Developing the appropriate linguistic and documentation skills in specialised domains is one of the greatest challenges in English for Specific Purposes (ESP) courses. Among other tools, corpora are intended as efficient resources students can use to improve and develop their thematic, terminological, and phraseological knowledge (Sánchez Ramos,…

This article addresses the benefits of audio-visual input for learning second language (L2) vocabulary and grammatical constructions. Specifically, it explores the role of frequency, the effects of subtitles and captions, and the mediating role of learner proficiency on language gains in two longitudinal studies. Study 1 targets vocabulary…

Software can facilitate English as a Foreign Language (EFL) students' self-correction of their free-form writing by detecting errors; this article examines the proportion of errors which software can detect. A corpus of 13,644 words of written English was created, comprising 90 compositions written by Spanish-speaking students at levels A2-B2…

This paper investigates how language comprehension is modulated by temporal information, marked by time adverbs, and bodily constraints imposed by motor actions. The experiment used a paradigm similar to that employed by de Vega, Robertson, Glenberg, Kaschak and Rinck (2004), but included significant refinements in the materials and the…

As stated by Valero-Garcés (2006, p. 38), the new scenario including public service providers and users who are not fluent in the language used by the former has opened up new ways of linguistic and cultural mediation in current multicultural and multilingual societies. As a consequence, there is an ever increasing need for translators and…

Professional and academic discourse is characterised by a specific phraseology, which usually poses problems for students. This paper investigates atypical verb+noun collocations in a corpus of English technical writing of Spanish students. I focus on the type of verbs that most frequently occurred in these awkward or questionable combinations and…

This paper reports an assessment of the collocational competence of students of English Linguistics at the University of Granada. This was carried out to meet a two-fold purpose. On the one hand, we aimed to establish a solid corpus-driven approach based upon a systematic and reliable framework for the evaluation of collocational competence in…