This article examines how writing studies scholarship has responded to changes in society's understanding of gender. Combining grounded theory and corpus linguistic analysis using a self-compiled corpus of journal issues published between 1970-2020, the authors track changes in the usage of gendered versus gender-neutral nouns and pronouns with…

This research investigates disciplinary variations using syntactic features in Pakistani academic writing (AW). The corpus of this research is developed from 160 dissertations across four disciplinary divisions and analyzed through AntConc. Results reveal heterogeneous and homogenous use of the said features. Heterogeneity is seen in relation to…

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…

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…

Ambiguities are naturally found in languages and largely categorized into lexical and syntactical ambiguities. They are responsible for ambiguous expressions and may cause confusion in readers; therefore, accurate evaluation of them is critical for clear writing which is one of the prominent prerequisites for academic writing. The literature shows…

Students' Arabic thesis writing comprises several grammatical errors of different types. This study aimed to find out: (1) errors in writing Arabic phrases on students of the Arabic Language Education Master's Program at universities of Indonesia, and (2) factors that caused these writing errors. This research sued a qualitative research design,…

In recent years corpus linguistics research findings have begun to trickle down into some student language learning texts, both in terms of the focus and the specific material taught. However, when it comes to writing pedagogy, the materials, templates and the models presented to students tend to show a remarkably conservative (and uniform)…

This study investigates the use of DO, HAVE, MAKE, GIVE and TAKE in light verb constructions (LVCs) and their corresponding simplex verb forms in British L1 and Malaysian L2 students' writing. The students' essay sub-corpus of the International Corpus of English (ICE) of Great Britain (ICE-GB) and Malaysia (ICE-Malaysia) formed the data of this…

The present study investigates the usage of speech like expressions in written works of Turkish learners of English. It also aims to find out the differences between C1 and B1 level learners in terms of the frequency and types of speech like expressions. The participants in this study were 21 B1 and 33 C1 level students at a state university in…

A challenge in reading research, and particularly extensive reading research, is how to manage the transition from the top of graded reading schemes to authentic texts which may be separated from each other by up to 5,000 word families. While texts written for native-speaker children have been recommended at times, recent research has shown that…

An increasing body of scholars have investigated noun phrase complexity in L2 English writing from varied perspectives, but few of them focus on the differences of the English writing produced by EFLs and ESLs. Thus, the study explored how three international postgraduates from China and three local Malaysian postgraduates in a top university of…

Recent second language acquisition research has demonstrated that language learning is in essence the learning of constructions, or form-meaning pairings. Compared to first language acquisition research, however, our understanding of how constructions in a second language (L2) emerge and develop with proficiency and/or experience is limited.…

The aim of this comparative study is to investigate the deployment of interactional metadiscourse features in two different academic genres. For this purpose, a small, specialized corpus of 48 research articles and book reviews from seven different disciplines were collected. The conclusion sections of the texts written by non-native speakers of…

Grammatical compression and implicitness have been proven as characteristics of academic writing (Biber & Gray, 2010, 2016), but they are an underexplored area of research particularly in academic ESL (English as a second language) writing. In this study, we explored the dependent phrases that most and least characterize academic ESL writing…

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…