Undergraduate students majoring in Islamic Studies in Saudi Arabia need to take an English-for-Specific-Purposes (ESP) course each year of the B.A. program. The material for all four courses was developed in-house by a group of instructors at those colleges. A review of the course material, particularly reading texts, showed many inadequacies. It…

In recent years, the use of English corpora to instruct grammar in writing classes has become increasingly popular. In English for Specific Purposes classes, such a novel approach is critically important since it not only allows teachers to achieve a profound understanding of which syntactic structures should be instructed, but it also increases…

Many studies have found EFL/ESL learners over/under/misuse linking adverbials. Because their use is specific to genre and register (Biber et al., 1999), and news writing is a compulsory course for EFL journalism majors at many Chinese universities, this study investigates their usage patterns in news and suggests teaching material design for the…