Writing skill is one of the four language skills in learning English language in EFL setting. The role of self-esteem in learning second language as is one of the major important factors is very vital; because, success or failure of a learner depends mostly on the degree of ones' self-esteem. This research aimed at investigating the correlation between self-esteem and English writing achievemen...

In this study, the use of speech-like pragmatic markers in Iranian EFL students’ academic writing was investigated. Speech-like pragmatic markers, such as I think, well, I guess, actually, anyway, anyhow, etc. are linguistic components that are more specific to conversation than writing, and writers may wrongly include them in their academic writing. To examine the students’ use of speech-like ...

In this study, the use of speech-like pragmatic markers in Iranian EFL students’ academic writing was investigated. Speech-like pragmatic markers, such as I think, well, I guess, actually, anyway, anyhow, etc. are linguistic components that are more specific to conversation than writing, and writers may wrongly include them in their academic writing. To examine the students’ use of speech-like ...

In the development of corpus linguistics, the creation of corpora has had a critical role in corpus-based studies. The majority of created corpora have been associated with English and native languages, while other languages and types of corpora have received relatively less attention. Because an increasing number of corpora have been constructed, and each corpus is constructed for a definite p...

We begin by showing that the best publicly available, multiple-L1 learner corpus, the International Corpus of Learner English (Granger et al. 2009), has serious issues when used for the task of native language detection (NLD). The topic biases in the corpus are a confounding factor that result in crossvalidated performance that is misleading, for all the feature types which are traditionally us...

In learner corpora, as in any corpus, mark-up is an important issue. One aspect of learner corpora so far largely ignored, however, is the specific question of handwriting and in particular how to mark-up handwriting anomalies, especially with learners whose native language uses a different writing system. In this paper we pose some open questions about what aspects of a learner’s handwriting m...

Researchers working with learner corpora promise quantitative results that would be of greater practical value in areas such as CALL than those from small-scale and qualitative studies. However, learner corpus research has not yet had an impact on practices in teaching and assessment. Significant methodological issues need to be examined if results from learner corpus research are going to prov...

Many  elements  contribute  to  the  relative  difficulty  in  acquiring  specific  aspects  of  English  as  a foreign  language  (Goldschneider  &  DeKeyser,  2001).  Modal  auxiliary  verbs  (e.g.  could,  might), are  examples  of  a  structure  that  is  difficult  for  many  learners.  Not  only  are  they  particularly complex  semantically,  but  especially  in  the  Malaysian  context ...