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Writers of academic papers generally use a wide range of strategies when they expose scientific argumentations or take a stance that can potentially threaten readers’ face. Hedging and boosting devices are rhetorical devices that help authors mitigate or enhance the impact of their positions and claims on readers. This study seeks to explore the role and the frequency of hedging and boosting in scientific articles from a cross-cultural perspective. Our goal is to compare English and Italian research papers to describe hedging and boosting strategies and check whether they differ between the two languages in terms of frequencies and functions. To do that, we have collected a bilingual corpus made up of 58 medical research papers in Italian and English, investigated through quantitative and qualitative methods. Our findings demonstrate that targeting an international audience dramatically increases the frequency of the hedges, and in particular the category of reader-oriented hedges.

Nominal prepositional phrase is one of the under-researched compressed syntactic features of academic research writing. Employing Biber, Johansson et al.’s (1999) prepositional phrases as noun postmodifiers framework, with the aid of Hernandez’s (2021) syntactic patterns, I cross-examined of-, in-, on-, and for-phrases in qualitative and quantitative research articles in Psychology, Sociology, and Curriculum and Instruction. Main findings revealed that of-phrases outnumbered other prepositional phrases across disciplinary research article sub-registers. A significant difference exists between of-phrases and other prepositional phrases. Thus, of-phrases are phrasal characteristics of Filipino-authored disciplinary research articles regardless of their research nature. Through of-phrases, Filipino researchers across the three disciplines frequently convey to what or to whom certain entities belong when writing qualitative and quantitative research. Implications for research writing curricula and academic research writing instruction are highlighted by the end of the study.

The predominance of Thai as a foreign language in Asia has significantly increased the prevalence of Standard Thai and the demand for native Thai-speaking teachers. As a result, universities in China, Japan, and South Korea have officially recruited native Thai lecturers to instruct their L2 learners using an authentic language. The students’ responses to native Thai lecturers, on the other hand, are not fully understood. The purpose of this study was to investigate how learners with varying language backgrounds perceive the pronunciation and grammar instruction of native-speaking teachers. A total of 108 (N = 108) international students completed a questionnaire eliciting lecturers’ use of L1 in pronunciation and grammar instruction, and 12 participants shared their opinions in follow-up interviews. The results revealed that while all three groups valued instruction by native teachers, significant differences were discovered between the Chinese and the others. Japanese and Korean learners, in particular, had a more favorable attitude toward the various roles of native speaker teachers in grammar and pronunciation teaching than Chinese students did.

This study aimed to compare and contrast online TELL-and-TBLT-based and traditional TBLT-based ESP instructional outcomes for analogies and differences. A total of 87 (N=87) ESP learners were matched for language proficiency and assigned to a control group (receiving TBLT-based ESP instruction) and an experimental group (receiving TELL-and-TBLT-based ESP instruction). Their writing achievement and self-efficacy were compared through a set of mixed between-within subjects analysis of variance (SPANOVA). Results showed that the participants’ ESP writing skills were positively influenced by the treatment they received in both groups, but learners in the experimental group showed significantly greater achievement. The results also indicated that the participants in the experimental group achieved significantly greater writing self-efficacy. Implications for the teaching of writing in ESP courses are discussed.

Along with the developments of the internet and digital technology, teachers can have better opportunities to apply technology to improve learning and teaching a second or foreign language. When opting for any kind of technology, educational authorities should consider different aspects of employing technological tools in the process of learning and teaching. This study set out to explore the attitudes of English as a foreign language (EFL) teachers toward the educational use of Skype and its integration into the EFL classroom. The participants were five university professors who had experienced Skype-based instruction at Mustansiriya University in Iraq. A qualitative methodology, involving semi-structured interviews, was adopted for data collection. The findings indicated that there was a general positive tendency towards Skype-based instruction in higher education. Moreover, the results showed that teachers’ beliefs, intentions, and perspectives on technology are significant factors which can determine how technology is integrated into the classroom. The teachers who had traditional views of language teaching and learning preferred blended instruction (in favor of more traditional methods). Those who held more constructivist conceptions of teaching and learning desired dominant technology-based EFL classrooms. The findings of this study may shed some light on how educational authorities can facilitate the integration of social media into EFL contexts.

One of the most important issues in the discussion of fictional propositions is the question of the semantic nature of such propositions in general and fictional names in particular. One approach to the discussion of fictional propositions has been the implementation of the Referential Theory of Meaning, which some believe is adequate to the explanation of fictional propositions. Being based on Wittgenstein's (1953) metaphor of the mirror, this theory envisages a direct relationship between ‘sense’, ‘reference’, and ‘referent’ to claim that a word is the linguistic representation of its real-world referent. The current paper provides a basic description of the referential theory of meaning. Four main issues are discussed: (a) the issue of existent and nonexistent objects, (b) the issue of reference and descriptive names, (c) transworld identity and counterpart theory, and (d) Stalnaker’s two-dimensional approach. The theoretical implications of each issue for the referential theory of meaning are discussed.