This article outlines the content of an elective university course designed for domestic and international students, combining language and international relations. The course is intended to make students more sensitive to the linguistic intricacies of a specialist variety of English. The focus is on its written modes, particularly writing and reading academic (professional) texts dealing with complex foreign policy issues. As a result, students are expected to enhance their academic writing skills. The linguistic component of the course is backed up with a review of world affairs. Conversely, the field of international relations theory is enriched by a systematic study of language effects observed in the respective discourse. The interdisciplinarity of this enterprise benefits students with different academic and cultural backgrounds.

This paper presents the findings of a frequency analysis of modal verbs and their complementation in 390 English school-leaving essays written by Czech secondary-school students in a high-stakes B1 level exam. These constitute a learner corpus, CZEMATELC 2017. The study reveals a very high proportion of correct complementation patterns, but predominantly with lexical verbs at A1 and A2 CEFR levels. The most frequent errors are the complementation of modal verbs by past-tense forms of lexical verbs and the absence of complementation.

This paper focuses on the frequency and accuracy of five types of grammatical collocations G8E-G8I (Benson et al. 1986) in CZEMATELC, an English language learner corpus (8,338 types; 211,503 tokens) consisting of 1,841 English exam texts from the written part of the national school-leaving exams between 2015 and 2019. The findings reveal the prevalence of A1-A2 CEFR level colligations relying on a limited number of verb lemmas, a wide incorrect pattern variation and preference for patterns which are also the most frequent patterns of their Czech equivalents.

This study presents an analysis of informal written requests from the national school-leaving exam and simulated spoken requests collected via Written Discourse Completion Task (WDCT) to describe pragmalinguistic features used by Czech EFL learners in requests for borrowing objects. In both types of data, the findings reveal strong preference for conventionally indirect strategies and external modification, but considerable underuse of softeners within head acts. The written requests show significant reiteration with a great deal of modification devices outside head acts and a higher proportion of face-threatening features, such as expectations and direct strategies realized by want statements and imperatives. The WDCT requests tend to employ more face-saving strategies but show less variability in request realization. Consequently, awareness raising activities, helping Czech EFL learners fully understand the face-threatening nature of requests, as well as explicit metapragmatic treatment, focusing on strategic use of requests constituents, are recommended.

This article focuses on the frequency and accuracy of dependent prepositions which complement the adjectives in CZEMATELC 2017, a corpus consisting of 390 essays from the written part of the national school-leaving exam leading to certification of secondary education in the Czech Republic. The research findings reveal that the learners used adjectives from A1 to B2 level, according to the CEFR. A limited number of A1 adjective lemmas was considerably overused, but showed the lowest proportion of dependent prepositional complementation. As learners tended not to complement the adjectives at A2 -B2 proficiency levels either, adjective-preposition collocations frequently co-occurring in native speaker corpora were identified for further remedial work. In addition, corpus-based discovery-learning was proposed as a solution because it encourages awareness and gradually leads to learner autonomy.