The construct of reading is presented in language assessment. Previous studies have focused on reading issues encountered by English learners, most of which are manifested by certain linguistic features: lexical bundles (LBs). Addressing this, the study aims to analyze LBs in reading comprehension passages in the Chinese National Matriculation…

Metaphor of modality in the Hallidayan linguistic framework is manifested through a transition from implicit modal expressions to explicit modal expressions, encompassing metaphor of modalization and metaphor of modulation. This article conducts a corpus-based investigation to examine the prevalence of metaphors of modalization in English academic…

This study examines the use of lexical bundles in reports produced by university-level L2 English writers in civil and environmental engineering (CEE). The corpus consists of 119 reports, and the study compares the use of different types of lexical bundles (3-word, 4-word, and 5-word) in high-scoring and low-scoring papers. The results show that…

This article investigated the English research article (RA) titles across different disciplines and cultures. To this end, 600 RA titles in the Chinese context and 600 RA titles in the international context were collected from six disciplines, which are grouped as social and natural sciences. The frequency of title types, their subtypes, and title…

An English reading class of 10th graders (N = 50) was asked to self-construct English word cards for unknown vocabulary incidentally encountered when completing textbook readings. The students were assigned this task to determine what linguistic and nonlinguistic elements they would self-select to include on the cards and whether the appearance of…

Artificial intelligence (AI) technologies have the potential to reduce the workload for the second language (L2) teachers and test developers. We propose two AI distractor-generating methods for creating Chinese vocabulary items: semantic similarity and visual similarity. Semantic similarity refers to antonyms and synonyms, while visual similarity…

This corpus-based diachronic study aims to investigate the change in the use of English relative clauses over a 45-year time span. It does not only focus on change over time but also change between two varieties of English (British and American). The data were taken from the Brown family of corpora. Each corpus in the Brown family corpora consists…

This study investigates language attitudes held by Chinese-English bilinguals toward two types of switching to English in mandarin Chinese discourse, that is, intraclausal and interclausal switching. Participants with varying degrees of English proficiency were sampled from four cities in mainland China and one oversea city, London. A variation of…