Although there is consensus that collaboration refers to two or more learners working together to accomplish a task (Davin & Donato, 2013;Ohta, 2001), debate remains about how to assess collaboration. Researchers have pursued two approaches to evaluate collaboration during peer interaction: rater judgments (e.g., Ahmadi & Sedeghi, 2016;Winke, 2013) and qualitative coding of interactional patterns (e.g., Galaczi, 2008;Storch, 2002a). Largely absent, however, has been any attempt to describe the linguistic features of collaboration. Therefore, the present study uses corpus linguistic techniques to identify the linguistic markers of collaborative and noncollaborative peer interactions. Students of English as a second language (N = 80) enrolled in an intensive English program carried out a paired oral test as part of the program's formative assessment procedures. Their interactions were audio-recorded and rated using an analytic rubric with three categories (collaboration, task completion, and style), and transcripts were analyzed for 146 linguistic features using the Biber Tagger (Biber, 1988). Linguistic features associated with high collaboration included first-and second-person pronouns, wh-questions, that deletion, and subordinate conjunctions, whereas low-collaboration interactions were characterized by nominal forms. The collaborative and noncollaborative functions served by these linguistic features are discussed.

The United Nations (UN) has demonstrated a commitment to women’s empowerment over seven decades of work. Yet gender inequality pervades in countries around the world and even within the UN. This corpus analysis investigated collocates of woman(’s), women(’s), man(’s) and men(’s) in 193 UN General Assembly General Debate addresses in fall 2015 to examine gender representation by international decision-makers. The analysis revealed that the plural women occurred more frequently than men and primarily in discussions on gender equality and violence. In contrast, the singular man was identified more frequently than woman, in generic use (e.g. mankind) and in references to eminent male leaders. Despite UN dedication to gender equality and linguistic guidelines promoting gender-inclusive language, these General Debate addresses do not conceptualise women and men equally, more frequently referring to women as a group in need of protection and support and to men as political figures and other distinguished individuals.

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