Dative alternation between prepositional and double object datives has been a popular topic in second language (L2) acquisition, but only few studies deal with discourse constraints such as the "given-before-new" principle, or given-new (GN) ordering, which describes the tendency to place given information before new information. The…

In many parts of the world, learners of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) or English as a Second Language (ESL) often face language difficulties and challenges in their performance in learning. These challenges and errors have multiple forms and causes, covering various language and skills aspects. This study focuses on the types of grammatical…

Purpose: Using a blocked cyclic picture-naming task, we compared accuracy and error patterns across languages for Spanish-English bilingual children with and without developmental language disorder (DLD). Method: Pictured stimuli were manipulated for semantic similarity across two (Same and Mixed) category contexts. Children's productions were…

This research analyzed adequacy of referential expressions in the narratives of bilingual and monolingual children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) and typical language development (TLD), aiming to shed light on the relative contribution of morpho-syntactic, discourse-pragmatic, and semantic constraints. Narratives were collected from 51…

The purpose of this research was to identify the common errors made in English writing by Malaysian Chinese primary year 6 ESL students and to determine the extent of the influence of the first language, Mandarin in ESL writing. The Mandarin language uses a logographic writing system while the English language is written in alphabetic scripts. The…

This article investigates the second language (L2) acquisition of two expressions of the semantic feature [definite] in Russian, a language without articles, by English and Korean native speakers. Within the Feature Reassembly approach (Lardiere, 2009), Slabakova (2009) has argued that reassembling features that are represented overtly in the…

Learning new vocabulary words in a second language is a challenge for the adult learner, especially when the second language writing system differs from the first language writing system. According to the lexical quality hypothesis (Perfetti & Hart, 2001), there are three constituents to word-level knowledge: orthographic, phonological, and…

In a study on L2 proficiency in writing, conducted among 84 Dutch university students of Italian and 75 students of French, manipulation of task complexity led in the complex task to a significant decrease of errors, while at the same time a trend for a lexically more varied text was observed (Kuiken and Vedder 2005, 2007, in press). Based on this…

This study focused on linguistic analyses used in the PIF Project (Project in Error Analysis, Interlanguage Studies and Contrastive Linguistics), an ongoing study of learner language and a project in foreign language pedagogy. For the project, 120 Danish learners of English were divided into 12 groups representing different Danish educational…

The text and accompanying workbook are designed to help second language teachers explore theories of language teaching and learning, deriving a set of hypothesized principles for classroom teaching based on the concept of proficiency and suggesting classroom techniques using them. The first two chapters outline and expand on both theoretical and…