Learner corpora of written texts from academic writing assignments provide a practical resource for students, particularly in fostering academic writing skills. One such corpus is the newly available ROGER (Corpus of Romanian Academic Genres), a bilingual comparable corpus containing learner discipline-specific academic writing data in Romanian…

Learning to use prepositions in English as a second language (L2) has been widely acknowledged to pose significant difficulties to learners, especially within metaphorical contexts. Difficulties relate to the complex distributional patterns of prepositions in discourse, namely, the variety of collocations requiring their use, as well as…

The present study was focused on acquisition of Chinese relative clauses (RCs) by second language (L2) learners and whether this acquisition was influenced by RC linguistic features, learners' Chinese proficiency levels, and their first language (L1). Data were gathered via a Chinese reading comprehension test, a grammaticality judgment task, a…

The English past counterfactuality is difficult for non-native learners to learn and understand due to cross-language discrepancies. Oftentimes, individuals unavoidably develop the interlanguage and this language system becomes fossilized regardless of the amount of exposed time and input. The purpose of the study was twofold: (a) to examine 126…

Despite the worldwide prevalence of multilingualism, the knowledge of the relationship between domain-general cognitive control and multilingual language control remains scant. Here we provide new insights into this issue by examining systematically how different components of inhibitory control (i.e., response inhibition and interference…

Current second language (L2) listening research has lacked detailed accounts of L2 listeners' difficulties comprehending texts comprising orthographically known lexis. In the current study, 15 first language (L1) Japanese English language learners of three English proficiency levels listened to sentences and a narrative text. A two-task diagnostic…

There have been many studies on first language interference towards learners' second or foreign language learning, but not many on the otherwise. This study investigates the effects of learning Japanese as a foreign language towards learners' first language use, Indonesian. The data for this qualitative study were obtained from five Japanese…

The articulation of the consonant sounds /[voiceless dental fricative]/ and /[voiced dental fricative]/ of the English language is a serious pronunciation problem for the Bechari students in general and EFL students at Tahri Mohamed University (UTMB) in particular. It was noticed that EFL students at UTMB manage to use the /t/ and /d/ sounds…

This paper reports the preliminary results of a study examining the role of structural overlap, language exposure, and language use on cross-linguistic influence (CLI) in bilingual first language acquisition. We focus on the longitudinal development of determiners in a corpus of two French-English children between the ages of 2;4 and 3;7. The…

Following a surge in the 1970s of research on the role played by the L1 in L2 acquisition, Ellis (1985) compiled ESL studies in which the percentage of L1-based errors was provided. He concluded that, according to available research findings, approximately one third of ESL errors appear to be due to L1 influence. For more than 30 years, that…

This qualitative study uses a semi-structured interview to investigate why Saudi learners stop learning a third language and whether these reasons are permanent or temporary. The participants were six female master's degree students who had experience learning a third language outside of formal education or informal settings. This study identifies…

Current research on cross-language transfer has focused primarily on literacy development. The present study extends the scope of existing research by focusing on argumentative reasoning, an important but under-research academic skill. A single-case study with a reversal design was conducted with four Chinese-English elementary students with the…

The present paper examined the errors occurring in the use of English in the linguistic landscape of Tehran, the capital of Iran. To this end, a total of 400 bilingual (Persian and English) and multilingual signs (Persian, English and Arabic) were culled from the landscape of the city in a course of eighteen months. Having analysed all the signs,…

The current study endeavours to examine the learning and comprehension patterns of English aspect categories by Yemeni EFL students in the different levels of undergraduate program at the English department, faculty of arts at Sana'a University. The data of the study were collected from a total of 120 students covering the four levels of…

Cognitive flexibility (switching) and control (inhibition) are among widely accepted cognitive advantages of bilingualism. Switch Cost (SC), i.e., the time difference to complete a switch versus non-switch task, is a construct for measuring the switching ability. The need to control the interference and switching between one's languages leads to…