This study investigated the efficacy of explicit lexical collocation instruction via the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). To improve competence in lexical collocation and writing performance and to examine whether collocational competence and writing performance have a linear interrelation, 16 international English for Academic…

The article shines light upon the differences in the vocabulary demands of academic spoken discourse between three broad scientific disciplines: Life Sciences, Physical Sciences, and Social Sciences. By employing the Academic Word List (AWL) and British National Corpus/Corpus of Contemporary American English (BNC/COCA) wordlist, the present study…

With a number of word lists available for teachers to choose from, teachers and students need to know which list provides the best return for learning? Four well-established lists were compared and it was found that BNC/COCA2000 (British National Corpus / Corpus of Contemporary American English 2000) and the New General Service List (New-GSL)…

Knowledge of collocations is essential for English academic writing. However, there are few academic collocation referencing tools available and there is a pressing need to develop more. In this paper, we will introduce the ACOP (Academic Collocations and Phrases Search Engine), a newly developed corpus-based tool to search large academic corpora.…

The study compares three synonymous nouns, "disadvantage," "downside," and "drawback," in terms of their frequency, distribution patterns, and collocations, using data from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). The findings show that the frequency of "disadvantage" is the highest, followed by…

This study analyzes four English synonyms -- clear, obvious, apparent, and evident -- concentrating on meanings, distribution across genre, collocations, and semantic preference and prosody. The data were drawn from learner's dictionaries and the Corpus of the Contemporary American English (COCA). It was discovered that the four synonyms share the…

ESL writing teachers face the challenge of providing written feedback that is both effective and motivating to students. Thus, many end up making use of praise (or positive feedback) before offering criticism. Only limited research has examined how students perceive praise, and few studies among the most recent have focused on praise above other…

This study investigates the roles and functions of directives in academic texts mainly produced by Indonesian college students. Sixty-two (62) imperatives, 11 "it is + Adjective + to"-clauses, and 7 modals of obligation are searched for in academic texts taken from the Corpus of State University of Malang Indonesian Learners English…

In recent years, higher education programs with English as a medium of instruction (EMI) have been expanding at a swift pace in Taiwan, where Taiwanese Mandarin is the official language. Behind this rapid growth is the widespread belief that EMI provides immersion in English, which facilitates incidental learning of the target language. In this…

The importance of input on language learning cannot be overstated. One method of providing input to learners at a level that is appropriate for them is called extensive reading, in which learners read an abundance of texts. In practice, for learners of English as a second or foreign language, these texts are often books that have been written and…

Due to the large number of near-synonyms present in the English language, English learners frequently struggle to use near-synonyms in different contexts, as these words, despite similar meanings, are not always interchangeable. This study examines the distribution and collocation of three synonyms, "important," "significant,"…

This research was inspired by the phenomenon of binge-watching Korean television drama series (K-dramas) among Taiwanese university students. K-drama fever may provide an impetus for sustained English-subtitled K-dramas viewing, which may serve as an alternative to extensive reading of graded readers that English teachers often encourage their…

The article offers an in-depth lexical analysis of the listening sub-test of the famous International English Language Testing System (IELTS). The vocabulary profile of 239 listening transcripts from 60 IELTS official practice tests were analyzed. The results showed that, 3,000 most frequent word families in the British National Corpus/Corpus of…

Vocabulary learning materials and vocabulary learning research have a common objective of promoting effective vocabulary instruction (Schmitt, 2008), but in practice vocabulary learning materials tend to reflect materials writers' repertoire and intuition primarily (Tomlinson, 2011). In an effort to develop a stronger interface between research…

This study investigated three synonymous verbs, "teach," "educate," and "instruct," in terms of their collocational patterns and distribution across genres. Data were drawn from the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English (2021) and the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). The findings from this…