The paper looks at several conceptual questions in contemporary cognitive lexicology and considers how recent AI tools can be brought into language teaching in a way that does more than automate routine tasks. At its centre is a premise that lexical meaning cannot be separated from the cognitive mechanisms through which speakers organise and transmit knowledge. From this angle, the relationship between mental structures and linguistic form becomes more than a theoretical point and serves as a practical guide for analysing how meaning is built and negotiated. The discussion turns to the discursive-cognitive direction in cognitive lexicology, which has increasingly emphasised the need to move towards a more grounded, communicative-pragmatic interpretation of lexical and metaphorical phenomena across different languages and cultures. The study pursued two aims: to trace the conceptual metaphors and frames that emerge in Russian, English, and Kazakh, and to assess how AI-based tools contribute to students’ cognitive awareness when working with such material. To address these questions, the project combined quantitative methods (corpus queries, embedding models, and statistical testing) with a qualitative reading of students’ reflections and of the metaphorical patterns that surfaced in their work. The distinctive contribution of the study lies in the creation of a cognitively oriented AI platform together with a set of teaching modules that show how AI can act as a mediator between languages. These modules allow learners to explore cross-linguistic conceptual structures, observe culturally specific mappings, and see more clearly how metaphor, categorisation, and framing condition lexical meaning. The approach provides a practical framework for integrating AI into language teaching and supports the development of metalinguistic awareness and intercultural understanding.

The article adopts a cross-disciplinary perspective on foreign language instruction for non-linguistic students, with particular emphasis on the axiological aspects of developing their professional speaking and writing skills in a foreign language. The theoretical framework of the study integrates contemporary achievements in axiology, cognitive psychology, social studies, and language education into a coherent teaching methodology, designed to reflect the lifestyles, modes of thinking, preferences, values, and cultural practices of today’s youth. The study is aimed at identifying the correlation between professional values and foreign language communicational skills and prove its positive effect on the formation of student’s professional speech culture through a foreign language course titled ‘Professional Speech Culture in the Native and Foreign Language’ for undergraduate science students. The course is tailored to the learners’ specific linguistic, cultural, and professional needs, focusing on oral and written communication in both L1 and L2 to support their future academic and professional success. The course incorporates authentic academic materials in both languages, collaborative activities, and grammar and vocabulary practice, with special attention given to the analysis and categorisation of specialised discourse units and markers within a cross-cultural professional context. The methodology was implemented and tested through a three-stage pedagogical experiment conducted among Physics and Mathematics students at the State University of Education during the 2024–2025 academic year. The results of current and final assessment procedures confirmed the effectiveness of the proposed methodology: students in the experimental group demonstrated greater fluency, fewer grammatical and lexical errors, and more substantial progress in both oral and written communication compared to the control group. Thus, we can state that the proposed methodology makes a valuable contribution to the theory and practice of foreign language instruction.

Reporting verbs (Rverbs) play a crucial role in academic writing, and they are used quite differently across disciplines. This study aimed to showcase how engineering graduate students use Rverbs to establish an authorial voice in writing their PhD theses. Data were collected from 122 doctoral candidates in six engineering fields at PSG College of Technology. This cohort participated in a workshop on voicing and revoicing process in academic writing during which a survey was distributed to the attendants. The survey data was supplemented by a follow-up interview (n=12) for a better understanding of using Rverbs in engineering disciplinary writing. Findings revealed linguistic challenges related to syntactical and semantic structures. The participants stated that they use a limited set of Rverbs in writing their theses. Some of these verbs were overused while others were underutilised without awareness of the rhetorical functions of such verbs. The study indicates that Rverbs in the engineering genre are primarily employed to present information, reflecting a strong emphasis on objectivity, unlike soft sciences, which typically allow greater flexibility for authors to argue and engage critically with sources. Although this study focuses on engineering writing, it acknowledges a growing trend toward integrating hard and soft sciences through interdisciplinary approaches, which calls for reconciling Rverb practices across these fields.

In a globalised environment where social media saturates daily life, bilingual EFL learners move between languages with an ease that has made translanguaging feel almost habitual. Yet we still know surprisingly little about the kinds of identities they fashion for themselves in these online spaces, or about the pressures and motivations that tug these practices in different directions. This study set out to trace how Indonesian EFL learners negotiate their identities through translanguaging on social media and what conditions those choices. Drawing on Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis, we worked with eight learners and talked through their experiences in a series of semi-structured interviews. An inductive reading of the dataset brought five broad themes into view, supported by twelve more finely grained subthemes. What emerged was a set of identities that shifted across contexts: participants saw themselves, at various points, as developing English users, as part of particular groups, as individuals asserting personal voice, and as members of Generation Z whose communicative habits online form a recognisable part of their generational identity. Their translanguaging practices were prompted or coloured by several factors, among them emotional expressiveness, the pull of social trends, and a sense of how different audiences might receive their posts. The study considers what these patterns might mean for supporting digital translanguaging in EFL settings.

The article examines evidential adverbs that occur in initial positions of reactive utterances within a corpus of formal dialogic exchanges. These adverbs serve as markers of epistemic stance, revealing how speakers present themselves as bearers of knowledge or belief in institutional communication. The analysis shows a consistent tendency among respondents to activate evidential forms that lend explicitness and certainty to their statements, reinforcing the perceived factuality of what is being asserted. In most contexts, the use of these adverbs signals the speaker’s wish to clarify the origin or reliability of information and, at the same time, to demonstrate personal commitment to the propositional content of the response. The study combines corpus-based quantitative procedures with a qualitative pragmatic interpretation of the data, tracing how particular adverbial markers correlate with degrees of epistemic commitment. The findings indicate that epistemic adverbs represent the most frequent and functionally diverse category within reactive discourse, fulfilling both evidential and interpersonal roles. Their distribution and pragmatic load are discussed in terms of the communicative strategies by which speakers manage truth, certainty, and stance in dialogic interaction. The results carry implications for how epistemic positioning can be understood within reactive discourse. They show that evidential modality affects the pragmatic texture of a response – how speakers present themselves in relation to what is known, assumed, or inferred. In this sense, the study helps clarify how epistemic stance operates as a key mechanism in managing interactional balance.

Ellipsis has been widely examined in conversational and media discourse, yet its structural realisation in corporate communication has received little systematic attention. Existing research has tended to treat ellipsis either as a syntactic deletion phenomenon or as a cohesive device, leaving unexplored how omission operates in highly regulated, efficiency-oriented forms of interaction. To address this gap the present study analyses the structure of answer ellipsis in English corporate discourse with the aim of identifying recurrent positional models and specify the communicative effects associated with each. The empirical material was drawn from MeetingBank: A Benchmark Dataset for Meeting Summarisation, comprising approximately 200 authentic corporate meeting transcripts. Elliptical answers were manually extracted, reconstructed, and classified according to the position of the omitted element relative to the overt constituent. Two stable structural configurations were identified: the pre-positional model, in which the unspoken predicate precedes the visible noun phrase and foregrounds outcomes or decisions, and the post-positional model, in which the predicate follows the overt constituent and foregrounds the actor or responsible participant. The findings demonstrate that ellipsis in corporate discourse functions as a regular and context-sensitive structural mechanism reflecting the genre’s pragmatic orientation toward clarity, efficiency, and accountability. The study contributes to linguistic theory as it introduces positional modelling as a tool for examining the interface between syntax and discourse and offers a methodological framework for future corpus-based research on ellipsis in institutional communication.

Gila A. Schauer’s Intercultural Competence and Pragmatics arrives at a moment when the fields of applied linguistics and language pedagogy are still negotiating how to articulate the relationship between pragmatic knowledge and the broader, and often vaguely invoked, notion of intercultural competence. Although both constructs have been circulating for decades, they have often moved alongside one another without fully meeting: one rooted in the close study of how people use language in context, the other gradually taking on ideas from education policy, cultural studies and social psychology. Schauer’s study brings these two strands into direct conversation by shifting the focus to those who arguably mediate this relationship most actively – modern foreign language teachers working in higher education. The book is anchored in a substantial survey of 133 instructors teaching fifteen languages, a group whose daily classroom decisions influence learners’ expectations of what it means to use a language appropriately in intercultural settings. What Schauer offers is an empirically grounded account of how teachers themselves interpret the essence and conceptual frameworks of intercultural competence, which linguistic elements they fold into it, and how explicitly they perceive its ties to pragmatic competence. This teacher-centred perspective proves particularly valuable given that, for many students, university language courses are the final stage of formal instruction before they find themselves negotiating meaning in multilingual and multicultural contexts without institutional support.

Artificial intelligence is now part of many ordinary routines, often in ways that people barely notice, and it has started to find its way into university work as well. For students, this means that some familiarity with AI is becoming less of an advantage and more of an expectation. Much of this comes down to knowing enough about AI to use it sensibly in their studies, or at least not feeling lost when it appears in academic tasks. In this study, that basic level of knowledge – enough to work with AI without relying on it blindly – is taken as the starting point for the study of AI readiness. The investigation centres on students in the English for Professionals programme, which is an applied-linguistics degree. The study looks at how prepared these students feel to handle AI in the course of their academic work. Using a cross-sectional design, 291 students from different academic years completed a structured questionnaire measuring four dimensions of AI readiness: cognition, ability, vision, and ethics. The results show that AI readiness generally increases with academic progression, with second- and third-year students reporting higher levels of ability, cognition, and vision. The ethics dimension, however, remains low across all groups. Gender differences were minimal. The findings indicate a need for earlier inclusion of AI-related material and a more sustained focus on AI ethics in the applied linguistics curriculum. More broadly, the programme requires considerable revision to incorporate computational linguistics and AI-related topics, ensuring that applied linguistics students leave with the level of preparation now expected in professional contexts where AI routinely plays a role.

As genre modelling advances, describing research articles rhetorical structures becomes crucial. Though secondary to empirical studies, scoping reviews shape scholarly communication by framing analysis and setting epistemological benchmarks. Their introductions act as conceptual lenses, defining interpretive frameworks. However, most rhetorical models, designed for empirical articles, appear to be inadequate for scoping reviews. We propose a genre-based model of rhetorical structure for introductions to scoping reviews. Drawing on a corpus of 40 introductions from Q1 Education journals (2020–2025), we conduct step-by-step move analysis to reconstruct a three-move, nine-step schema tailored to the genre’s analytical mission. The methodological framework employs step-by-step rhetorical annotation, focusing on rhetorical functions, linguistic realisations, and deviations from normative structural expectations. Results show two core steps reproduced in ≥ 97% of the corpus (1.1 ‘scope nomination’ and 2.2 ‘task as reconstruction’), while epistemological positioning (3.2) is comparatively infrequent and often implicit. Median Jaccard of 0.63 indicates a teachable core with optional, stance-related elements; clustering reveals three stable structural profiles. We synthesise functionally efficient phrasings for each step and demonstrate linguistic correlates of stance (e.g., evaluative and hedging verbs/adverbs) relevant to Step 3.2. The model clarifies how introductions to scoping reviews motivate synthesis, frame analytical lenses, and set reconstruction boundaries. Pedagogically, it supports move-aware writing instruction; computationally, it provides patterns for automatic rhetorical tagging and metadiscourse-aware feature design. This study thus contributes to the formalisation and operationalisation of academic discourse analysis.