Yu-Hua Chen

Coventry University | CU · School of Humanities

This paper adopts an automated frequency-driven approach to identify frequently-used word combinations (i.e., lexical bundles) in academic writing. Lexical bundles retrieved from one corpus of published academic texts and two corpora of student academic writing (one L1, the other L2), were investigated both quantitatively and qualitatively. Publish...

This article describes the development and evaluation of the Academic Collocation List (ACL), which was compiled from the written curricular component of the Pearson International Corpus of Academic English (PICAE) comprising over 25 million words. The development involved four stages: (1) computational analysis; (2) refinement of the data-driven l...

In this study, we investigated criterial discourse features in L2 writing through the use of recurrent word combinations, a.k.a. lexical bundles, taking a corpus-driven and expert-judged approach by examining L2 English data across various proficiency levels from L1 Chinese learners. Proficiency was determined by a robust rating procedure which is...

Recent research reports that ELT materials often rely on subjective judgement and made-up sentences for the selection and introduction of idiomatic expressions, rather than real-life language data (e.g. Koprowski, 2005; Liu, 2003). As a result, these materials tend to include low-frequency lexical items that are of little pedagogical value and some...

Reliable high-quality transcription and/or annotation (a.k.a. 'coding') is essential for research in a variety of areas in Humanities and Social Sciences which make use of qualitative data such as interviews, focus groups, classroom observations or any other audio/video recordings. A good tool can facilitate the work of transcription and annotation...

Pointing out that language policy negotiations in classroom discourse are an understudied kind of “language-related episode”, and proposing that Tim Ingold’s notion of “meshwork” dissolves a boundary that typically encloses their analysis, this paper examines how a rich and indicative example of student group interaction on a British university cam...

One of the possible explanations for the decline in IQ test results over the last few decades is the effect computerised digitisation has on our communicative behaviour. In what I call the digital discourse mode the content of what is said is not interpreted but dealt with as data, which are processed mechanically, resulting in a Yes/No, Right/Wron...

This chapter reports on the motivations, design, and challenges of building the Corpus of Chinese Academic Written and Spoken English (CAWSE), an open-access corpus of Chinese students’ English samples collected from a Sino-British university in China. To date, the corpus comprises over 1.5 million words in the subcorpus of written assessment, a su...

Reliable high-quality transcription and/or annotation (a.k.a. 'coding') is essential for research in a variety of areas in Humanities and Social Sciences which make use of qualitative data such as interviews, focus groups, classroom observations or any other audio/video recordings. A good tool can facilitate the work of transcription and annotation...

This project explores the potential for multi-modal learning in the use of smartphones, tablets and notebook computers in lectures and seminars at an English-as-Medium-of- Instruction (EMI) university in China. Through surveys and focus groups, existing practices are investigated and staff and students consulted to understand how these resources co...

With the advances in technology, wordlists retrieved from computer corpora have become increasingly popular in recent years. The lexical items in those wordlists are usually selected, according to a set of robust frequency and dispersion criteria, from large corpora of authentic and naturally occurring language. Corpus wordlists are of great value...