Based on the texts of ‘Management Discussion and Analysis on Financial Status and Business’ (MD&A) collected from 118 American corporate annual reports, this study investigated how the professional discourse is realized from the dimensions of text, genre, professional practice and professional culture, according to the framework of the Critical Genre Analysis (CGA) theory. It was found that (1) In the text dimension, lexicon features regarding vocabulary volume, vocabulary highlighting, readability and sentiment are unique to MD&As; (2) the genre of MD&As corresponds to a rhetorical structure of 3 moves and 10 steps; (3) the professional practice of MD&As is represented by three types of interdiscursivity, that is, shifting, mixing and embedding; (4) the professional culture of MD&As is embodied through identity enculturation, human-oriented value, cooperation awareness and self-serving manner. The results of this study help to better understand the realization of professional discourse and expand the application of CGA in professional practice. The findings presented herein are expected to enhance interdisciplinary research that relates language with corporate performance.

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Here we present a longitudinal study of collocation, highlighting bigram development in L2 writing over a five-month span. Our analysis is primarily based on the learner corpus, a collection of 570 untimed L2 writing which is benchmarked against a reference corpus, the BNC. We applied two measures, the mean MI and the average t, computed from the learner corpus, to quantify both overall performance and individual variation. Interviews with three learners were conducted to explore factors contributing to the dynamism of bigram development. Our study found that, across the five times of writing, (1) learners’ command of bigrams, those of high quality in particular, is fairly unstable; (2) inter- and intra- individual variations account for the individual differences in managing bigrams over time; and (3) learners’ perception of collocation and their allocation of resources add to the dynamism of bigram development. Our study implies that teaching collocation from a dynamic perspective deserves increased attention. It is advisable to consider individual differences when allocating resources in teaching collocation.

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