This study aims to clarify the characteristics and differences in the breadth of vocabulary knowledge required for listening comprehension in each grade of the Eiken in terms of lexical diversity, frequency, and difficulty. Each sample in this study was derived from ten past tests. The results showed that lexical diversity and frequency tended to be higher in more advanced grades with a marked difference between Grade Pre 1 and Grade 2. Vocabulary difficulty was closely related to the overall difficulty of each grade, increasing gradually from lower to higher levels. Additionally, both the frequency and difficulty of vocabulary varied significantly across different sections of the listening test in all grades In contrast, there were no differences in lexical diversity among these sections in any of the grades.

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This corpus-based study aims to develop a discipline-specific word combination list, centering on the words appearing immediately after a single hyphen and their subsequent nouns in experimental medical research articles (EMRAs). We compiled a corpus of 300 EMRAs published in 2014, including 1,526,927 tokens in total. Using CasualConc, we extracted the top 200 two-word and 200 three-word clusters following a single hyphen. After excluding instances where the noun was not the head noun or was a proper noun, and multi-hyphen structures, 87 clusters remained. These clusters were validated using the Life Science Dictionary (https://lsd-project.jp/). The final list categorizes these clusters into five patterns based on the part of speech following the hyphen: adjective, ed-participle, ing-participle, noun, and others. From an English for Specific Purposes perspective, this word combination list could serve as a foundational resource for developing course materials, enabling students and researchers to effectively utilize these concise and information-dense expressions.

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The current study examines conventionalised illocutionary forces of three canonical event schema constructions (CESCs) (States/SVC, Location/SV, Possession/SVO) (e.g., Radden & Dirven, 2007) in spoken English as a replication study reframed from a cognitive pragmatics perspective. It also compares the strengths and directions of illocutionary force salience through collostructional analysis (e.g., Dunn, 2018, 2022; Gries, 2011, 2013, 2017, 2019; Gries & Stefanowitsch, 2004; Gries, Hampe, & Schönefeld, 2005, 2010; Hampe, 2013; Schmid & Küchenhoff, 2013; Stefanowitsch, 2013; Stefanowitsch & Gries, 2003). As a result, the following indirect speech acts and their conventionalised illocutionary forces, which emerged from three CESCs, were statistically confirmed: (1) the States/SVC construction (present: identifying (defining), expressing pleasure and dissatisfaction, asking; past: reporting); (2) the Location/SV construction (present: reporting, asking, correcting; past: reporting); and (3) the Possession/SVO construction (past: reporting, expressing probability, asking; perfective: reporting, correcting, asking).

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While considerable research has been conducted on the difficulty levels of words and numerous resources have been developed, comparatively less research has focused on the difficulty levels of collocations. This study investigates the relationship between the CEFR levels of English collocations listed in the English Vocabulary Profile and the levels of their component words. The results indicate that many collocations have higher CEFR levels than their component words, and several potential reasons are suggested. This study also examines the use of collocations in essay writing by EFL learners and native English speakers, revealing varied usage patterns of collocations with different level gap sizes and different frequency tendencies across proficiency levels. The findings suggest that (1) an alternative framework to existing ones for single words is needed to identify the levels of collocations, (2) more detailed research is called for to clarify the relationship between the levels of collocations and their component words, and (3) EFL learners require a list of collocations specifically tailored to their needs, given their limited understanding of natural English usage.

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