When learning to write from academic sources, developing writers need to identify and select appropriate reporting verbs and accurate modals to create precise statements about degree of certainty. These skills help writers to understand author stance in their sources and to produce accurate degrees of certainty in their own writing. Read More

This summary of my presentation at the 2011 TESOL convention offers a brief discussion of why and how to combine corpus and cognitive analysis in teaching lexis and grammar. Read More

This article discusses the theoretical and practical foundations for the approach to L2 teaching and learning developed in cognitive linguistics and construction grammar. Construction grammar presents a whole-unit approach to all kinds of conventionalized form-meaning pairings, such as phrasal verbs or collocations, which can be taught and learned as prefabricated expressions. Read More

In recent years, arguably the two biggest (and not unrelated) theoretical changes concerning vocabulary and grammar are, first, an appreciation of how much the subsystems of grammar and vocabulary are interdependent, and second, how the patterns created though their interdependence emerge from use. These theoretical shifts have important implications for teaching. Read More

Attention is a central, if often elusive, construct in modern theories of second language (L2) learning and teaching. This brief article summarizes three current trends in measuring attention. It then describes how Norris and Ortega’s (2003) measurement framework may aid in understanding claims regarding attention in L2 learning and teaching. Read More