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摘要：This article outlines the current state of and recent developments in the use of corpora for language assessment and considers future directions with a special focus on computational methodology. Because corpora began to make inroads into language assessment in the 1990s, test developers have increasingly used them as a reference resource to become well versed in terms of the linguistic characteristics of expert and novice speakers' usage and identify the test construct. In regard to developing and validating language tests, large representative corpora, learner corpora, and specialized corpora have been actively used, as these corpora have made it possible to systematically compare the linguistic features associated with expert users with those found in learner language. Recent advances in computational approaches to assessment can facilitate this comparison to a great extent using technologies in automated essay scoring and learner language analysis. As an emerging area in the field of language assessment, corpus-based research should extend to less explored areas including compilation and longitudinal analysis of developmental corpora, fine-grained microanalysis of learner's development, and assessment attuned to individual learners who use different linguistic varieties. Adapted from the source document

摘要：Most previous studies of epistemic modality in legal settings discuss epistemic modality as performing an interpersonal engagement or a positioning function. Via a probability test, the present corpus-driven study examined the way in which epistemic modality is employed in civil judgments to construct legal facts and to indicate legal probability. The study compared how different types of epistemic modality are used in judicial practice in different jurisdictions, namely Hong Kong, which is a common law jurisdiction, and Scotland, which is a mixed jurisdiction. Specifically, we examined the variation in the orientation of epistemic modality, that is, whether implicit or explicit and whether subjective or objective, and the variation in the value of epistemic modality, that is, high, median, or low. The findings suggest that both subjective epistemic modality and objective epistemic modality are employed in adjudication where the judges decide the degree of probability, and the value distribution of epistemic modality indicates that the same standard, that is, the balance of probability, is adopted in Hong Kong and Scotland. We propose an integrated framework of principle of proof and discuss the continuum of probability in law. Based on the conclusions, we propose pedagogical implications for English for Legal Purposes. [Copyright The American University; published by Elsevier Ltd.]

摘要：This study investigated (a) the lexical demands of academic spoken English and (b) the coverage of the Academic Word List (AWL) in academic spoken English. The researchers analyzed the vocabulary in 160 lectures and 39 seminars from four disciplinary sub-corpora of the British Academic Spoken English (BASE) corpus: Arts and Humanities, Life and Medical Sciences, Physical Sciences and Social Sciences. The results showed that knowledge of the most frequent 4,000 word families plus proper nouns and marginal words provided 96.05% coverage, and knowledge of the most frequent 8,000 word families plus proper nouns and marginal words provided 98.00% coverage of academic spoken English. The vocabulary size necessary to reach 95% coverage of each sub-corpus ranged from 3,000 to 5,000 word families plus proper nouns and marginal words and 5,000 to 13,000 word families plus proper nouns and marginal words to reach 98% coverage. The AWL accounted for 4.41% coverage of academic spoken English. Its coverage in each sub-corpus ranged from 3.82% to 5.21%. With the help of the AWL, learners with knowledge of proper nouns and marginal words will need a vocabulary of 3,000 and 8,000 word families to reach 95% and 98% coverage of academic spoken English, respectively. [Copyright The American University; published by Elsevier Ltd.]

摘要：The purpose of this research was twofold: to examine the vocabulary demands of English-medium engineering textbooks and to create an Engineering English Word List (EEWL) to cover EFL students' lexical shortage. The researcher compiled a corpus containing 4.57 million running words of 100 college textbooks across 20 engineering subject areas from e-book databases as the source of analysis. The results demonstrate that knowing the most frequent 5000 word families plus proper nouns, apparent compounds and abbreviations would command 95% lexical coverage of an engineering textbook to ensure adequate comprehension. Civil engineering and mechanical engineering, involving 3500 word families necessary for minimally acceptable comprehension, were the least lexically demanding, while marine engineering and biochemical engineering were the most demanding in lexis, stretching to a threshold of 8500 word families. Beyond the first 2000 words, 729 of the most frequently-occurring word families in the corpus were ultimately chosen, and these covered 14.3% of the total words in the engineering textbooks. The present EEWL may provide a window to the engineering register for matriculating engineering students and may be helpful for English for science and technology teachers when preparing Engineering English teaching materials for reading and vocabulary development. [Copyright The American University; published by Elsevier Ltd.]

摘要：Usage-based theories of language learning suggest that native speakers of a language are acutely aware of formulaic language due in large part to frequency effects. Corpora and data-driven learning can offer useful insights into frequent patterns of naturally occurring language to second/foreign language learners who, unlike native speakers, are not privy to a lifetime of input and fine-tuning. Recently, the use of the web in combination with the Google search engine as an accessible corpus and concordancer has received much attention. This article describes an experiment which tests the hypothesis that native speakers of English perceive learner-generated phrases to be more natural after learners have searched the phrases on Google and modified them in light of the frequency of search results. The findings indicate that native speakers perceive phrases that generated more results in Google searches to be more natural.

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摘要：Each of us as language learners had different language experiences, yet somehow we have converged upon broadly the same language system. From diverse, often noisy samples, we have attained similar linguistic competence. How so? What mechanisms channel language acquisition? Could our linguistic commonalities possibly have converged from our shared psychology of learning as applied to the evidence of similar-enough language experience? This article outlines a research program to investigate whether there are sufficient constraints in the dynamics of language to promote robust induction by means of statistical learning over limited samples. It illustrates the approach with regard to English verbs, their grammatical form, semantics, and Zipfian patterns of usage. It explores the emergence of structure from experience using methods from cognitive linguistics, corpus linguistics, learning theory, complex systems, and network science.

摘要：This study explores adolescents' accounts of self-harm with a view to elucidate the implications for health care practitioners seeking to administer care to teenagers in English. Drawing on a corpus of 1.6 million words from messages posted on a UK-hosted adolescent health Web site, analysis began by identifying a range of keywords relating to self-harm. The subsequent contextual examination of these keywords afforded a close description of the contributors' experiences of self-harm and the factors that resulted in their self-injurious behaviours. A recurring theme was that of the habitual nature of self-harm, with the act being represented as a form of addiction over which they had little control. Self-harmers construct the phenomenon as particularly powerful, and the act is formulated as the only effective means of relief from emotional turmoil. If we are to increase parents and health professionals' ability to respond to self-injury in the medium of English, close linguistic attention to individuals' accounts of self-harm is valuable. Online health resources are also valuable means of eliciting concerns from distressed adolescents who are often reluctant to seek support from professionals face-to-face. Adapted from the source document

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摘要：This paper illustrates how a freely available online corpus has been exploited in a module on teaching business letters covering the following four speech acts (functions) commonly found in business letters: invitations, requests, complaints and refusals. It is proposed that different strategies are required for teaching potentially non-face-threatening (invitations, requests) and face-threatening (complaints, refusals) speech acts. The hands-on pedagogic activities follow the 'guided inductive approach' advocated by Johansson (2009) and draw on practices and strategies covered in the literature on using corpora in language learning and teaching, viz. the need for 'pedagogic mediation', and the 'noticing' hypothesis from second language acquisition studies. Adapted from the source document

摘要：The authors present a model of lexical proficiency based on lexical indices related to vocabulary size, depth of lexical knowledge, and accessibility to core lexical items. The lexical indices used in this study come from the computational tool Coh-Metrix and include word length scores, lexical diversity values, word frequency counts, hypernymy values, polysemy values, semantic co-referentiality, word meaningfulness, word concreteness, word imagability, and word familiarity. Human raters evaluated a corpus of 240 written texts using a standardized rubric of lexical proficiency. To ensure a variety of text levels, the corpus comprised 60 texts each from beginning, intermediate, and advanced second language (L2) adult English learners. The L2 texts were collected longitudinally from 10 English learners. In addition, 60 texts from native English speakers were collected. The holistic scores from the trained human raters were then correlated to a variety of lexical indices. The researchers found that lexical diversity, word hypernymy values and content word frequency explain 44% of the variance of the human evaluations of lexical proficiency in the examined writing samples. The findings represent an important step in the development of a model of lexical proficiency that incorporates both vocabulary size and depth of lexical knowledge features. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications, Ltd., copyright holder.]

摘要：This review covers recent applied linguistic research in Finland and Sweden during the years 2006-2011, with particular emphasis on foreign language learning and teaching. Its primary aim is to inform the international research community on the type of research that is going on in these countries. Special attention is given to topics which have attracted a lot of interest in the area: language immersion schools and CLIL, cross-linguistic influence, corpus linguistics (English as a lingua franca) and language use in multilingual urban settings. Adapted from the source document

摘要：Several projects that are in progress at the Research Centre for Language Education and Acquisition in Multilingual Societies (RCLEAMS), one of four Institute-level Research Centres at the Hong Kong Institute of Education, are highlighted. These include projects in the following fields: (1) the Asian Corpus of English (ACE);(2) trilingualism and trilingual education in minority regions of China; (3) linguistic and cultural ecology; (4) using the local/regional language as the language of internationalization (Cantonese and Putonghua in Hong Kong); (5) perceptions of English language suitability and processes of language assessment recruitment in Filipino call centres; (6) effects of language aptitude and personality on linguistic performance in English as a second language in two Chinese populations; (7) boundary-crossing teacher trainees; (8) vocabulary development among learners of English in a Hong Kong primary school; and (8) the Multilingual project: policy and implementation. Adapted from the source document

摘要：This paper presents a comprehensive overview of lexicogrammatical devices which highlight important or relevant points in lectures. Despite the established usefulness of discourse organizational cues for lecture comprehension and note-taking, very little is known about the marking of relevance in this genre. The current overview of lexicogrammatical relevance markers combines a qualitative and quantitative investigation of 160 lectures from the British Academic Spoken English (BASE) corpus. These markers could mostly be classified according to their main element into adjective, noun, verb and adverb patterns. Verb patterns were the most common, followed by noun patterns. The verb pattern V clause (e.g., remember slavery had already been legally abolished) and the noun pattern MN v-link (e.g., the point is) are the predominant types of relevance markers. The discrepancy between the prevalent markers and what may be thought of as prototypical or included in EAP textbooks as relevance markers also demonstrates the need for corpus linguistic research. Implications for EAP course design, teaching English for lecturing purposes, and educational research are discussed. [Copyright The American University; published by Elsevier Ltd.]

摘要：This article examines the stance options used by writers responding to a data description task in the discipline of Statistics. Based on a small learner corpus, it uses inductive qualitative content analysis to explore both the content propositions that students included in their writing, and the ways in which they expressed evaluative stance vis-a-vis such propositions. In the light of an interview with a specialist informant, the article discusses the appropriacy of the content choices and stance options taken by students. It then discusses the potential exploitation of the learner corpus for pedagogic purposes. [Copyright The American University; published by Elsevier Ltd.]