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There has been increasing interest in utilizing corpora in linguistic research and pedagogy in recent years. Rhetorical organization of different sections of research articles may appear similar in various disciplines, but close examination may show subtle differences nonetheless. One of the features that has been at the center of attention especially in recent years is the idiomaticity of a discourse which can be examined from the perspective of multi-word units captured by the automatic retrieval of lexical bundles. This study takes a corpus-based approach for the identification of lexical bundles. A corpus of 801,894 words from 790 articles was collected. In order to fulfill the purposes of the present study, ABBYY FineReader 10 professional edition, Total Assistant, Antconc 3.2.3, and WordSmith Tools 5 were used to identify lexical bundles. Then these bundles were classified structurally and functionally based on the presented taxonomies in the literature. The results of the current study indicated that the writers of medical research articles mostly rely on text-oriented bundles in the discussion section of research articles to establish academic discourse.

This study aimed to investigate the application of Group Dynamic Assessment (GDA) to writing accuracy of EFL learners and explore whether secondary interactants could benefit from interactions between mediator and primary interactants. The idea of implementing DA (Dynamic Assessment) in dyads seems unworkable since teachers are required to teach the whole class (Guk & Kellog, 2007). Moreover, Lantolf and Poehner (2004) suggest a new approach to DA that is GDA, which involves applying DA with a large number of learners rather than individuals. Following a multiple case study design and interactionist DA, the development of ten students in a class of twenty five was tracked during the eight sessions of DA program. Data were collected though written artifacts, video-recording of interactions, interview, and observation. The results indicated that GDA was an effective way of helping learners overcome their linguistic problems and there were signs of microgenetic as well as macrogenetic development within the same DA session and across sessions. The present findings provide further insight into understanding how secondary interactants benefit from the interactions between mediator and primary interactants.

Grounded in sociocultural theory (SCT), this study explored whether the hypothesized difference in task-induced involvement could affect the actual realization of evaluation, one of the cognitive dimensions of the Involvement Load Hypothesis (ILH). A group of 24 Iranian EFL learners participated in the study. They were paired up to write a composition including ten unknown words in the first session and then completed a cloze task with another set of ten new words in the second one. Collaborative dialogues in both sessions were audio-recorded, transcribed verbatim and micro-genetically analyzed to trace how the value of hypothesized evaluation could affect the manifestation of evaluation during collaborative dialogues. In line with the tenets of ILH, the results of the micro-genetic analysis demonstrated that using target words in the composition task could induce a higher degree of evaluation than using them in the cloze task. In light of the findings, researchers are suggested to look at issues from different standpoints rather than restricting themselves to one single theoretical perspective.

Despite the importance of author engagement in the literature review of academic articles, many writers fail to publish their academic articles due to being incompetent in using conventional engagement resources. In view of this problem, the present study aimed to study linguistic representation of engagement as a dimension of evaluation in academic articles published in international and Iranian local journals. To do so, the literature review section of eighty psychology and applied linguistics articles as representatives of humanities and mechanical engineering and medicine articles as representatives of hard science articles published between 2008 and 2017 in the international and Iranian local journals formed the corpus of the study and were analyzed on the basis of the engagement resources proposed by Martin and White’s (2005) Appraisal Theory The findings indicated that monoglossic resources were used more frequently in articles published in local journals than those published in international ones. Regarding heteroglossic resources, intra-vocalizing resources (countering, denial, pronouncement, and entertainment) were found more frequently in articles published in international journals. However, extra-vocalizing resources (endorsement and attribution resources) used in local journals outnumbered those used in international ones. The findings can provide insights for teaching academic writing in EFL contexts.

In translation, choosing appropriate equivalent is essential to convey the right message from source-text to target-text, and one of the issues that may have a determinative role in appropriate equivalent choice is the semantic prosody (SP) behavior of words and the relation existing between the SP of a word and semantic senses (i.e. negativity, positivity or neutrality) of its collocations in the context. This research explored the impact of Iranian translator trainees' semantic prosody knowledge on the appropriate selection of equivalents in translation. The probable influence of proficiency level or fields of study on the appropriate selection of equivalents with respect to SP was concentrated as well. To fulfill the aims of the study, a translation test including a number of near-synonym pairs with different SPs was administered among participants with different fields of study as well as different proficiency levels. Findings were analyzed based on Sinclair's (1996) hypothesis of SP as well as Stubbs' (1995) model of SP classification. The study showed where there is more than one equivalent of a word in another language, having the knowledge and being aware of the conditions of semantic prosody is necessary to select the appropriate, accurate equivalents and thus to convey the exact message from a source text to the target one. The results also revealed that proficiency level and field of study among language learners can have an influence on choosing appropriate equivalents with respect to SP. The findings of the present study can be beneficial for the instructors and learners in both fields of translation and Teaching English as a Foreign Language to improve equivalent choice appropriateness. Also, this study by highlighting the essential role of semantic prosody in selecting appropriate equivalents can be beneficial to dictionary compilers to include semantic prosody behaviors in the definition and information of words.