The aim of this study is to shed light on the learnability regarding usages of three English articles ("a," "the" and zero) among Chinese EFL learners. To this end, three tasks were administered in a pool of 107 participants to examine the extent to which learners can accurately use articles across different semantic contexts…

This study analyzed semantic errors in the written compositions of first-year BSEd English students. 86 participants were asked to write a narrative essay and provide feedback on their writing difficulties and language learning needs. The collected data were statistically analyzed. Semantic errors were categorized into 8 types: code-switching,…

The purpose of the current dissertation is to map the relationships between first language (L1), writing quality, and syntactic complexity, accuracy, lexical complexity, and fluency (CALF) in second language (L2) writing. CALF are characteristics of language production that have been of significant interest in L2 writing research for the past few…

This study aims to: (i) describe the different meanings and contexts in which Arabic "dar" and "bayt" and English "house" and "home" expressions are used; (ii) compare "dar," "bayt," "house" and "home" expressions and give examples of expressions that are identical in…

It is well known that article usage is difficult for learners of English to acquire. Indeed, learner errors such as "*many of people" are not uncommon. A closer look at similar multiword sequences reveals why learners might have difficulty using articles properly in such expressions: No definite article is required in phrases like…

Conditional sentences are difficult for EFL students to understand because of their complexity in both form and function. By analyzing the performances and opinions among EFL learners, the pedagogical contribution may be beneficial for both EFL students and teachers. The use, errors, and perceptions of Thai EFL students regarding conditional…

This study aims to explore how corpus-based approaches can be used to address the distinctions of English near-synonyms effectively. Especially, it collected source data from the British National Corpus (BNC) and adopted Sketch Engine (SkE) as an analyzing tool to compare the near synonymous pair "damage" and "destroy" commonly…

Contrastive focus, conveyed by prosodic cues, marks important information. Studies have shown that 6-year-olds learning English and Japanese can use contrastive focus during online sentence comprehension: focus used in a "contrastive context" facilitates the identification of a target referent (speeding up processing), whereas focus used…

Collocations are one of the areas that create problems for EFL learners. Iranian EFL learners like other EFL learners encounter serious problems in producing collocations. The current study is an attempt to examine the Iranian EFL learners' ability to produce English collocations. It also attempts to identify the strategies that they usually adopt…

English teachers, especially those who teach summary writing to students with relatively lower proficiency in English face difficulty in teaching summary writing and while assessing their students' performances. In the classroom context, an analytic rubric is pedagogically more helpful than a holistic rubric because the teacher can confirm the…

Studies in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) indicate that the use of discourse markers (DMs) in the academic writing of second language learners improves the overall quality of these texts by contributing to their cohesion and comprehensibility (Saif Modhish 2012; Jalilifar 2008; Intaraprawat & Steffensen 1995). However, despite the…

One of the most researched challenges in learning Spanish is the acquisition and use of the past aspect, namely, the preterit and imperfect. L2 learners encounter this challenge due to differences in how native English and Spanish speakers view past events. Numerous studies on the Spanish past aspect have analyzed L2 learners' past aspectual…

The 23rd Annual Graduate Student Conference of the College of Languages, Linguistics & Literature (LLL) at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa was held on Saturday, April 20th, 2019. As in past years, this conference offered the students in the six departments across the college, East Asian Languages and Literatures, English, Indo-Pacific…

Oral narrative retells are rich sources of information for language development. Investigators collected English-language oral narrative retells during the fall and spring from 65 Spanish-English-speaking dual language learners (DLL) in kindergarten and first grade. Investigators examined transcripts of oral narratives for (a) inclusion 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…