Studies of English academic writing have revealed a shift to a compressed style, with preferences for lexical and phrasal types of noun modifiers over clausal modifiers. However, condensed noun phrases may result in a loss of explicitness since they lack grammatical markers specifying the semantic relations between head nouns and modifiers. This…

Knowledge of vocabulary is essential for learners of any language, and unfortunately, it has become clear recently the learners of English in a variety of contexts have not scored well on vocabulary tests. Low scores are problematic for language use and success in general, but they cause particular problems when it comes to the vocabulary needed…

This article reports the results of a study that explored Thai EFL learners' repertoire of congruent and incongruent academic English (L2) collocations in relation to their native-Thai language (L1) and academic experience. Eighty Thai tertiary students performed a gap-filling translation test on 15 congruent and 15 incongruent collocations by…

Grammatical compression and implicitness have been proven as characteristics of academic writing (Biber & Gray, 2010, 2016), but they are an underexplored area of research particularly in academic ESL (English as a second language) writing. In this study, we explored the dependent phrases that most and least characterize academic ESL writing…

Focusing on noun phrase complexity in writing, this study adopted Biber, Gray and Poonpon's (2011) hypothesized developmental stages to investigate the academic writing of Thai and native English university students by comparing their argumentative English essays as concerns their usage of noun modification. Prenominal modifiers and postnominal…