In language teaching, emphasis is usually placed on grammatical competence rather than metaphorical competence to improve a learner’s proficiency in the target language. Research has shown that figurative language poses a problem for second language learners whether it is in their ability to interpret, process, or produce metaphors. This affects communication as metaphors are not only restricted to formal texts but are a common feature of everyday language through which individual’s conceptualize and describe the world. To gauge students’ metaphorical competence, this paper aims to analyze student writing to identify the type of problems second language writers have with collocations and to convince teachers of the importance of promoting the development of metaphoric language among language learners. The findings revealed that although students attempt to use a range of metaphors such as grammatical, textual, illocutionary, and sociolinguistic in their writing, these tend to be unidiomatic and need to be developed further for fluency in the target language.

Although cross-cultural variation in spoken interaction has been dealt with extensively in discourse studies, very little research has been reported in the case of academic and professional written genres. The importance of this work is highlighted by the findings that writers from different cultures organize and develop ideas differently in expository writing tasks (Hinds, 1990) and that professional genres like business letters (The Geok Suan, 1986;Bhatia and Tay, 1987), job applications (Bhatia, 1989) and some legal genres (Bhatia, 1993) are sensitive to socio-cultural constraints. In order to gain a better understanding of the role played by socio-cultural factors in shaping a genre, the present paper examines, through a genre-based comparison, the cross-cultural differences between book blurbs of international publishers and local Singapore-based publishers. It is hoped that such a study will demonstrate the fact that genres are socioculturally dependent communicative events and their success, in part, depends upon their pragmatic value in a specific business/professional environment. An attempt will also be made to relate the findings of this analysis to the dual and conflicting notions of`linguistic creativity' on the one hand and`linguistic orthodoxy' on the other. It is hoped that a comparative study of this nature will sensitize researchers/teachers to the cultural factors that are responsible for constraining/shaping genres in particular socio-cultural contexts.

Writing project reports is an important part of the engineering curriculum at Singapore universities. One important section of the formal report is the literature review. Most universities around the world provide guidelines on writing reviews, emphasizing that plagiarism is unethical. However, these guidelines do not offer explicit training on how to avoid plagiarism. In order to write academically acceptable reviews while avoiding copying from source materials, students face a major challenge and resort to employing various strategies to cope with the task. In this study, we examined the literature review sections of final year project reports to find out how engineering undergraduates in a Singapore university cope with writing reviews and to suggest ways in which they can extend their skills to improve their literature reviews.

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