Recently, corpus assisted vocabulary instruction has been attracting a lot of interest. Most studies have focused on understanding language learners' receptive vocabulary knowledge. Limited attention has been paid to learners' productive competence. To fill this gap, this study attended to learners' productive lexical development in terms of form, meaning and use respectively. This study introduced EFL learners to the corpus-based language pedagogy to learn COVID-19 theme-based vocabulary. To investigate the gains and views of 33 EFL first-year college students, a sentence completion task and a questionnaire were developed. Learners' productive performances in the three lexical knowledge aspects (i.e., form, meaning and use) were particularly targeted. The results revealed that the students achieved significant gains in all aspects regardless of their proficiency level. In particular, the less proficient students achieved greater knowledge retention compared with their highly proficient counterparts. Meanwhile, students showed positive attitudes towards the corpus-based approach to vocabulary learning.

The present study employed an analytical framework that is characterised by a synthesis of quantitative and qualitative analyses with a specially designed computer software SpeechActConc to examine speech acts in business communication. The naturally occurring data from the audio recordings and the prosodic transcriptions of the business sub-corpora of the HKCSE (prosodic) are manually annotated with a speech act taxonomy for finding out the frequency of fillers, the co-occurring patterns of fillers with other speech acts, and the linguistic realisations of fillers. The discoursal function of fillers to sustain the discourse or to hold the floor has diverse linguistic realisations, ranging from a sound (e.g. 'uhuh') and a word (e.g. 'well') to sounds (e.g. 'um er') and words, namely phrase ('sort of') and clause (e.g. 'you know'). Some are even combinations of sound(s) and word(s) (e.g. 'and um', 'yes er um', 'sort of erm'). Among the top five frequent linguistic realisations of fillers, 'er' and 'um' are the most common ones found in all the six genres with relatively higher percentages of occurrence. The remaining more frequent realisations consist of clause ('you know'), word ('yeah') and sound ('erm'). These common forms are syntactically simpler than the less frequent realisations found in the genres. The co-occurring patterns of fillers and other speech acts are diverse. The more common co-occurring speech acts with fillers include informing and answering. The findings show that fillers are not only frequently used by speakers in spontaneous conversation but also mostly represented in sounds or non-linguistic realisations.

This research examines Japanese non-native speakers' (JNNS) modal auxiliary verb use from two different perspectives: frequency of use and preferences for modalities. Additionally, error analysis is carried out to identify errors in modal use common among JNNSs. Their modal use is compared to that of English native speakers within a spoken dialogue corpus which is part of the International Corpus Network of Asian Learners' English. Research findings show at a statistically significant level that when compared to native speakers, JNNSs underuse past forms of modals and infrequently convey epistemic modality, indicating the possibility that JNNSs fail to express their opinions or thoughts indirectly when needed or to convey politeness appropriately. Error analysis identifies the following three types of common errors: (1) the use of incorrect tenses of modal verb phrases, (2) the use of inflected verb forms after modals, and (3) the non-use of main verbs after modals. The first type of error is largely because JNNSs do not master how to express past meanings of modals. The second and third types of errors seem to be due to first language transfer into second language acquisition and JNNSs' overgeneralization of the subject-verb agreement rules to modals respectively.

With the wide spread of the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR) scales, many studies attempt to apply them in routine teaching and rater training, while more evidence regarding criterial features at different CEFR levels are still urgently needed. The current study aims to explore complexity features that distinguish and predict CEFR proficiency levels in oral performance. Using a quantitative/corpus-based approach, this research analyzed lexical and syntactic complexity features over 80 transcriptions (includes A1, A2, B1 CEFR levels, and native speakers), based on an interview test, Standard Speaking Test (SST). ANOVA and correlation analysis were conducted to exclude insignificant complexity indices before the discriminant analysis. In the result, distinctive differences in complexity between CEFR speaking levels were observed, and with a combination of six major complexity features as predictors, 78.8% of the oral transcriptions were classified into the appropriate CEFR proficiency levels. It further confirms the possibility of predicting CEFR level of L2 learners based on their objective linguistic features. This study can be helpful as an empirical reference in language pedagogy, especially for L2 learners' self-assessment and teachers' prediction of students' proficiency levels. Also, it offers implications for the validation of the rating criteria, and improvement of rating system.