This study investigated the use of the amplifier very in high school English textbooks and native corpora by comparing its frequency distributions and collocation patterns. The native corpora, used as the reference of the study, were COCA and BNC, with their built-in sub-corpora further grouped into spoken and written corpora. The High School English Textbook Corpus (HSETC) was compiled from a total of 53 high school textbooks, with the spoken corpus (HSETC-S) from the texts in listening and conversation and the written corpus (HSETC-W) from the reading passages. Analyses using AntConc3.4.4 revealed no prominent differences between HSETC and reference corpora in the frequency of the amplifier very, while the written corpus (HSETC-W) had more occurrences contrary to the native corpora. The combination patterns and their occurrences of HSETC were slightly different from those of COCA and BNC with the gap increased with the spoken corpus (HSETC-S). Pedagogical implications and suggestions are made on ELT materials development and teaching practices.

This present study borrows the framework of action research as a tool for improving the quality of instruction in a university reading comprehension course by reflecting previous and current teaching practices, by incorporating students’ feedback and preferences, and by intervening students’ beliefs and strategy use. In doing so, the study examines the potential effects and problems of strategy-based instruction in the reading comprehension tasks that integrate TETE in collaborative, task-based learning environment. The students were assigned to the training of two different types of strategies in terms of language processing: paraphrasing vs. translation strategies in a TETE class. A total of 107 students from two reading comprehension courses were asked to take a TOEFL and answer a self-report questionnaire both at the beginning and at the end of the semester. While students’ use of metacognitive and cognitive strategies increased significantly, their use of translation strategies and beliefs about translation were persistent to change as the students seemed to regard translation an important tool for reading comprehension. A follow-up interview and course evaluation were also used for triangulating the quantitative findings. It is suggested that the role of L1 in language classes should be revisited and the English-only policy be reconsidered.