A growing body of research has indicated that a lexical bundle approach is effective in capturing the phraseological variation in texts across registers and writing proficiency levels. However, research to date has rarely employed such an approach to analyze small-scale learner writing produced in classroom-based L2 research. In response to Reppen’s (2016) call for promoting the connection between corpus linguistics and language teaching, this study employed a lexical bundle approach to examine the phraseological variation in learners’ co-constructed texts produced in collaborative writing tasks implemented in two task conditions (L1 versus L2 interaction) in EFL classrooms. The results indicated that a lexical bundle approach was able to identify similarities and nuanced differences in the use of formulaic linguistic patterns in a small collection of learner writing produced in the two task conditions. Specifically, learners in the L2 interaction task condition employed more verb phrase based formulaic expressions in their collaborative texts than those in the L1 interaction condition, which may have rendered their texts less academic-like. In addition, learners relied more on longer strings of words (5-word lexical bundles) to express obligation and call for actions in the L2 interaction condition. Methodological and pedagogical implications were discussed.

Little published research studies examined the relationship between cohesion and writing quality of L2 children’s narrative texts using scientific tools such as Automatic Analysis of Text Cohesion (TAACO) and Coh-Metrix. To fill the research gap, this study investigates the development of cohesive devices and writing quality of 59 ESL grade four students over one semester using TAACO and Coh-Metrix. The corpus for the current study contained 177 narrative texts. Results show that L2 grade four children’s use of cohesive devices and the quality of writing has improved over one semester. Low proficiency group of students tends to use more cohesive devices than high proficiency group. Multi-dimensional assessment of writing quality shows that referential cohesive devices would be positive predictors of complexity by length and subordination. The study has contributed new knowledge in the field of second language writing in terms of research, theory, and pedagogy.

This article explores the usage patterns of an open personal construction in Finnish, namely the so-called zero-person construction in naturally occurring conversational discourse, and provides a bottom-up model of these patterns. The aims of this article are twofold. Firstly, the article attempts to shed more light on the functional groupings of zero-person constructions in conversational discourse. Secondly, it tests the suitability of Multiple Correspondence Analysis (MCA) in categorizing a linguistic construction on the basis of its semantico-grammatical and contextual features. Based on the MCA, three distinct groups of zero-person constructions are identified and examined in detail, namely the Narrative, Reactive and Evaluative zero-person constructions. At the macro-level, the article shows the advantages of a usage-based approach combining both quantitative and qualitative methods on the study of interaction and personal constructions. At the micro-level, it offers an example of the use of the MCA in examining a syntactic construction based on its semantico-grammatical and discourse features.

This study aims to explore diachronic changes of close kinship terms such as father, mother, uncle, aunt, son and daughter in North Korean English textbooks as to how the metaphorical extensions of these words occur. To this end, this paper uses North Korean English textbook corpora from 1991 to 2015 and AntConc, a corpus analysis tool employed for the investigation of these close kinship terms with their co-occurring lexical context. The findings are: Most frequent metaphor in the 1990s is the head of state as father and its people as sons and daughters. The metaphor of sons and daughters persists in the textbooks of 2000s, but not the head of state as father. Father stops with Kim, IlSung in its metaphor. In 2010s, father, sons and daughters metaphors have disappeared, though other metaphors remain in fatherland, motherland and mother tongue. The engineered metaphors such as father and sons/daughters by the state tend to be easily forgotten due to its forced nature of these expressions. This disappearance of metaphor shows a critical difference of metaphorical endurance between naturally occurring metaphors and artificially formulated metaphors.