Pennsylvania State University, United States
About the Speaker
Xiaofei Lu is the George C. and Jane G. Greer Professor of Applied Linguistics and Asian Studies at The Pennsylvania State University. His research interests include corpus linguistics, English for Academic Purposes, second language writing, second language acquisition, and computer-assisted language learning. He serves as an Associate Editor for the Journal of Second Language Writing. He has published over 100 peer-reviewed articles in leading journals, including Applied Linguistics, Behavior Research Methods, Computer Assisted Language Learning, Journal of Second Language Writing, Language Learning, Studies in Second Language Acquisition, TESOL Quarterly, and The Modern Language Journal, among others. His recent book, Corpus Linguistics and Second Language Acquisition: Perspective, Issues, and Findings, was published by Routledge in 2023. Since 2022, he has been recognized on Stanford University’s annual list of the Top 2% Most-Cited Scientists Worldwide in the subfield of Languages & Linguistics for both single-year and career-long impact. The L2 Syntactic Complexity Analyzer and Lexical Complexity Analyzer he developed have been widely used in second language writing and acquisition research.
About the Talk
Connecting Language Patterns to Genre Purposes: New Perspectives for Research and Teaching
Recent corpus-based genre analysis studies have shown how specific language patterns are connected to rhetorical and pragmatic functions in academic and professional communication. These findings have informed classroom activities that help learners notice these patterns, understand their functions in particular genres, and choose expressions that effectively convey their intended purposes. This keynote proposes a new perspective on the connections between language patterns and genre purposes, and on how learners develop them. Drawing on insights from usage-based accounts of language learning, we treat such connections as a fundamental unit of learning in EAP/ESP contexts and hypothesize that learners’ development of these connections may be influenced by features of their input, such as the frequency with which specific language patterns are used for particular genre purposes and the strength of their association with these purposes. The talk outlines specific research questions and methodologies for investigating how these usage features shape learners’ developmental trajectories and discusses how findings from this work can inform the design of materials and classroom tasks in data-driven, genre-based pedagogy. Finally, it highlights how GenAI tools, such as fine-tuned models for identifying rhetorical functions and assessing the appropriateness of linguistic choices for specific genre purposes, can support research, instruction, and assessment in this framework, alongside a discussion of ethical considerations for their responsible use.