This research investigated the discursive construction of COVID-19 in WHO director general's discourse through the lens of corpus linguistics and critical discourse analysis. 255 speeches of the WHO director general were collected, forming a 234,149-words corpus. Collocations of 'COVID-19' were generated and analyzed in terms of the semantic…

This plenary speech provides an overview of applications of corpus research in several core areas of applied linguistics, including second language acquisition and language assessment. It does this by showcasing a number of recent studies carried out by or with involvement of the author. These studies all focus on phraseological aspects of…

A critical question in the study of language development is to understand lexical and syntactic acquisition, which play different roles in speech to the extent it would be natural to surmise they are acquired differently. As measured through the comprehension and production of closed-class words, syntactic ability emerges at roughly the 400-word…

Learning objectives, especially those well defined by applying Bloom's taxonomy for Cognitive Objectives, have been widely recognized as important in various teaching and learning practices. However, many educators have difficulties developing learning objectives appropriate to the levels in Bloom's taxonomy, as they need to consider the…

The Question answering (QA) system plays a basic role in the acquisition of information and the e-learning environment is considered to be the field that is most in need of the question-answering system to help learners ask questions in natural language and get answers in short periods of time. The main problem in this context is how to understand…

Applied linguists and Communication scholars have mainly adopted different yet complementary approaches to research on language and health communication. Using discourse-analytic (DA) approaches such as conversation analysis and corpus analysis, applied linguists tend to focus on describing and explicating health messaging techniques in naturally…

Typical data science instruction uses generic datasets like survival rates on the Titanic, which may not be motivating for students. Will introducing real-life data science problems fill this motivational deficit? To analyze this question, we contrasted learning with generic datasets and artificial problems (Phase 1) with a community-sourced…

A negative consequence of the proliferation of social media is the increase in online abuse. Bullying, once restricted to the playground, has found a new home on social media. Online social networks on their part have intensified efforts to tackle online abuse, but unfortunately, such is the scale of the problem that many young people are still…

How early do children produce multiword utterances? Do children's early utterances reflect abstract syntactic knowledge or are they the result of data-driven learning? We examine this issue through corpus analysis, computational modeling, and adult simulation experiments. Chapter 1 investigates when children start producing multiword utterances;…

Linguistic category learning has been shown to be highly sensitive to linear order, and depending on the task, differentially sensitive to the information provided by preceding category markers ("premarkers," e.g., gendered articles) or succeeding category markers ("postmarkers," e.g., gendered suffixes). Given that numerous…

Idioms have been traditionally described as fixed expressions, highly restricted in their realization. Corpus and experimental studies, however, have shown that they are more variable than previously thought. The issue of idiom syntax has received a renewed interest, since it also addresses the problem of how idioms are mentally stored. Another…

St. Lawrence Island Yupik is an endangered language of the Bering Strait region. In this paper, we describe our work on Yupik jointly leveraging computational morphology and linguistic fieldwork, outlining the multilayer virtuous cycle that we continue to refine in our work to document and build tools for the language. After developing a…

Detailed learning objectives foster an effective and equitable learning environment by clarifying what instructors expect students to learn, rather than requiring students to use prior knowledge to infer these expectations. When questions are labeled with relevant learning goals, students understand which skills are tested by those questions.…

The release of ChatGPT marked the beginning of a new era of AI-assisted plagiarism that disrupts traditional assessment practices in ESL composition. In the face of this challenge, educators are left with little guidance in controlling AI-assisted plagiarism, especially when conventional methods fail to detect AI-generated texts. One approach to…

Why do infants learn some words earlier than others? Many theories of early word learning focus on explaining how infants map labels onto concrete objects. However, words that are more abstract than object nouns, such as "uh-oh," "hi," "more," "up," and "all-gone," are typically among the first to…