Completing a postgraduate dissertation requires various types of support, whether it be academic, moral, or financial. One way to express gratitude towards those who contribute is through the acknowledgement section. However, the guidelines provided by universities appear to be inadequate to support students, which poses challenges for those who…

While metadiscourse use has been well-attended in second language (L2) writing research, relatively less effort has been made in documenting changing patterns of metadiscourse use among L2 writers. The present study addressed this gap by probing a diachronic change of interactive metadiscourse in research articles published in "English…

Appraisal/Evaluation within Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) is a rather new framework for the analysis of evaluative language, focusing on how human beings reveal their emotions directly or indirectly, how they take stances, and how they align or disalign themselves with social subjects. Through an attitudinal analysis of the system of…

Abstract is of a pivotal genre in scientific communication, assisting not only highly selective readers with judgment of the pertinent articles but also researchers in disseminating new knowledge and intellectual discoveries. Difficult yet challenging, however, is the task of writing effective abstracts particularly among non-English speaking…

This primarily methodological article makes a proposition for linguistic exploration of textual resources available through the "Google Scholar" search engine. These resources ("Google Scholar virtual corpus") are significantly larger than any existing corpus of academic writing. "Google Scholar", however, was not designed for linguistic searches…

Since the late 1980s, collocations have received increasing attention in applied linguistics, especially language teaching, as is evidenced by the many publications on the topic. These works fall roughly into two lines of research (a) those focusing on the identification and use of collocations (Benson, 1989; Hunston, 2002; Hunston & Francis,…

Collocation is an aspect of language generally considered arbitrary by nature and problematic to L2 learners who need collocational competence for effective communication. This study attempts, from the perspective of L2 learners, to have a deeper understanding of collocational use and some of the problems involved, by adopting a task based…

A large proportion of text is made up of a variety of multi-word units (MWUs). One type of MWU is "idioms". While previously linguists have established criteria to define an idiom, the criteria have often been general so as to apply to the wide-ranging MWUs found in this category, and have been a description of them rather than a definition. We…

Investigates the general intonation patterns of Korean speakers when they speak English declarative sentences. Findings show the pitch accent often falls on the last syllable of the phonological word in focus, and that Korean subjects exhibit a distinct tonal pattern for phrases similar to the low-high-low-high tone sequence of Korean accentual…

This article presents an outline for a seminar in English intonation for language teachers. (Text is in French.) (CLK)

This article discusses sociolinguistics and how certain of its norms bear a direct relationship to the teaching objectives of EFL. (CLK)

This paper points out the irrelevance of the sentence-based grammatical explanations found in most grammar reference books and ESL textbooks with regard to answering questions such as: (1) when and why do native speakers of English use the passive rather than the active voice, and (2) when and why does the native speaker of English use the present…

This paper attempts a systematic approach to the teaching of word stress in the ESL classroom. Stress assignment rules from Chomsky and Halle and from Ross are used to establish the SISL Principle (Stress Initial Strong Left), for final weak-syllable words. On the basis of spelling, this rule can be applied correctly to 95 out of 100 cases. (AM)

This concordance study uses a corpus of applied linguistic articles to explore how and why accomplished academic writers use quotations and citations, specifically the word 'say,' and analyses the lexical and grammatical choices they make. Citations were examined in almost 50,000 words from 11 articles to document use by experts writers. Overuse…