Recent years have witnessed increasing attention to L2 creative writing not only in language classrooms but also in various disciplinary settings, in this case, an English scriptwriting module for Chinese university students doing Communication Studies. This text-based L2 writing study investigates the stylistic characteristics emerging from 54 pieces of film scripts written in English submitted by the students upon completion of the module. The above investigation is done through comparison of the student scripts to 16 selected professional English film scripts representing different genres. The particular pedagogical approaches for this scriptwriting module are briefly explained. Nevertheless, the study is corpus-driven. It utilises Keyword analysis (Scott, 2015) and Key Semantic Domain analysis (Rayson, 2008) to locate noticeable ideological and discoursal features of the student scripts particularly concerning: the attempts at dramatic tension; effort at visual details; and deviation from conventions of scriptwriting in English. Two focal students were selected to see the trajectories of changes regarding individual writers’ textual features throughout the workshops to the final film script. The above is facilitated by Cluster analysis which reveals ‘local textual functions’ (Mahlberg, 2007). In addition, qualitative interpretation of the focal students’ writing and their reflective comments was also performed. The results hold pedagogical implications particularly regarding: the modelling of certain stylistic aspects of English scriptwriting; and the design of more targeted future ESL/EFL scriptwriting course in China.

The purpose of this presentation is to examine the use of connectors in English writing of Korean undergraduate students. Compared with intermediate or advanced level English writers in EFL contexts, not much has been explored in what beginning EFL writers tend to do in their writing. In this study, the authors aim to find out what types of connectors are most widely used (i.e., additive, causal/ resultative and sequential) by the beginning Korean writers of English and whether or not they are influenced by their L1 use. The participants will be 40 sophomores who are taking the pre-intermediate English writing course during the spring semester of 2016. As for the instruments, the questionnaire survey and the pre- and the post-tests on the use of the connectives by the students will be conducted. The participants are going to write 5 different kinds of paragraphs (i.e., definition, process, description, opinion, and narration) consisting of approximately 120 words in length respectively during the 15-week semester. Because the kinds of writing the beginning participants will produce are paragraphs not essays, it is expected that the use of connectors will be somewhat limited to certain kinds. The students’ works will be analyzed in terms of the frequency of the connective use using AntCon. The results will shed light on pedagogical implications and suggestions for how to teach beginning writers the use of connectors more effectively.

The current study explores the characteristics of frequently-used multi-word expressions (i.e., lexical bundles) in spoken and written Russian. Lexical bundles are retrieved from a one million word Russian National Corpus (RNC) sample. The lexical bundles in spoken and written sub-corpora of the RNC are analyzed quantitatively regarding discourse functions of reference expressions, stance bundles, and discourse organizers. The analysis confirms that the spoken and written Russian corpora exhibit significantly different lexical bundle distribution patterns: there are more referential expressions in written Russian; while there are more stance bundles in spoken Russian. The study also suggests future study calling more in-depth investigation for developing language-specific discourse functions.

SOLAS Convention, as the most important international maritime treaty regulating ship safety, sets up the minimum safety levels for construction, equipment and operation. Due to the development of technology, safety understanding and management, all three safety standards are undergoing revision over time. This paper aims to explore and explain the trend of these changing standards by employing a keyword analysis on SOLAS Convention based on the idea that keywords are indicative of changes in writing style, which can ultimately be linked back to social change. To achieve this objective, five consolidated versions of SOLAS Convention covering the period from 1974 to 2015 were targeted to collect data. Keywords of three safety standards in each version were extracted respectively using WordSmith tools. For discovering the degree of diachronic changes in each safety standard, statistical measures like frequency count and type-token ratio were adopted to compare the lexical distribution and density of each keyword list. The findings suggest that all three safety standards have been revised over time and the changes vary in terms of degree and content. This study is believed to be useful for understanding the safety concerns in maritime industry and to contribute to the literature in the diachronic research conducted by keyword-based approach.

Vocabulary is one of the crucial factors for students’ academic comprehension (Anderson, 2008; Grabe, 2009; Laufer, 1992; Nation, 2001; Qian, 2002). Thus, academic vocabulary lists have been created for research and materials of English as a foreign language (EFL) and English for specific purpose (ESP). Although the academic vocabulary lists have been widely used, few studies have probed into the reliability of the lists. Miller and Biber (2015) pointed out this gap and suggested that the reliability of word lists would be investigated by simply dividing a corpus into random smaller sub-corpora. A thirty-million-word corpus was created with 900 academic articles across nine disciplines of humanity, social sciences and sciences. Then the corpus was divided into two sub-corpora and sixteen criteria sets of register frequency, range, discipline measurement and dispersion were applied to each sub-corpus for vocabulary list creation. The replicability of the vocabulary lists was examined to find a set of criteria extracting the most reliable vocabulary list. The results showed that the combination of the lenient register frequency and discipline measurement, and the strict dispersion was the most desirable condition to create a reliable academic vocabulary list. This result was similar to Gardner and Davies (2012)’ methodology to create their vocabulary list called Academic Vocabulary List, but does not show the impact of range on the replicability of an academic vocabulary list. The implications and limitations were also addressed.

Compared to conversations and other written genres, written academic prose favours heavy nominal groups, in which the head noun is typically accompanied by premodifiers such as adjectives or nouns, and/or by postmodifiers such as prepositional phrases (Parkinson & Musgrave, 2014). In particular, a Noun Complement structure, a relatively neglected means of stance expression has been underresearched in the study of stance and the way writers to convey an attitude to their compositions and readers. The current study examines this structure as a nominal stance construction related to students’ advanced academic literacy (Jiang, 2015). By means of corpus-based contrastive analysis, this study compares the uses of this stance construction in problem-solution essays of 70 Korean university students (L2) with those of English native students (L1) of similar age (20s) and educational level (undergraduate students). The findings observe that EFL students employ fewer examples of nominal stance constructions compared to native English ones and that they showed the use of limited types of this construction. It might be caused by lack of the EFL learners’ L1 proficiency and the inherent difficulty of noun phrase constructions in the acquisition of syntactic structures. This research can also make suggestions for EAP (English for Academic Purposes) writings and instructions.

Adopting an audience-centred approach in business writing is considered fundamental to successful business communication and is widely advocated by leading textbooks of the field targeted at both university students and professionals. Thill and Bovee (2013) explain this approach embraces a ‘you’ attitude whereby the emphasis of the message is placed on the reader rather than the writer. Although a large pool of literature on writer-reader interaction has developed under concepts such as metadiscourse, appraisal, stance, and evaluation; these generally place a focus on writer as opposed to reader-orientated aspects of language. Moreover, the attention from linguists have overwhelmingly been directed towards academic writing. This study uses corpus analysis to explore features of audience involvement in the letter to shareholders of Chinese and U.S. companies. Utilising the engagement framework (Hyland, 2005), I examine how corporate leaders attempt to explicitly recognise the presence of their readers and construct relationships with this complex and diverse set of stakeholders. The results reveal engagement features are an integral element of both Chinese and U.S letter to shareholders; however the density was noticeably lower in the Chinese sample. While this does not necessarily render the Chinese discourse less audience-centred, it does represent a cultural divergence that has implications for the learning and teaching of business communication and ESP. Currently, U.S.-centric textbooks and guides dominate but with China’s prominent commercial position entrenched there is a need to develop a greater understanding of Chinese business communication styles so that students and professionals globally can benefit from such insights.

English dictionaries usually provides only the senses of each word without explicitly showing the subtle nuances of the synonymous words. The great challenge in English language teaching is to distinguish the similarities and differences of near synonyms for EFL learners so that they will be able to understand and use the words correctly. This paper is intended to explore comprehensively the similarities and differences in meaning and usage of two near-synonyms, entire and whole through Wmatrix. This paper consists of 4 steps; administrating questionnaire to college students, analyzing BNC and COHA, applying the dictionary definitions to corpus data, and analyzing and sorting 200 noun collocates (MI>3) using Wmatrix web tool. The findings show that there are clear differences between two near-synonyms and that utilizing the semantic categories through Wmatrix can contribute to distinguishing and learning near-synonyms.

In this paper, we present anew approach to automatic alignment of multi-word terms based on contextual information. With the English-Chinese Parallel Corpus of Maritime Conventions (ECPCMC) as a basis, we first extract the candidate terms from the corpus of each language separately using a hybrid approach which combines a list of user-adjustable morphosyntactic patterns and a term weighting measure. Then the extracted terms are aligned based on the contextual information with the assumption that translation equivalents are often used in similar contexts. For this purpose, we extract the collocates of each candidate term in either side of the languages in the corpus and comparethem for the degree of similarity at the semantic attribute level. Since the collocation extraction is restricted to the concordance lines containing the candidate term, this method not only overcomes the limitations of conventional statistical methods requiring large corpora to be effective but also improves the accuracy of automatic alignment. Experiments based on a section of ECPCMC, which is annotated with terms manually, indicate that the proposed approach is promising, giving an encouraging 85.3% precision and 60.6% recall on average.

Research in English for Academic Purposes has often analyzedlearner language discourse to provide evidence on learner language development (Biber & Gray, 2013; Staples, Egbert, Biber, & McClair, 2013). From the lexical perspective of a second language, previous analyses of learner discourse have focused more on vocabulary frequency measures; however, single word based analyses have been found to be insufficient in capturing learner language development (Read & Nation, 2006). Therefore, together with the measure of single word distributions, analysis of lexical bundles is also called for(Read & Nation, 2006). This study explored the use of lexicon and lexical bundles in written performances across three proficiency levels in an English Placement Test (EPT) corpus (N = 1,388) from a large Midwestern university in the US. The results showed that higher proficiency learners used a higher number of types and tokens and word families, a higher percentage of the second most frequent 1,000 words of English (K2 tokens) and Academic Word List (AWL) tokens, and a higher level of type-token ratio and lexical density than lower proficiency learners. Regarding the use of lexical bundles, although lexical bundles were used more often by lower level learners, most of those bundles were prompt dependent. Prepositional phrase-based lexical bundles with a discourse function were common in higher level responses while noun phrase-based and verb phrase-based bundles with referential and stance functions were frequent in lower level responses. This study has implications for teaching practice, second language acquisition research on learner language development, and second language writing assessment.