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…

This study analyzed semantic errors in the written compositions of first-year BSEd English students. 86 participants were asked to write a narrative essay and provide feedback on their writing difficulties and language learning needs. The collected data were statistically analyzed. Semantic errors were categorized into 8 types: code-switching,…

This study aims at shedding light on the linguistic significance of collocation networks in the academic writing context. Following Firth's principle "You shall know a word by the company it keeps." The study intends to examine three selected nodes (i.e. research, study, and paper) shared collocations in an academic context. This is…

English phrasal verbs (PVs) are ubiquitous and often polysemous. These lexical items are thus very important, but also challenging for ESL/EFL learners. Substantial research that can inform instructional approaches to PVs has already been conducted. One strand of this research has focused on identifying PVs that merit prioritization in learning.…

The concept of semantic prosody has attracted great research interest in language teaching. Identifying learners' perception of semantic prosody and collocation may be beneficial to vocabulary teaching. This study analyzes two pairs of synonyms in English writings of Chinese students and English native speakers based on the ICNALE corpus. The…

Abstract writing presents problems to budding academics, especially in keeping to the generic structure and the requisite word counts by the various publishers. The article focuses on grammatical metaphor as a systemic resource for achieving proficiency in research abstract writing. Borrowing from Halliday and Matthiessen's semantic domains beyond…

Developing small learner and native corpora, this case study examines how Korean L2 learners used six types of lexical collocations in L2 writing to address (a) the frequency and acceptability of learner collocations, (b) problematic constituents of deviant collocations, and (c) possible sources of the learner difficulties. The overall frequency…

To help EFL learners realize the use of nominals and clauses in practicing productive skills of academic writing in English writing tests, experiments have been exploited using the tasks similar to those of internet-based test of English as a foreign language to determine the nominal and clause level information during sentence and paragraph…

Within Asian EFL contexts such as South Korea, large class sizes, poor sources of input and an overreliance on the Grammar-Translation Method may negatively impact semantic and pragmatic development of writing content. Since formulaic language is imbued with syntactic, semantic and pragmatic linguistic features, it represents an ideal means to…

Using the academic writing sub-corpora of the Corpus of Contemporary American English and the British National Corpus as data and building on previous research, this study strives to identify the most frequently-used multi-word constructions (MWCs) of various types (e.g., idioms, lexical bundles, and phrasal/prepositional verbs) in general…

The study applied the Multi-Dimensional analysis used by Biber (1988) to examine the functional parameters of essays. Co-occurrence patterns were identified within an essay corpus (n=1529) using a linguistic indices provided by Co-Metrix. These patterns were used to identify essay groups that shared features based upon situational parameters.…

This paper combines the use of corpus techniques with discourse analysis in order to investigate adverbials of result in the writing of advanced academic student writers. It focuses in detail on the phraseology and functions of "thus," "therefore," "then," "hence," "so" and "consequently." Two corpora of native-speaker theses are examined: 190,000…

Argues that publishers of simplified versions of literary texts accessible to the language learner give inadequate guidance to their simplifiers regarding grammatical simplification, leaving them to rely on their intuitive feel. The article outlines and demonstrates a system of grammatical simplification based on fundamental syntactic…

Course designs for Basic English Writing classes vary from one course to another. The objective of this study was to investigate the semantic misinterpretation of English words found in the English compositions written by native-Chinese-speaking undergraduate students and to overcome if such a barrier occurred in the process of writing. First,…

Using a corpus-based approach, this paper investigates the construction of stance in finite reporting clauses with "that"-clause complementation. The data are drawn from two corpora of theses in contrasting disciplines: a social science--politics--and a natural science--materials science. A network for the analysis of reporting clauses is…