This qualitative study explored the perceptions of EFL students at a Chinese university regarding collocation learning. The participating students were provided with a collocation instruction and practice component over ten weeks within a regular one-semester EFL course. The participants were 15 Chinese first-year non-English major students. The…

Background/purpose: This study examined Vietnamese English majors' competence and perception of academic collocations to determine the need for targeted instruction. The research aimed to identify specific challenges these learners face in learning and using academic collocations in their writing. Methods: The study involved 199 Vietnamese English…

Complex noun phrases (NP) are central to mature academic writing and often a focus of explicit teaching. The National Curriculum in England, for example, requires specific components of NP complexity to be taught at specific educational stages. However, the evidence base for such practices is unclear. Research on the emergence of NP components is…

AI-generated paraphrasing tools, especially QuillBot and Paraphrasing Tool, play a crucial role in preventing plagiarism in academic writing. However, their effectiveness and proficiency have been questioned, particularly regarding the adequacy of their strategies. This qualitative study analyzed the paraphrasing strategies and proficiency levels…

Corpus-based studies of lexical bundles have opened new avenues for language teaching research. The fact that naturally occurring language consists of patterns of lexical repetition and multi-word units has given rise to the question of chunkiness in learner language. This study was designed to examine lexical bundles and their functions in a…

Lexical bundles are recurrent multiword combinations and often function as discourse building blocks. Lexical bundles have been analysed in university students' writing to detect linguistic errors, measure writing competence, and investigate the divergence between L1 and L2 writing. Few studies, however, have focused on the high-stakes genre of…

This study was conducted to examine the lexical bundles used by nonnative speakers of English and explore any potential L1 influence on L2 lexical bundle use. Following a corpus-based approach, the frequency and types of English four-word lexical bundles in the postgraduate academic writing of Turkish and American students were analyzed, and the…

Literature survey concerning the Learner Corpus Research (LCR) in the last 20 years has shown a paucity of studies involving specialised/discipline-specific text. Since the use of discipline-specific academic writing learner corpora is useful in determining the language pattern within the English for Specific Academic Purposes (ESAP) context, this…

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…

This study discusses the impact of interactionist output-oriented approaches, specifically, the effects of collaborative text reconstruction on subjunctive recognition and production in the written modality by English-dominant Spanish second-language learners. It also examines whether students' text length and text complexity increase after…

Linggle is a pattern-based referencing tool that assists in collocation learning. In this ongoing project, we aimed to improve its performance further. First, many of the example sentences are long and difficult for students to understand, so we used a machine learning method and trained a classifier to help select dictionarylike example…

This study is about student writers' development of their own approaches to using formulaic phrases from a compendium (Academic Phrasebank). While the essential role of formulaic phrases in academic texts has been well established in research, teaching about the effective use of these phrases is not widely available, and little attention has been…

The employment of genre-based pedagogy and Task-Based Language Teaching in second language education is representative of a paradigmatic shift towards a focus on meaning-making. Despite this shift, second language acquisition (SLA) research continues to predominantly rely on complexity, accuracy, and fluency metrics to assess learner production…

The present study examines the ways Chinese high school EFL learners organize information in their writing. A class of 50 students at grade 9 from a local high school in Guangzhou, China, were recruited as participants. The students' writing at grade 9 was collected as a corpus, comprising ten writing tasks from different text types. In order to…

Incorporating counterarguments can be challenging for many student-writers, including those for whom English is a second or other language. In this study, we present findings that may lead to improvements in students' understanding of the benefits of integrating counterarguments. In our study, expert readers were presented with excerpts of student…