A growing body of research has indicated that a lexical bundle approach is effective in capturing the phraseological variation in texts across registers and writing proficiency levels. However, research to date has rarely employed such an approach to analyze small-scale learner writing produced in classroom-based L2 research. In response to Reppen’s (2016) call for promoting the connection between corpus linguistics and language teaching, this study employed a lexical bundle approach to examine the phraseological variation in learners’ co-constructed texts produced in collaborative writing tasks implemented in two task conditions (L1 versus L2 interaction) in EFL classrooms. The results indicated that a lexical bundle approach was able to identify similarities and nuanced differences in the use of formulaic linguistic patterns in a small collection of learner writing produced in the two task conditions. Specifically, learners in the L2 interaction task condition employed more verb phrase based formulaic expressions in their collaborative texts than those in the L1 interaction condition, which may have rendered their texts less academic-like. In addition, learners relied more on longer strings of words (5-word lexical bundles) to express obligation and call for actions in the L2 interaction condition. Methodological and pedagogical implications were discussed.

Little published research studies examined the relationship between cohesion and writing quality of L2 children’s narrative texts using scientific tools such as Automatic Analysis of Text Cohesion (TAACO) and Coh-Metrix. To fill the research gap, this study investigates the development of cohesive devices and writing quality of 59 ESL grade four students over one semester using TAACO and Coh-Metrix. The corpus for the current study contained 177 narrative texts. Results show that L2 grade four children’s use of cohesive devices and the quality of writing has improved over one semester. Low proficiency group of students tends to use more cohesive devices than high proficiency group. Multi-dimensional assessment of writing quality shows that referential cohesive devices would be positive predictors of complexity by length and subordination. The study has contributed new knowledge in the field of second language writing in terms of research, theory, and pedagogy.

This article explores the usage patterns of an open personal construction in Finnish, namely the so-called zero-person construction in naturally occurring conversational discourse, and provides a bottom-up model of these patterns. The aims of this article are twofold. Firstly, the article attempts to shed more light on the functional groupings of zero-person constructions in conversational discourse. Secondly, it tests the suitability of Multiple Correspondence Analysis (MCA) in categorizing a linguistic construction on the basis of its semantico-grammatical and contextual features. Based on the MCA, three distinct groups of zero-person constructions are identified and examined in detail, namely the Narrative, Reactive and Evaluative zero-person constructions. At the macro-level, the article shows the advantages of a usage-based approach combining both quantitative and qualitative methods on the study of interaction and personal constructions. At the micro-level, it offers an example of the use of the MCA in examining a syntactic construction based on its semantico-grammatical and discourse features.

This study aims to explore diachronic changes of close kinship terms such as father, mother, uncle, aunt, son and daughter in North Korean English textbooks as to how the metaphorical extensions of these words occur. To this end, this paper uses North Korean English textbook corpora from 1991 to 2015 and AntConc, a corpus analysis tool employed for the investigation of these close kinship terms with their co-occurring lexical context. The findings are: Most frequent metaphor in the 1990s is the head of state as father and its people as sons and daughters. The metaphor of sons and daughters persists in the textbooks of 2000s, but not the head of state as father. Father stops with Kim, IlSung in its metaphor. In 2010s, father, sons and daughters metaphors have disappeared, though other metaphors remain in fatherland, motherland and mother tongue. The engineered metaphors such as father and sons/daughters by the state tend to be easily forgotten due to its forced nature of these expressions. This disappearance of metaphor shows a critical difference of metaphorical endurance between naturally occurring metaphors and artificially formulated metaphors.

In this article we examine gender differences in the spoken usage using a selection of files from the British National Corpus (BNC). Our aim is twofold. First, to report on some similarities and differences in the words and phrases used by men and women in conversation. Secondly, we address some methodological issues related to the study of gender and to corpus linguistics research in general. In particular, we aim to address what we call the “bag of words, bag of people’ problem. In many studies a corpus is treated as a bag of words in common techniques such as a keyword analysis. Such frequency-based analyses have led to many discoveries about the nature of language, but the backgrounding of discourse and text structure is problematic in obscuring some patterns of language usage. In addition, corpora are necessarily compiled using the language output of many individuals---a bag of people---and the individual contributions, and hence variation in usage, are often overlooked. These issues are explored with reference to some linguistic elements known to potentially sensitive to gender variation.

The Prime Minister’s Questions has always been regarded as one of the most heated debates in Britain’s political arena. As Teresa May stepped on stage, there has been a huge increase in the number of female MPs in the British Parliament. In this study, a corpus which has 10 sessions of PMQs held from October 2017 to February 2018 is compiled. This study has used the appraisal annotation scheme of the BFSU Qualitative Coder 1.2. (Xu & Jia, 2011) based on the appraisal system (Martin & White, 2005) to find out the differences in the appraisals used by the female and male MPs while raising questions. The results show that the most significant differences in the appraisals appear in the following categories: force (-)＞proclaim (-)＞entertain (-)＞disclaim (+)＞attribute (+). Among these discourse strategies, force, proclaim, and entertain are overused by the male MPs while female MPs tend to use more disclaim and attribute. We cannot simply say whether the female MPs or the male MPs are more impolite because numerous social and cultural factors can influence the results of the study. It’s the different strategies used by the female and male MPs that count.

Previous studies argued that most listening tests used scripted texts which may not represent real-world spoken discourse and that semi-scripted texts should be used (Clark, 2014). However, only a few studies investigated the extent to which these two types of spoken texts are different (Wagner, 2016). This study aimed to identify linguistic features which distinguished scripted from semi-scripted texts. Two corpora were created based on transcripts of standardized listening tests: the reference corpus (the scripted texts) and the target corpus (the semi-scripted texts). Using lexico-grammatical and phonological analyses, results revealed that the semi-scripted texts were different from the scripted counterparts regarding dysfluencies and discourse connectors. Despite the limited number of texts, these findings echoed results from studies using much larger corpora (Biber, 2006). Interpretation and explanations were provided using a register variation framework (Biber & Conrad, 2009). Implications for L2 listening pedagogy and assessment were also addressed.

Classroom use of authentic texts used in everyday communication has not always been an inseparable part of foreign language teaching. According to Grigaliuniene (2013, p. 17), “the structures many current textbooks teach for certain functions are either never used or used infrequently while quite unexpected structures are the ones that actually occur”. Despite the awareness of the importance of authentic patterns of language use, students often learn structures (lexical or grammatical) which are rarely used in actual communication. Teaching authentic phrases is even more important in English for Specific Purposes (ESP) where learners’ specific needs impact the design of a course (Dudley-Evans & St John, 1998). What is more, ESP students need to acquire vocabulary of a target profession. Thus, in this preliminary study, conducted using corpus linguistic methodology, an attempt is made to identify and explore the use and discourse functions of frequent and typical patterns of language use, i.e. keywords, recurrent clusters and multi-word terms (nominalizations), found in a custom-designed corpus of car reviews written in English. As shown by examples of student tasks, the results have pedagogical potential in that they can be used as a useful resource when designing or supplementing teaching materials for secondary-school ESP students (automotive technicians and car mechanics).1)