This corpus-based study investigates lexical richness in English writing by Chinese senior high school students. Lexical uses in 303 compositions were compared across three grades in terms of lexical sophistication, variation, density and errors. Timed compositions were sampled from Writing Corpus of English Learners, and the sample sizes of three…

As one type of the most extensively used sentences, English questions are must-learn grammatical structures for learners of English as a foreign language (EFL). However, it is commonly seen that English learners across proficiency levels produce ungrammatical English questions. To determine the source of learners' erroneous production, we…

Many of the students of the English Language & Communication (ELC) department at UCSI University are Malaysian Chinese (MC) students and International Chinese (IC) students from China. All the courses in the university are conducted in English. Currently, there is still lack of research done on grammatical errors among these students who…

Translation teachers have long experimented with various methods to help students improve their translation competence. This study approaches the issue by developing an assessment framework based on error analysis and a translation grading system, with the aim of identifying the most common and frequent errors committed by students in their…

This study aims to examine how Chinese learners develop in their use and misuse of English modal verbs from Grade 7 to 9. Specifically, it examines form-function connections and explores the factors behind learners' development. The main focus is on the modal verbs "can," "could," "will," "would,"…

This study investigated the erroneous use of the high-frequency verb TAKE by the Chinese college learners of English as a foreign language (EFL), aiming to identify the similarities and differences between Chinese EFL learners, aimed at finding out more effective ways for the teaching and researching of the high-frequency verbs. Corpus-based…

This study extracts the comments from a large scale of Chinese EFL learners' translation corpus to study the taxonomy of translation errors. Two unsupervised machine learning approaches are used to obtain the computational evidences of translation error taxonomy. After manually revision, ten types of English to Chinese (E2C) and eight types…

We investigated whether consensus-based test translation review procedures can be used effectively in cultural contexts with high social stratification. We staged two test translation review panels in China -- where social stratification may potentially inhibit individuals' ability to express opinion and disagreement. We adapted a consensus-based…

This paper investigates the various roles found in the EFL classroom, such as native English-speaking teachers, learners' parents, and study habits outside of the classroom. During the study, the development of learners' reading comprehension, vocabulary, and writing ability was measured over the course of one semester in a weekly 2-hour English…

This case study analyzed data from an asynchronous written mediated exchange between a native speaker and nonnative speaker of English. Three methods of analysis-error analysis, propositional complexity (idea units), and qualitative analysis were used to analyze learner performance over time. The results from these methods were visualized and…

This paper investigated a large number of errors found in the topic-based writings of Chinese EFL learners, especially provided an analysis on frequent errors, to find useful pedagogical implications for English grammar teaching and writing instruction in Chinese EFL setting. Students' topic-based writings were examined by the author. The findings…

Because of the increasing international image of China, the translation of public signs in city has become the very important issue. From the point of view of cross-cultural communication, the public signs have crucial influence on the image of the city, even for the whole China. However, there exist many translation errors of the public signs in…

This study aims to further the understanding of first language (L1) lexical transfer within the context of L1 Chinese learners of English. Previous transfer research has often focused on a small subset of grammar errors, without examining how lexical choices, especially in collocations and multi-word units (MWU), might have been influenced by L1…

Acquisition of English grammatical morphology was examined in five internationally adopted (IA) children from China (aged 0;10-1;1 at adoption) during the first three years' exposure to English to determine whether acquisition patterns were characteristic of child second language (L2) learners or monolingual first language (L1) learners. Results…

This paper investigated a number of common ungrammatical patterns that were found in Chinese EFL leaners' free writings, in order to find useful pedagogical implications for English grammar teaching in EFL setting, especially in China. The corpus of writing data is examined by the author together with a native English teacher. Our findings suggest…