This paper explores how individuals living within high-stakes precarious categories navigate their identity within online spaces. Using Membership Categorisation Analysis, we investigate how categorical inferences are indexed by those individuals within online biosocial communities in everyday speech, as part of their construction of identities. More specifically, we analyse online interactions of women who have been identified as carrying a BRCA gene mutation in an online biosocial community. Our findings show how (1) the online spaces participate in constituting and sustaining a form of collective responsibility, where those who are within a high-stakes precarious identity category are expected to not only support and educate each other, but also monitor the compliance to category predicates, and (2) the tensions and conflict in making sense of, belonging to, resisting and sustaining a category membership often occur when there are clashes with the socio-moral order. Overall, this paper’s contributions are twofold, first, methodologically, the use of Membership Categorisation Analysis provides an insightful analytic approach to identities, online communities and their organisation. Second, the emerging tensions identified provide insight into the complex ways in which online communities offer a forum in managing precarious identity as individual and collective life intersect.

Technological innovation in supporting feedback on writing is well established in computer-assisted language learning (CALL) literature. Regarding writing development, research has found that intelligent CALL systems that respond instantly to learners' language can support their production of better-written texts. To investigate this claim further, this chapter presents a study on learner use of Write & Improve (W&I). The study, based on learner engagement with W&I and learner and teacher surveys and focus groups, demonstrates that learners find W&I to be engaging and motivating. Moreover, there is evidence of improvements in learner writing practices and written language proficiency. For teachers, W&I can render feedback more efficient, allowing them to focus on more complex aspects of learner texts, while spelling and syntactic accuracy are addressed by W&I. Issues also emerge in the use of W&I, which present problem areas for teachers and learners and which signal important future considerations for CALL research.

The results suggest that, although there is some degree of homogeneity in the use of questions in terms of function, form and distribution, there is also evidence of important differences between the two languages. These findings illustrate some distinctions in writing in these two discourse communities and their potential for informing language pedagogy in both English for academic purposes and Français langue académique.

This chapter investigates how the internationalization process by way of English-medium Education in Multilingual University Settings (EMEMUS) is unfolding in a Spanish university context. Broadly, Englishmedium instruction (EMI), like content and language integrated learning (CLIL), can be defined as "the use of the English language to teach academic subjects in countries or jurisdictions where the first language (L1) of the majority of the population is not English" (Dearden 2015: 4). A typical differentiating factor between CLIL and EMI is the role of language teaching, and typically, EMI has "no explicit language learning aims" (Madhavan and McDonald 2014: 1). However, separating language and content in EMI contexts has proven challenging owing to EMI instructors' low language proficiency (Dearden 2015), instructors' lack of language awareness and training (Dearden et al. 2016), the varied English language skills among students (Macaro et al. 2018), and broader linguistic difficulties among students and instructors (Vu and Burns 2014). Moreover, following Ortega (2014), in many cases where research on EMI addresses language issues, it typically takes a simplistic and uncritical position of seeing L2 speakers as deficient and a cause of problems in EMI contexts. The complexity of the sites where multilingual universities struggle to provide EMI programs is extraordinary and requires further attention and theorization beyond such a simplistic view (Macaro et al. 2018). In fact, in their systematic review, Macaro et al. (2018: 69) identifya number of outstanding problems and questions in the field of EMI, of which one has been the inspiration for this chapter, namely: Do different HE institutions (e.g., private and state) experience different levels of success in implementing EMI? If so, why? As there remains a need to investigate the implementation of EMI policies in a range of higher education institutions, this study focuses on statefunded education and investigates teacher beliefs about EMI in a Spanish state-funded higher education institute.

Research dissemination through academic blogs creates opportunities for writers to reach wider audiences. With COVID-19, public dissemination of research impacts daily practices, and national and international policies, and in countries like the UK and Spain, The Conversation publishes accessible COVID-19 themed research. Such academic blogs are important to the global academy, yet the role of authorial stance therein is notably under-investigated. This paper presents a corpus-based contrastive analysis of “stance nouns + that/de que” in a comparable corpus of English and Spanish COVID-19 themed academic blogs from The Conversation. The analysis identifies similarities and differences across languages that reflect how COVID-19 is framed in each language. For example, Spanish academics use Possibility and Factualness nouns when self-sourcing their stances with expanding strategies, while English academics use Argument and Idea nouns with external sources in contracting strategies. Overall, this paper adds to current linguistic knowledge on academic blogs and scientific communication surrounding COVID-19.

While the role of corpus linguistics (cl) in language teaching and learning continues to evolve, its use in the language teaching industry remains somewhat unclear. The specific ways in which elt publishers use cl research to inform materials development are under-studied, meaning that it is not known whether cl is being used by publishers to its full potential. This study investigates the use of cl research by a major international elt publisher by conducting research into recent change in adverbs in casual spoken British English and sharing the findings with editors from the publisher. Through our analysis, we find evidence of major recent changes in the use of frequent adverbs. Following the corpus analysis, we conducted in-depth interviews with the editors and a review of the materials they subsequently produced using the corpus findings. In so doing, we find some evidence of effective use of corpora in materials development but reveal limitations in current corpus research which prevent editors from employing cl research more effectively.

Studies in modality comprise a complex canon of functional, formal, sociological and diachronic analyses of language. The current understanding of how English language speakers use modality is unclear; while some research argues that core modal auxiliaries are in decline, they are reported as increasing elsewhere. A lack of contemporary and representative spoken language data has rendered it difficult to reconcile such differing perspectives. To address this issue, this article presents a diachronic study of modality using the Spoken BNC2014 and the spoken component of the BNC1994. We investigate the frequency of core modal auxiliaries, semi-modals, and lexical modality-indicating devices (MIDs), as well as the modal functions of the core modal auxiliaries, in informal spoken British English, between the 1990s and 2010s. The results of the analysis are manifold. We find that core modal auxiliaries appear to be in decline, while semi-modals and lexical MIDs appear relatively stable. However, on a form-by-form basis, there is significant evidence of both increases and decreases in the use of individual expressions within each modal set. As a result, this study problematises form-based studies of change, and illustrates the value and coherence that functional analyses of modality can afford future work.

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