An integrated approach for examining instructional language: combining manual coding, corpus analysis, and syntactic profiling
Applied Corpus Linguistics, cilt.6, sa.3, 2026 (ESCI, Scopus)
- Yayın Türü: Makale / Tam Makale
- Cilt numarası: 6 Sayı: 3
- Basım Tarihi: 2026
- Doi Numarası: 10.1016/j.acorp.2026.100249
- Dergi Adı: Applied Corpus Linguistics
- Derginin Tarandığı İndeksler: Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI), Scopus
- Anahtar Kelimeler: Corpus linguistics, ELT materials, Instructional language, Natural language processing, Research methodology
- Ankara Yıldırım Beyazıt Üniversitesi Adresli: Evet
Özet
Instructional language, the register through which task instructions are delivered in ELT materials, has received little sustained theoretical attention. Existing research uses manual content analysis, corpus-linguistic description, or computational syntactic profiling, and each of these captures only part of the register. This study proposes an integrated analytical approach that combines the three traditions to investigate instructional language more comprehensively. The approach was demonstrated on all task instructions in a widely used B2 level ELT coursebook (N = 621). A twenty-four-variable coding scheme was applied manually to identify functional categories, with inter-rater reliability established through weighted kappa. Corpus-linguistic keyword analysis was conducted using AntConc, and syntactic complexity was profiled with NLTK and TAASSC. Correlations between manually-coded and computationally-derived measures were also examined. Imperative instructions dominated the corpus. Interrogative instructions formed a distinct and more syntactically complex register associated with metalinguistic vocabulary. Scaffolding relied mostly on resource redirection and multimodal cues instead of elaborated verbal guidance. Manual coding, corpus analysis, and syntactic profiling captured complementary aspects of instructional language, and the modest cross-method correlations suggested that the analytical components measured related but non-identical dimensions of the register. The study contributes an integrated analytical protocol for investigating instructional language that combines manual coding, corpus linguistics, and NLP-based syntactic profiling. The protocol is transparent and reproducible, and it is designed for application to other instructional corpora.