This study focuses on modeling discourse coherence in the context of automated assessment of spontaneous speech from non-native speakers. Discourse coherence has always been used as a key metric in human scoring rubrics for various assessments of spoken language. However, very little research has been done to assess a speaker's coherence in automated speech scoring systems. To address this, we ...

This review of research considers the occurrence and function of Spanish discourse markers and other particles in indigenous speech. I discuss important research that has examined these phenomena and refer to studies of bilingual discourse markers in other non-indigenous language contact situations to address unresolved issues concerning the form and function of these particles in indigenous la...

Approximately 50% of publications in English peer reviewed journals are contributed by non-native speakers (NNS) of the language. Basic thought processes are considered to be universal yet there are differences in thought patterns and particularly in discourse management of writers with different linguistic and cultural backgrounds. The study highlights some areas of potential incompatibility i...

The present study is an attempt to explore the effect of one of the pragmatic elements of discourse (namely the conceptualizable agent) on overpassivization of English unaccusative verbs. Through employing the questionnaire originally used by Ju, (2000), 206 Iranian intermediate and advanced English majors were asked to choose the more grammatical form (active or passive) in target sentences wi...

Focus is of communication function in discourse. How it is realized by native speakers has long been in vigorous discussion. However, studies on focus concerning language learners are few, with the ones taking dialects into account even fewer. This study takes eight Zhenjiang dialect speakers as the subjects and investigates if their phonetic and phonological realization of narrow focus in Engl...

one of the challenges of academic writing is the creation of a structurally and communicatively well-organized and coherent text. metadiscourse enables authors of journal articles to achieve this goal by raising the writers‘ awareness about discourse features which can contribute to a better academic content production. also, l1 background has always been a hot topic in applied linguistics and ...

The pressure to produce work in English and to publish internationally has increased over recent years. However, a large number of non-native writers may be excluded from the web of global scholarship due to defective rhetorical organizations and discourse structures of their works. This study aimed to investigate frequency and distribution of transition markers (TMs) in introduction sections o...

In recent years, collocation has been widely acknowledged as an essential characteristic to distinguish native speakers from non-native speakers. Research on academic writing has also shown that collocations are not only common but serve a particularly important discourse function within the academic community. In our study, we propose a machine learning approach to implementing an online collo...