This study investigated whether structural priming, as a reflection of error-driven learning mechanisms, could facilitate second language (L2) learning of the dative alternation in Mandarin. We sought evidence of learning from both priming and acceptability judgment data. Participants were 25 native speakers and 41 classroom learners (CLs). After…

Verb-marking errors such as "she play football" and "daddy singing" are a hallmark feature of English-speaking children's speech. We investigated the proposal that these errors are input-driven errors of commission arising from the high relative frequency of subject + unmarked verb sequences in well-formed child-directed…

There is substantial evidence that children's apparent omission of grammatical morphemes in utterances such as "She play tennis" and "Mummy eating" is in fact errors of commission in which contextually licensed unmarked forms encountered in the input are reproduced in a context-blind fashion. So how do children stop making such…

In recent years, there has been considerable interest in how to maximize learners' retention of multiword expressions. One technique that has been shown to be highly effective is the use of exercises such as those found in mainstream English as a second language textbooks. In the present study, we investigated how the execution of a gap-fill…

This study explored a way to help Japanese university students write longer essays while maintaining grammatical accuracy. Participants were three groups of students enrolled in a one-year EFL course in different academic years (N = 111), and the number of words they wrote in 30 minutes and the number of errors made per 100 words were compared. To…

The study examined the types of language errors made by learners in the English narrative essays. It also assessed the feedback techniques employed by teachers of English in the handling of language errors in the English narrative essays. A descriptive research design was employed to examine errors of English narrative essays of 181 form two…

This article examines the use of prompt-based lexical collocations in opinion essays by Vietnamese English as a foreign language (EFL) students. Fifty second-year English majors at a Vietnamese university wrote 100 opinion essays on two topics as progress tests. The AntConc programme (Anthony, 2020) was employed to identify the frequencies of use…