In this chapter, we present an overview of current knowledge about learners’ use and understanding of connectives. In the first part of the chapter, we will see that connectives are notoriously difficult to master for second language learners, because they require an array of complex competences. Learners must know how to use them appropriately in various genres and registers, have a fine-grained understanding of the meaning differences between connectives used to convey similar coherence relations, and also automatize this knowledge so that it is activated automatically during discourse processing, and not only when they consciously elicit usage rules. In the second part of the chapter, we review the important body of studies that have empirically assessed the causes for learners’ difficulties with connectives, and conclude with some recommendations for teaching. We conclude that research on the second language acquisition of connectives contributes to answering important questions, such as what makes connectives difficult to master, and how they are they used across languages.

This chapter presents some of the most significant studies in the history of intercultural pragmatics (IP) research that have applied the methodology of corpus pragmatics (CP). In fact, the use of corpora has been an essential contribution to IP in crucial areas such as formulaic language, context and common ground, or politeness research, among others, with the conviction that CP has redefined the conceptualization of pragmatic competence in a globalized world. The chapter follows a topical structure in which critical areas of research from an intercultural and corpus pragmatic perspective are addressed, like the role of the lingua franca; the use of academic, professional, and scientific language; cross-cultural studies; prosody, multimodality, and computer-mediated communication and learner's corpora. In all these areas, the chapter highlights the significant research concerns and achievements that have helped to shape IP as an essential discipline in current linguistic theory. A final section with conclusions and ideas for further research will ensue.

This is a chapter about ‘applications’, specifically the application of corpus linguistics to language learning and teaching. The chapter highlights the input of corpus research into reference materials for learners, including a proposal for a novel ‘constructicon’. It then discusses research using learner corpora, with advice on building a learner corpus and exploiting it to gain information on grammatical development and on vocabulary and collocation. Applications of corpus research to the study of discoursal or pragmatic features such as signalling nouns and stance expressions are then discussed. Finally, there is a discussion of the notion of complexity in learner language. The final part of the chapter discusses the issue of language learners using corpora directly. Research in this area is described, as are some of the materials – software and books – specifically designed to enable learners to gain information from a corpus, especially in the area of academic discourse.

This paper investigates article use in learner corpora in order to (i) examine how both the native language and proficiency level influence the patterns of article use, misuse, and omission and (ii) examine whether patterns of the overuse of the with specific indefinites found in experimental studies are also present in learner corpora. To this end, 200 texts from the Cambridge Learner Corpus are examined: 100 texts from Spanish-speaking learners of English and 100 texts from Russian and Ukrainian-speaking learners of English. Each subcorpus has an even distribution between learners at CEFR B1 and B2 proficiency levels. The results confirm that the learners’ native language affects article use: speakers of Spanish, an article language, show an increase in correct article use with proficiency; in contrast, speakers of Russian, an article-less language, continue to make article errors. On the other hand, the particular patterns of article misuse found in prior experimental work are not found in learner corpora: while Russian-speaking learners do overuse the with indefinites in the corpora, this error type is not tied to specificity. This null finding could be due in part to the relatively low number of errors of the overuse in the learner corpus.

Chapter 3 offers an interdisciplinary overview of research on multi-word units in second language (L2) processing and use. It is motivated by a long-standing puzzle in the field of second language acquisition suggesting that while the idiom principle is the main mechanism of language production in native speakers, non-native speakers cannot benefit from it to a similar degree. The chapter shows that researchers are not unanimous in assessing the degree to which learners operate on the idiom principle and raises a few problems which might be obscuring such operation in commonly used research designs, such as a focus on specific multi-word units rather than co-selection as such, questionable representativeness of reference corpora and inability of statistical measures to capture abstracted associations. The chapter concludes by offering an alternative interpretation based on the concept of approximation adopted from studies of English as a lingua franca.