Usage of definite and indefinite articles is known to vary across different varieties of English, especially in the outer circle. As a semantic/pragmatic category, definiteness is notoriously slippery to define -- is it uniqueness, familiarity, inclusiveness or identifiability? Literature has shown that the lack of an agreed definition can…

This dissertation draws on both qualitative and quantitative approaches to investigate the linguistic practices of teachers and children who are learning Mandarin Chinese as a Heritage Language (CHL) in two dual immersion preschools in California. CHL children have been interpreted as novice members in local speech communities who actively explore…

The present study adopts a corpus-driven perspective to an analysis of the 'current relevance' meaning, a central meaning of the present perfect, in general and textbook corpora. The term 'current relevance' refers to a meaning of the present perfect, in which a past action or event is shown to be connected with the present time in some ways. The…

This paper explores the applications of pattern grammar and local grammar in English language teaching, focusing specifically on the design of teaching materials. It shows that grammar patterns can be systematically analysed from a local grammar perspective, and further argues that the practice of local grammar analyses helps to raise language…

Purpose: Unlike traditional implicit approaches used to improve grammatical forms used by children with developmental language disorder, explicit instruction aims to make the learner consciously aware of the underlying language pattern. In this study, we compared the efficacy of an explicit approach to an implicit approach when teaching 3 novel…

Drawing on unique observational data from police training with child volunteers, this study evaluates the linguistic patterns used by officers for transmitting complex, legally-binding information to children during the opt-out procedure (which determines how children's evidence is presented in court). It is shown that while the officers realise…

Corpus-based data-driven learning (DDL) is an inductive instructional approach using computer-generated concordances. It provides students with the opportunity to analyze different language forms across contexts found in the concordance output. The idea of engaging students to discover the language rules and patterns from authentic learning…

Inasmuch as the fact that writing is a cognitively demanding task and as a step toward overcoming some of the barriers English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners face during writing performance, this study attempted to investigate Iranian EFL learners' perceptions toward the most common writing difficulties. To this end, 120 Iranian EFL learners…

This article studies students' use of sentence variety in an ESL writing course. The study includes three sentence features: (a) sentence types, (b) sentence combining, and (c) sentence patterns. Although sentence variety is part of the curriculum, the actual use of sentence structures has not been measured so far. By understanding students' use…

With the development of language corpora, linguists have been able to identify how often specific words, phrases, and expressions are used, and in which contexts. However, applications of corpora in the wider domain of language teaching have remained limited. This article presents an approach to utilizing corpora, combining principles from…

The aim of this study is to monitor, analyse and assess the effectiveness of using idioms in mastering students' vocabulary knowledge and improving speech in EFL class. The leading research method was a three-stage experiment. To successfully conduct the experiment, there were compiled a list of an active vocabulary and a list of English idioms…

The present study attempts to identify difficulties that Japanese students encounter with metadiscursive nouns in writing second language (L2) argumentation essays. Metadiscursive nouns are abstract and unspecific nouns which can serve as cohesive markers by retrieving their meanings in the text where they occur. Using a selected number of nouns…

This timeline looks at explicit uses of corpora in foreign or second language (L2) teaching and learning, i.e. what happens when end-users explore corpus data, whether directly via concordancers or integrated into CALL programs, or indirectly with prepared printed materials. The underlying rationale is that such contact provides the massive…

Purpose: The purpose of this tutorial is to explain how learning to read can be thought of as learning statistical regularities and to demonstrate why this is relevant for theory, modeling, and practice. This tutorial also shows how triangulation of methods and cross-linguistic research can be used to gain insight. Method: The impossibility of…

This study examined the developmental trajectories of Arabic grammatical number in Arabic-English bilingual children. The samples consisted of 80 individuals (40 monolingual children residing in Jordan and 40 bilingual children residing in the USA), aged between 5 and 9 years. Data was collected through two tasks involving picture able objects and…