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In spite of the growing interest in using corpora in language teaching and learning, applying computers and software (especially corpora software) is still new in second language teaching and learning. In addition, employing a learner corpus-based perspective in teaching metadiscourse features in International English Language Testing System (IELTS) writing tasks is not reported to the best knowledge of the researchers. Understanding and spotting this gap, the purpose of this paper is to utilize a learner corpus-based approach in teaching metadiscourse features and investigate its possible impacts on IELTS writing performance of the Iranian second language learners. Therefore, this study addressed the following research questions and hypotheses.

The current research utilized a quasi-experimental research design. In addition, this research used a learner corpus-based methodology. The corpus-based methodology was exploited to enable the researchers to have access to a large body of authentic language materials. In other words, a corpus-based methodology was used due to the fact that it made it possible for the researchers to elicit the metadiscourse features from a large number of authentic writing materials and to employ them during the treatment process with authentic examples.

The findings showed that there was a positive correlation between teaching metadiscourse features and writing performance of IELTS learners; in that, teaching metadiscourse features could soar the writing performance of the subjects. In addition, interactional metadiscourse features had more impact than interactive metadiscourse features on writing performance.

The results of this research can have useful implications for second language teachers and learners as well as researchers in learner corpus as they can learn the creation and application of learner corpora in second language teaching and learning.

This paper is value in that it uses corpus software and methodology in teaching metadiscourse features in writing section of IELTS test.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an overall review of grammar checking and relation extraction (RE) literature, their techniques and the open challenges associated with them; and, finally, suggest future directions.

The review on grammar checking and RE was carried out using the following protocol: we prepared research questions, planed for searching strategy, addressed paper selection criteria to distinguish relevant works, extracted data from these works, and finally, analyzed and synthesized the data.

The output of error detection models could be used for creating a profile of a certain writer. Such profiles can be used for author identification, native language identification or even the level of education, to name a few. The automatic extraction of relations could be used to build or complete electronic lexical thesauri and knowledge bases.

Grammar checking is the process of detecting and sometimes correcting erroneous words in the text, while RE is the process of detecting and categorizing predefined relationships between entities or words that were identified in the text. The authors found that the most obvious challenge is the lack of data sets, especially for low-resource languages. Also, the lack of unified evaluation methods hinders the ability to compare results.

This study attempts to evaluate the effect of the corpus-based inductive teaching approach with multiple academic corpora (PICA, CAEC and Oxford Corpus of Academic English) and conventional deductive teaching approach (i.e., multiple-choice items, filling the gap, matching and underlining) on learning academic collocations by Iranian advanced EFL learners (students learning English as a foreign language).

This is a quasi-experimental, quantitative and qualitative study.

The result showed the experimental group outperformed significantly compared with the control group. The experimental group also shared their perception of the advantages and disadvantages of the corpus-assisted language teaching approach.

Despite growing progress in language pedagogy, methodologies and language curriculum design, there are still many teachers who experience poor performance in their students' vocabulary, whether in comprehension or production. In Iran, for example, even though mandatory English education begins at the age of 13, which is junior and senior high school, students still have serious problems in language production and comprehension when they reach university levels.

Using a newly compiled corpus module consisting of utterances from Asian learners during L2 English interviews, this study examined how Asian EFL learners' L1s (Chinese, Indonesian, Japanese, Korean, Taiwanese and Thai), their L2 proficiency levels (A2, B1 low, B1 upper and B2+) and speech task types (picture descriptions, roleplays and QA-based conversations) affected four aspects of vocabulary usage (number of tokens, standardized type/token ratio, mean word length and mean sentence length).

Four aspects concern speech fluency, lexical richness, lexical complexity and structural complexity, respectively.

Subsequent corpus-based quantitative data analyses revealed that (1) learner/native speaker differences existed during the conversation and roleplay tasks in terms of the number of tokens, type/token ratio and sentence length; (2) an L1 group effect existed in all three task types in terms of the number of tokens and sentence length; (3) an L2 proficiency effect existed in all three task types in terms of the number of tokens, type-token ratio and sentence length; and (4) the usage of high-frequency vocabulary was influenced more strongly by the task type and it was classified into four types: Type A vocabulary for grammar control, Type B vocabulary for speech maintenance, Type C vocabulary for negotiation and persuasion and Type D vocabulary for novice learners.

These findings provide clues for better understanding L2 English vocabulary usage among Asian learners during speech.

In an effort to bridge the gap between applying translation corpora, specialized terminology teaching and translation performance of undergraduate students, the purpose of this paper is to investigate the possible impacts of teaching specialized terminology of law as a specific area of inquiry on translation performance of Iranian undergraduate translation student (English–Persian language pairs). The null hypothesis of this study is that using specialized terminology does not have statistically significant impacts on the translation performance of the translation students.

The design of this research was experimental in that there was pretest, treatment, posttest and random sampling. In other words, this research was pre-experimental one-group pretest-posttest design. This design was used in this research as the number of subjects who participated in the research was limited. Apart from being experimental, this research enjoyed a corpus-based perspective. As Mcenery and Hardie (2012) claim, corpus-based research uses the “corpus data in order to explore a theory or hypothesis, typically one established in the current literature, in order to validate it, refute it or refine it” (p. 6). Table I shows the design of this research.

The results of this research indicated that on the whole, the posttest results had statistically significant differences with that of the pretest. In this regard, the quality of students’ translation enhanced after using the specialized terminology in the form of three types of corpora. Indeed, there was a general trend in the improved quality of the novice translators in translating specialized and subject-field terminologies in an English–Persian context.

This paper is original in that it probes into one of the less researched areas of Translation Studies Research and employs corpora methodology.

In this chapter, we explore uses of corpus linguistics within higher education research. Corpus linguistic approaches enable examination of large bodies of language data based on computing power. These bodies of data, or corpora, facilitate investigation of the meaning of words in context. The semiautomated nature of such investigation helps researchers to identify and interpret language patterns that might otherwise be inaccessible through manual analysis. We illustrate potential uses of corpus linguistic approaches through four short case studies by higher education researchers, spanning educational contexts, disciplines and genres. These case studies are underpinned by discussion of the development of corpus linguistics as a field of investigation, including existing open corpora and corpus analysis tools. We give a flavour of how corpus linguistic techniques, in isolation or as part of a wider research approach, can be particularly helpful to higher education researchers who wish to investigate language data and its context.

This paper aims to explore the beliefs and experiences of a group of teachers endeavouring to enhance their students’ learning of English while adapting to a multicultural classroom reality.

The paper is based on the results of a case study involving a number of semi-structured interviews.

The paper illustrates how the teachers and their learners adopted a number of strategies to make the most of the opportunities of learning English within a multilingual context.

This paper underscores the role that language-in-education policies can play in enhancing the teaching and learning of English in a multicultural classroom.

The purpose of this study is to apply a corpus-assisted analysis of keywords and their collocations in the US presidential discourse from Clinton to Trump to discover the meanings of these words and the collocates they have. Keywords are salient words in a corpus whose frequency is unusually high (positive keywords) or low (negative keywords) in comparison with a reference corpus. Collocation is the co-occurrence of words.

To achieve this purpose, the investigation of keywords and collocations is generated by AntConc, a corpus processing software.

This analysis leads to shed light on the similarities and/or differences amongst the past four American presidents concerning their key topics. Keyword analysis through keyness makes it evident that Clinton and Obama, being Democrats, demonstrate a clear tendency to improve Americans’ life inside their social sphere. Obama surpasses Clinton as regard foreign affairs. Clinton and Obama’s infrequent subjects have to do with terrorism and immigration. This complies with their condensed focus on social and economic improvements. Bush, a republican, concentrates only on external issues. This is proven by his keywords signifying war against terrorism. Bush’s negative use of words marking cooperative actions conforms to his positive use of words indicating external war. Trump’s positive keywords are about exaggerated descriptions without a defined target. He also shows an unusual frequency in referring to his name and position. His words used with negative keyness refer to reforming programs and external issues. Collocations around each top content keyword clarify the word and harmonize with the presidential orientation negotiated by the keywords.

Limitations have to do with the issue of the accurate representation of the samples.

This research is original in its methodology of applying corpus linguistics tools in the analysis of presidential discourses.

This paper aims to evaluate Web-based applications for teaching critical media literacy. It proposes modeling for criteria to evaluate Web-based applications for critical media literacy learning. The study aims to critically analyze the applications based on their potential for critical media literacy learning (CMLL), learner compatibility, authenticity, beneficial impact, practicability, engagement and support.

The paper was addressed by the walkthrough method, which provides underpinning analysis of the applications combined with content analysis to gain further deeper insight into users’ applications and application appropriation to accommodate critical media literacy instructions. The applications are organized according to their utilization in each sort of CMLL, namely, media understanding and analysis, and media production.

The paper describes how to select appropriate applications for critical media literacy instruction. It suggests a list of applications that can help teachers integrate critical media literacy into their classroom instruction, as well as the results of each application’s evaluation. In summary, the results indicated the importance of meticulous selection criteria and evaluations of applications used for critical media literacy integration in teaching.

Because technology and applications are constantly evolving, ongoing research in this area is always required. Furthermore, researchers are encouraged to test the proposed hypotheses further.

The paper discusses the implications for technology selection in teaching, the development of selection criteria and managing the balance between technological advancement and teaching. In a nutshell, this paper practically contribute to shed light on the framework for CMLL application selection and adoption.

The paper provides comprehensive guidance for teachers on how to select applications for critical media literacy integration teaching, as well as lists of application evaluations that they can easily use.

This paper fills a gap in the literature by investigating how digital media and technologies can be used in the classroom and how they are chosen based on the needs of teachers and students.

This paper aims to highlight contrasts between the writing of young people in the UAE and Japan. For comparison, anthologies of 50-word short stories written in English, resulting from the Extremely Short Story Competition (ESSC) in each country are examined. These two ESSC anthologies were created under similar conditions in 2006. Analysis of the most frequently-appearing topics in each ESSC anthology provides insights into the daily life, general mindsets, behavior, preferences, values and culture of these two groups. These data help us to understand the everyday life and social context of young people in the UAE and Japan. Thematic analysis shows that youth in both countries are often preoccupied with seeking identity, and regard friends to be important. Both groups of young people also appear to appreciate the beauty of nature and feel affection towards living creatures. An identifying characteristic of Emirati youth is that they talk about death more often than do the Japanese writers; in addition, the ESSC anthologies indicate UAE society is remarkably family-oriented, with life being firmly connected to Islam and God. In contrast, Japanese youth show they are keen to engage in various hobbies and also like to express their romantic feelings and thankfulness for their environment. The ESSC was originally designed to develop students’ creative writing in English. This study explains that corpora generated by the ESSC may be used to illuminate the lives and societies of students living in disparate countries, with implications for planning and delivering locally appropriate education.