ExELL

Modal verbs in London’s climate change reports

2026-01-22T12:34:02+00:00

Given that London is exposed to the negative consequences of climate change, the Greater London Authority (GLA) has authored a number of climate change reports. However, little is known about linguistic and discursive means that characterise the GLA’s climate change reports. Attempting to bridge the present gap, this paper looks into the frequency and pragmatic use of the central modal verbs (for instance, “can,” “could,” “may,” “might,” etc.) in a corpus of the GLA’s climate change reports that are available to the public at large. By means of using a mix of quantitative and qualitative methodology, the paper shows that the central modal verbs “will,” “can,” and “should” are the most frequently occurring modals in the corpus, in which they play a range of pragmatic roles that are further analysed in the paper.

Chasing blood sugars: Metaphor, agency, and community knowledge in the Juicebox Podcast

2026-01-22T12:47:41+00:00

This paper examines how people with Type 1 Diabetes (T1D) use metaphor to construct agency, identity, and shared understanding within The Juicebox Podcast, an international platform for patient dialogue. It aims to show how figurative language mediates between data, emotion, and lived experience, transforming individual management into collective expertise. An embedded singlecase study was conducted on 81 podcast episodes (≈ 953,000 words). The analysis combined Conceptual Metaphor Theory (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980), the Discourse Dynamics Approach (Cameron, 2003, 2011), and Critical Metaphor Analysis (CharterisBlack, 2004, 2011, 2018) to identify salient metaphors and explore their cognitive, pragmatic, and ideological functions. Recurring metaphors conceptualise T1D as mathematics, a journey, a machine or broken object, and a personified agent. These patterns reveal how participants negotiate control, responsibility, and relationality while resisting biomedical hierarchies. The conversational medium enables real-time metaphor negotiation, fostering empathy and peer learning. Metaphor emerges as both a cognitive tool and a social practice: it translates quantifiable data into meaningful experience, builds community knowledge, and reinforces patient agency. The study demonstrates the value of qualitative, discourse-based methods for understanding chronic-illness communication in digital contexts.

Preparing to teach English in the age of English as a global lingua franca: Insights from Austria and Hungary

2026-01-22T12:58:54+00:00

English Language Teaching (ELT) and English language teacher education should nowadays reflect the global role of English while also taking local realities into account. The aim of this study is therefore to investigate the use of English in everyday life and the views on teaching English of student teachers in two central European countries, Austria and Hungary, by means of a questionnaire and semi-structured interviews. The findings indicate that the attitudes and views of student teachers of English are similar in the two countries. The one pronounced difference between the groups concerns the ideal of the native speaker (NS) teacher. The study shows promising avenues for future research and highlights the potential benefits of international cooperation in teacher education.

Iterative refinement: Using the generative AI chatbot Copilot as a feedback tool – Evidence from the ELT classroom

2026-01-22T13:11:18+00:00

Recent advances in artificial intelligence have opened the door to new applications in the teaching of writing. This article addresses a current research gap by combining automated AI-based feedback, provided by Microsoft Copilot, with teacher feedback and student self-correction. The present study investigates the effectiveness of AI-assisted feedback on EFL students’ writing skills. Data were collected from 41 university students. The feedback from Copilot and the subsequent revisions made by students were analysed using MAXQDA according to categories such as genre conventions, accuracy, lexical scaffolding, and content. Results suggest that considerable improvements in writing skills, especially in the areas of lexical scaffolding and line of argumentation, can be achieved through AI-assisted feedback.

Readability scores and content in simplification of authentic text

2026-01-22T13:21:28+00:00

The paper explores a more comprehensive approach to assessing text-level difficulty by combining quantitative readability metrics with qualitative analyses of content and context which help in reading comprehension and reading-for-translation. It compares two excerpts using eight readability scores formulas (Automated Readability Index, Flesch Reading Ease, Gunning Fog Index, Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level, Coleman-Liau Readability Index, Smog Index, Original Linsear Write Formula, Linsear Write Grade Level Formula) to explore how topic, content, and context may be used as indicators of text-level difficulty. Using authentic texts, specifically interviews from Humans of New York, the paper aims to demonstrate that other (extra)linguistic features must be considered beyond the numerical scores provided by readability formulas.