Syntactic and linguistic complexity have been studied extensively in applied linguistics as indicators of linguistic performance, development, and proficiency. Recent publications have equally highlighted the reductionist approach taken to syntactic complexity measurement, which often focuses on one or two measures representing complexity at the…

This study reports the findings of a research that was conducted on ten (10) Arab students, who were enrolled in a master of English applied linguistics program at Universiti Putra Malaysia. The research aimed at instrumentally analyzing the English stops produced by Arab learners, in terms of voice onset time (VOT); identifying the effect of…

This is a report of the main points I made in an informal "conversation" with Paul Fletcher and the audience at the 14th ICPLA conference in Cork. The observations arose randomly, as part of an unstructured 1-h Q&A, so they do not provide a systematic account of the subject, but simply reflect the issues which were raised by the conference…

This cross-linguistic and cross-cultural, corpus-based study explores the notion of "writer identity" expressed through self-reference. The study examines how writers from two cultural regions -- Polish and Anglo-American -- construct a credible representation of themselves in writing. That is, it investigates the differences and…

The structure of the conclusion sections in Research Papers (RPs) is of significance in academic writing. The conclusion section in spite of providing an outline of the article, states other essential components, such as recommendations, implications and statements of possible lines of future research. This paper analyses the conclusion parts of…

The disproportionate representation of English Language Learners (ELL) to special education is widely attributed to the difficulty in identifying a disability through a language in development. This language acquisition or language disorder question has manifested in paradoxical disproportionality patterns for the ELL population. Some…

This article critically discusses the paradigmatic shift in applied linguistics, resulting in a claim that countless real-world language problems fall within its scope, but in reality they weaken the discipline and make it lack a focus. Then it takes a closer look at the nature of these language problems, and picks out, for analysis, real examples…

The present cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary study was aimed at exploring the similarities and differences between English and Indonesian research articles from the disciplines of applied linguistics and chemistry in terms of frequency of usage of hedges (e.g. "perhaps," "may") and boosters (e.g. "clearly,"…

In recent years, genre studies have attracted the attention of many researchers. The aim of the present study was to observe the differences in generic structure of doctoral dissertation acknowledgements texts written by English native and non-native (Chinese) PhD students. To this end, thirty native English students' acknowledgement texts and the…

This paper reports the compilation of a corpus of Taiwanese students' spoken English, which is one of the sub-corpora of the Louvain International Database of Spoken English Interlanguage (LINDSEI) (Gilquin, De Cock, & Granger, 2010). LINDSEI is one of the largest corpora of learner speech. The compilation process follows the design criteria…

Contrastive rhetoric studies the writing of second language learners to understand how it is affected by their first language and culture. The field of contrastive rhetoric is as multidimensional as second language writing is complex. It draws on the work of contrastive analysis, anthropology, linguistics, pedagogy, culture studies, translation…

The present study studied contrastively the use of metadiscourse in two disciplines (applied linguistics vs. computer engineering) across two languages (Persian and English). The selected corpus was analyzed through the model suggested by Hyland and Tse (2004). The results revealed the metadiscursive resources are used differently both within and…

Rapid advances in computing have enabled the integration of corpora into language teaching and learning, yet in China corpus methods have not yet been widely adopted. Corpus Linguistics in Chinese Contexts aims to advance the state of the art in the use of corpora in applied linguistics and contribute to the expertise in corpus use in China.

There is an increasing interest in the way academic writers establish the presence of their readers over the past few years. Establishing the presence of readers or what Kroll (1984, p.181) calls imagining "a second voice" is accomplished when a writer refers "explicitly" to their readers using explicit linguistic resources…

Research article introductions (RAIs) play a significant role in gaining publication, and therefore have been studied by many applied linguists. Research into RAIs published in Indonesia has begun to be developed (Adnan, 2009; Mirahayuni, 2001; Safnil, 2000), and generally conclude that Indonesian Humanities RAIs were structured differently from…