type of verbs that most frequently occurred in these awkward or questionable combinations and…

The analysis of 2,369 finite clauses in 11 English-language academic articles on oceanography attempts to establish the semantic characteristics of "by" phrases as a step toward understanding the circumstances in which authors were likely to use the prepositional phrase following a passive verb form. (CB)

Analysis of how students of English for Science and Engineering use certain categories of nouns in their technical writing projects revealed a significant use of "sub-technical" and "text-structuring" words serving both referential and discourse-oriented functions. The use of matching or cloze-type and open-ended writing exercises to improve…

Thematic progression (TP) is examined in the text of a communication between a cardiologist and a general practitioner concerning a patient, offering a clinical diagnosis of the patient's condition. Analysis of the discourse looks at the field, tenor, and mode of the communication as a context for TP. The methods of analysis are first described,…

Tests whether nominal compounds, the juxtaposition of three or more nouns, retain sufficient semantic information to justify their use for brevity. Finds that respondents often misidentified at least one out of five given headwords. Recommends reminding students of headwords' importance and employing nominal compounds only after their fuller…

A study of 15 popular scientific journal articles and 15 specialist medical-research articles indicates that in medical discourse hedging, the expression of tentativeness and possibility by epistemic devices, can be applied in less specialized English- for-Special-Purposes (ESP) texts such as popular scientific articles, but in different…

Variability in the grammatical profile of finite verbs in English is examined in 20 Master of Science theses in biology, chemistry, and physics. The use of verbs with respect to voice, tense, aspect, and modality is examined in five rhetorical sections of the theses--introduction, review, methods, results, discussion. (SED)

A study investigated the genre, structure, and delivery of oral presentations in engineering delivered in English as a first and as a second language. Eleven manufacturing engineering presentations, four by non-native speakers of English and seven by native speakers in Loughborough, United Kingdom, were analyzed with reference to the discourse…

A study examined frequency of active, passive verb forms in two astrophysics journal articles, finding "we" plus an active voice occurs at least as frequently as the passive. This pattern typifies a previously unidentified type of research article, the logical argument scientific paper, whose characteristics are detailed. Similar pattern…

A study investigated the usefulness of instructional materials on the writing of scientific articles by comparing the descriptions of abstracts offered in the textbook with a sample of abstracts drawn from four fields of medicine (clinical medicine, surgery, epidemiology, basic sciences). The comparison was confined to abstracts of results-focused…