Writing requires a suitable and strategic use of language with communicative potential and structural correctness. The use of coherence and cohesion helps create communicative potential and structural correctness in texts. This study aims to investigate the use of cohesive items in the abstracts of Pakistani research articles and thereby determine what type of cohesive items are frequently used by writers. In addition, the study aims to know what functions the said writers achieve through the most frequently used cohesive items. For this purpose, 50 abstracts were retrieved from two famous Pakistani research journals (25 articles per journal), which were developed into a corpus for the study and analysed through AntConc. 3.4.4.0. The results revealed that Pakistani research writers used reference items the most frequently to achieve “directive” as well as “referential” functions. On the basis of these findings, the study concluded that Pakistani research article writers organised information in abstracts using reference items the most frequently and they were mainly concerned with directive as well as referential functions of meaning. The results also showed that the said writers organised texts on a syntactic level only, which implied that they should organise texts on a semantic level also. This would be possible with the use of repetition devices.

Background: Writing means communication through words whereas academic writing means making careful use of words to communicate ideas to a range of readers and audiences. Therefore, academic writing reflects specificities related to audience, context/discipline and purpose of the use. These specificities result in ample differences in terms of language use. Purpose: This study investigates disciplinary variation in the use of different syntactic (i.e., clausal, intermediate and phrasal) features in academic writing produced by the Pakistani advanced writers of English as an L2 specializing in different disciplines of arts and humanities, life sciences, physical sciences and social sciences. Method: For the said purpose, the corpus has been developed from dissertation texts produced by the Pakistani doctoral candidates from 16 academic disciplines of four disciplinary divisions. The analysis has been performed using AntConc Software after tagging with Multidimensional Analysis, and TagAnt Taggers. Results: The results reveal mixed findings. On the one hand, the results show variation in the use of syntactic features that is observed to be marked by the difference in the frequency of the different types of the said features across disciplines. On the other hand, the results show a similarity in the use of syntactic features that has been evidenced by the finding that the most and least frequently used features are identical across disciplines. Conclusion: These results suggest both heterogeneity and homogeneity in the use of syntactic features by the Pakistani advanced L2 academic writers. The results of this study have implications for educators, policy makers, and syllabus designers to ensure discipline-specific instruction, and incorporation of the discipline-specific syntactic features into the academic curricula for supporting academic writing development skills in the students particularly at the advanced level of education.

This corpus-based research investigates features representing different stages of development in Pakistani academic writing (AW) to determine the stage of Pakistani AW in physical and social sciences. Corpus for this research comprises texts from 80 doctoral dissertations and is analyzed through AntConc after tagging with Multidimensional Analysis Tagger (MAT) and TagAnt. Results show Pakistani AW in both disciplines frequently comprising nouns as pre-modifiers that represent Stage-3. These are lower level features used by the writers developing towards higher levels. Therefore, Pakistani advanced level AW in physical and social sciences is positioned at Stage-3. This suggests that Pakistani writers in these disciplines are operating below the expected developmental level specifically Stage-5. These results are found to oppose the general hypothesis i.e. L2 (English as a second language) academic writers frequently use phrasal features at the advanced level. Consequently, Pakistani AW is concluded to be below the required level of language development.

This study investigated Teacher Talk (TT) quantity, TT quality, teacher questions and feedback to determine whether the teacher-student interaction practices in a Pakistani language classroom align with ESL (English as a Second Language) principles or not. For this purpose, two lessons in a Pakistani secondary level ESL classroom were recorded and analysed through conversation analysis (CA). TT was observed to dominate in the classroom. The teacher used display questions more than referential questions. There was a slight use of second language (L2) in the classroom that was limited to the use of key terms in the lessons. Feedback was romantic in nature. All of these practices were observed as less effective teacher-student interaction practices. Therefore, the study concluded that teacher-student interaction did not align with ESL classroom management principles. Since TT, teacher questions and feedback were the important forms of teacher-student interaction in an ESL classroom, this study suggested to manage TT, teacher questions and feedback in the Pakistani ESL classroom for effective L2 teaching.

Owing to the rising needs of English language for communication at a global level, experts have stressed the significance of teaching English supported by materials based on communicative language teaching (CLT) principles to facilitate the development of communicative competence. This study, therefore, aims to evaluate ESL teaching materials to check their suitability to develop learners' communicative competence. The study, for this purpose, employs content analysis approach for the analysis of text of English designed for class two in the light of a checklist devised on CLT principles. The results reveal that the content of the said textbook does not conform to the CLT principles. Therefore, it is not suitable to facilitate the development of communicative competence in the learners. The study suggests either to improve/revise the textbook or to replace it by another suitable one. Request access from your librarian to read this chapter's full text.