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This corpus-based study aims at investigating the similarities and differences that exist between afraid, scared, frightened, terrified, startled, fearful, horrified and petrified. Specifically, it compared and contrasted them in terms of dialectal differences, frequency of occurrence, distribution in different genres and core meanings. The data were collected from the British National Corpus (BNC), the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), the online Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English (LDOCE) and the online Merriam Webster's Dictionary (MWD). The results of both corpora have revealed that the most frequent adjectives of fear are "afraid", "scared" and "frightened". Moreover, the findings of both corpora have shown that nearly all adjectives appear to be mostly used in fiction and spoken genres. Furthermore, the results also unveiled that both the Americans and the British tend to avoid using such adjectives of fear in academic contexts. As for the core meanings, the findings have uncovered that the core meanings of these adjectives in dictionaries have shown that LDOCE gives more emphasis on idiomatic meanings of words under investigation. Unlike MWD, LDOCE offers more senses for the words "afraid", "scared" and "frightened". Further, the meanings of these adjectives in COCA have revealed that this corpus gives more space for idiomatic expressions related to the adjectives under investigation if compared to the results of MWD. Therefore, it can be concluded that the data 112 of the two corpora give extra meanings that are not found in these dictionaries. Also, the study concluded with some pedagogical implications.

This paper explores the most frequently used strategies by Jordanian Facebook users when commenting on the death anniversary status of Wasfi al-Tal, a former prime minister of Jordan, who was assassinated in 1971. The corpus comprises 530 comments. The findings reveal the use of nine strategies, e.g., praying for God’s mercy, praying for God’s mercy annexed to wishing the deceased an abode in paradise, praying for God’s mercy in combination with highlighting the uniqueness and unforgettability of the deceased, among others. The findings also uncover that while some Facebook death anniversary related strategies were similar to those associated with offering condolences in general, some other strategies appeared to be solely used for this death anniversary.

The current research was an attempt to compare the impacts of online English language learning and face-to-face English language learning on Iranian EFL learners’ grammatical knowledge and their learning motivation. To this end, the Oxford Quick Placement Test (OQPT) was given to 81 Iranian EFL students, and 50 of them who were at the intermediate level were selected as the participants of the study. Then, they were randomly divided into two groups; one experimental group (EG) ( n = 25 ) and one control group (CG) ( n = 25 ). After that, both groups were pretested by a grammar test and a motivation questionnaire. After pretesting, the participants of the EG received the treatment through online instruction. On the other hand, the participants of the CG were taught the grammatical points through a face-to-face instruction. At the end of the treatment, both groups took the posttest of grammar and motivation. The EG outperformed the CG on both the grammar and motivation posttests, according to the findings of paired and independent samples t -tests. Implementing online instruction assisted Iranian EFL learners to enhance their grammatical knowledge and increase their learning motivation. The implications of this research can encourage teachers to use online learning methods in their classes.

The present study attempts to identify the most frequent terms that are used in research abstracts relating to research articles designations, research methods, and research goals and quantify them in various disciplines, namely, economics, education, English literature, nursing, and political science to see whether there is a unique pattern characterizing terms peculiar to each of the five disciplines under investigation. It also explains why specific terms are overused/ underused by researchers. The current study follows a corpus-driven approach. For this purpose, we compiled a corpus of 2500 research abstracts from online refereed journals in the fields mentioned above. The corpus linguistic software program, AntConc (3.5.8), was used to analyze the collected data. The analysis revealed that some terms are more frequently used in some areas than others. For example, the term 'study' was the most common word to designate academic research. The most frequent term to refer to population and subject-related terms was 'sample/s,' while the least frequent was 'interviewee/s.' The words used to designate tools or instruments varied, with 'test' being the most frequent and 'checklist/s' the least. This study is of significant benefit for researchers in various disciplines. It acquaints them with terms used to designate articles in their respective fields, in addition to terms used most frequently to refer to sample- related terms and finally to words used for setting goals such as objectives, aims, and goals. This, in turn, can help researchers and graduate students embarking on writing their theses to opt for the most relevant terms peculiar to their disciplines. Unlike most studies that focused on developing academic word lists (AWL), this study set off with terms previously established and used in research bodies and research abstracts to unveil their popularity and the extent to which they are used in various discipline abstracts.   Received: 20 January 2021 / Accepted: 30 March 2021 / Published: 10 May 2021