This paper focuses on the pertinence of Action Research as a practical tool in the enhancement of language teachers' autonomy. We report on the results achieved after a year of collaborative action research undertaken by teachers enrolled in a Teacher Education Continuing Program and point out the steps taken throughout this initiative. We conclude by reflecting about the insights gained through this experience and additionally point out adaptations and new directions that might be pursued in the search for teachers' autonomy along their careers.

Este artigo discute a ocorrência de agrupamentos com a palavra for em textos argumentativos produzidos por aprendizes brasileiros de inglês de nível universitário e sugere atividades pedagógicas de descoberta de padrões linguísticos. Utilizamos ferramentas da Linguística de Corpus (LC) para análise e sugestões de ensino de gramática. Este artigo baseia-se em dados do Corpus de Aprendizes Brasileiros do Inglês (CABrI) em comparação com outros corpora. Os resultados, que revelam o uso adequado ou não adequado de agrupamentos com verbo + for e substantivo + for, são seguidos de atividades que visam à integração da gramática com o léxico e a uma conscientização dos aprendizes sobre a frequência do uso de certos agrupamentos linguísticos.

This article aims to present an investigation of the use of the following linking adverbials: so, therefore, and thus in essay writing of Brazilian university students. Few corpora-based studies have been carried out on the use of cohesive devices in the written production of Brazilian university students in comparison to the writing of American and British university students. It is worth mentioning Matte and Sarmento (2018) and Dutra et al. (2017) who identified differences among the groups concerning the use of additive linking adverbials. The present study compares the occurrences of result linking adverbials in the Corpus of English for Academic Purposes (CorIFA), in the Corpus of English Without Borders (CorIsF), and in the Louvain Corpus of Native English Essays (LOCNESS). The linking adverbials were identified by using AntConc 3.4.4 (ANTHONY, 2016). The concordance lines generated by the program were analyzed, and the linking adverbials were classified according to their meaning and syntactic position. Then, the data were submitted to the

Corpus compilation is a challenging research endeavor that many researchers decide to pursue. Few learner corpora, however, can be easily accessed (e.g.,the International Corpus of Learner English), and none of them carry a variety of text registers written by English learners at different proficiency levels studying in the Brazilian university context. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to present the compilation of a learner corpus, much needed in our research and teaching context, pointing out the advantages of building this type of corpus for the understanding of learners’ needs as well as for pedagogical decision-making based on sound data. Presenting a detailed rationale of the corpus compilation, this article reveals the various decisions made in order to guarantee that fair comparisons can be made. To exemplify the value of building a carefully designed corpus, results of previous studies are compared. Some of the conclusions reached refer to the need for discipline-specific tasks to propel writing proficiency and for authorship skills to be developed in English for Academic Purposes classes to foster academic success.

This chapter analyzes the use of attributive adjectives as nominal pre-modifiers in two corpora: CorAChem (Corpus of Articles in Chemistry) and CorAAL (Corpus of Articles in Applied Linguistics) composed of 150 articles each. Our aim is to understand the use of pre-modifying adjectives in noun phrases (NPs), considering which adjectives are used as well as the NP size and frequency across disciplines. The results show that both corpora carry more classifiers than descriptors. Nevertheless, each discipline favors the use of adjectives with specific functions. Both corpora use long premodifying sequences, but CorAChem carries a greater number of longer sequences. The use of long NPs may affect understanding due to the interrelation among the NP constituents as shown in CorAChem.