Anthony Becker

Colorado State University | CSU · English

In their 2019 article published in TESOL Quarterly, Crawford, McDonough, and Brun-Mercer sought to identify linguistic markers of collaboration in second language (L2) peer interaction. Implementing a key feature analysis (Biber and Egbert 2018), the authors focused on the co-occurrence of 58 lexico-grammatical features identified in paired oral di...

This volume showcases some of the latest research on academic writing by leading and up-and-coming corpus linguists. The studies included in the volume are based on a wide range of corpora spanning first and second language academic writing at different levels of writing expertise, containing texts from a variety of academic disciplines (and sub-di...

The present study compared 4-word lexical bundles found in a general engineering corpus (2,030,000 words) with those found in a corpus of texts collected from a Pathway engineering course for ESL (English as a Second Language) students (356,000 words) and a corpus of pedagogical materials used to teach advanced ESL students at an intensive English...

While previous research has identified numerous factors that contribute to item difficulty, studies involving large-scale reading tests have provided mixed results. This study examined five selected-response item types used to measure reading comprehension in the Pearson Test of English Academic: a) multiple-choice (choose one answer), b) multiple-...

Previous L2 studies (Liao & Fukuya, 2004; Laufer & Eliasson, 1993; Hulstijn & Marchena, 1989; Dagut & Laufer, 1985) have failed to consider the learning context and/or task type as possible explanations for avoidance of English phrasal verbs. This study overcomes these shortcomings in its investigation of phrasal verb usage by L2 learners of Englis...

In second language (L2) writing, rating scales are often used to measure a variety of discourse and linguistic features. When developing scales, the scoring criteria need to provide a clear and credible basis for scoring judgments, as well as for differentiating levels of writing performance (Weigle, 2002). Often times, the criteria used to evaluat...

With an increasing need for teaching discipline-specific language to second language (L2) learners, language instructors are tasked with a challenging objective to target the vocabulary that is necessary for students to understand and produce discipline-specific discourse. To meet this objective, language corpora and corpus software have been used...

Intensive English programs (IEPs) strive to make certain that international students have sufficient levels of speaking ability, which is typically assessed through a combination of different tasks. One drawback of including multiple tasks is that the development, administration, and scoring might not be practical. Therefore, it is important to inv...

This study was conducted at a large technical university in Russia, which offers English language courses to students majoring in nine different degree programs. Each degree program develops and delivers its own English language curriculum. While all degree programs followed the same curriculum development model to design language courses, each pro...

Models of academic listening ability indicate that two skills are crucial, identifying factual information and making appropriate inferences (e.g., Aryadoust, Goh, & Kim, 2012; Rost, 2011). However, designing tasks that target students' ability to make inferences can be challenging. This challenge is particularly important for academic English prog...

Rubrics are valued for their potential to clarify teachers’ expectations, identify strengths and weaknesses, and direct students toward self-evaluation (Panadero & Jonsson, 2013). While many instructors use rubrics to assess second language writing, students are rarely involved in their development and application. This can leave students without k...