Academic vocabulary, as the most challenging aspect of language learning in EAP and ESP contexts, has received much attention in the last few decades (e.g. Laufer, 1988; Sutarsyah, et al., 1994; Laufer and Nation, 1999; Coxhead, 2000; Nation, 2001a, 2001b; Wang et al., 2008; Martinez et al., 2009). The major attainments of these studies were…

There is no standard via which to measure the "qualified" English language teacher in a way that is meaningful to institutions seeking to employ teaching staff. This is significant given that candidates may differ markedly in their language competence, knowledge about language, methodological skills and ability to explain and justify their praxis…

Published language materials are widely used around the world, but many Foreign Language (FL) and/or Second Language (SL) learners still fail to develop their communicative competence satisfactorily and they are still not happy with their language materials. Materials design has recently been characterized by two important developments: first,…

Linguistic courses in ELT (English Language Teaching) departments, in some ways, may create obstacles due to their firm theoretical framework. Therefore, this study is concerned with the main problems for the students taking linguistic courses in ELT Department at Trakya University in Turkey. The purpose of the study is to investigate the…

Construction grammars (Lakoff, Women, fire and dangerous things: What categories reveal about the Mind, University of Chicago Press, 1987; Langacker, Foundations of cognitive grammar: Theoretical pre-requisites, Stanford University Press, 1987; Croft, Radical construction grammar: Syntactic theory in typological perspective, Oxford University…

The issue of cultural categorisation causes difficulties for teachers and learners of intercultural communication as it can easily lead to stereotyping. Within applied linguistics cultural categorisation is hard to avoid; the large number of cross-cultural studies of languages and language use bear witness to this. Categorisation itself is a…

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…

With the ever increasing number of studies on formulaic language, we are beginning to learn more about the processing of formulaic language (e.g. Ellis et al. 2008; Siyanova et al. 2011), its use in speech (e.g. Aijmer 1996; Wood 2012) and writing (e.g. Hyland 2008a, 2008b) and its application in natural language processing (e.g. Tschichold 2000).…

This review covers recent applied linguistic research in Finland and Sweden during the years 2006-2011, with particular emphasis on foreign language learning and teaching. Its primary aim is to inform the international research community on the type of research that is going on in these countries. Special attention is given to topics which have…

Evaluation in academic discourse has received considerable attention from researchers. Much of the work on evaluation has focused, however, on written genres, and less attention has been paid to how evaluation unfolds in spoken academic genres. In our present research, we are interested in disclosing how the interpersonal meaning of evaluation is…

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…

Twenty years after democracy, the legacy of apartheid and hitherto unmet challenges of resourcing and teacher development are reflected in a severely inequitable and underperforming education system. This paper focuses on second language writing in the middle years of schooling when 80% of learners face a double challenge: to move from…

This paper reports on an action research study investigating the use of online learning activities or "e-tivities" to enhance the learning and assessment experience of students on a distance master's programme. The study suggests that to be successfully integrated in a programme, such activities need to be carefully aligned with learning…

Research in the areas of second language (L2) pragmatics and of conversational humor has increased in recent decades, resulting in a strong base of knowledge from which applied linguists can draw information for teaching purposes and undertake future research. Yet, whereas empirical findings in L2 pragmatics are beginning to find their way into…

This review presents a broad picture of recent work on L2 Spanish in educational contexts. The thematic and geographic scope of the review is wide, in order to capture the diversity of learners and learning contexts of L2 Spanish, just two decades after teaching and learning the language gained impetus worldwide. Traditional second or foreign…