English as a Foreign Language (EFL) freshman students at the College of Languages and Translation received direct instruction in adjective-forming suffixes, then they took an immediate and a delayed test. Error analysis showed that 36% of the responses were left blank or the subjects duplicated the stimulus word. In 32% they mismatched the word…

The Malaysian government has long recognized the significance of mastering the English language among its citizenry. The government has planned, and subsequently, implemented many policies to ensure Malaysians master the English language. Although civil servants have a strong desire to master the English language to perform their duties more…

This study investigates the roles and functions of directives in academic texts mainly produced by Indonesian college students. Sixty-two (62) imperatives, 11 "it is + Adjective + to"-clauses, and 7 modals of obligation are searched for in academic texts taken from the Corpus of State University of Malang Indonesian Learners English…

This article investigates whether explicit instruction can affect second language (L2) competence in the domain of English quantifier scope. An intervention study was conducted with L1-Mandarin L2-English learners in order to examine (1) whether these learners can learn inverse scope for the structure on which they are instructed…

Language is a magical key that human beings hold in their hands to open the door of communication. To succeed in communication, formal links are one of the aspects of language that need to be known and used in discourse in addition to the contextual factors (Cook, 1992). Hence, systematic exposure to them is essential for satisfactory language…

Grammatical compression and implicitness have been proven as characteristics of academic writing (Biber & Gray, 2010, 2016), but they are an underexplored area of research particularly in academic ESL (English as a second language) writing. In this study, we explored the dependent phrases that most and least characterize academic ESL writing…

In second language teaching and learning, making errors is inevitable as language learning requires a lot of cognitive effort and concentration on the part of learners. Understanding the types and frequencies of student errors is, therefore, an important issue for ESL and EFL teachers to determine how students can be helped to improve their skills…

Referential expressions such as pronouns are frequently used in conversations, and native speakers seem to understand who these expressions refer to effortlessly. Although the process of pronoun resolution seems to be easy, interpretations of pronouns are dependent on various sources of information from the discourse including morphosyntax (e.g.,…

Based on a mega corpus, The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), this study aims to determine the most frequent adjectives used in academic texts and to investigate whether these adjectives differ in frequency and function in social sciences, technology, and medical sciences. It also identifies evaluative adjectives from a list of a…

This study investigates the role of age of first exposure in the acquisition and processing of English articles in an EFL setting. Fifty advanced Korean learners of English participated in a grammatical acceptability judgment task and a self-paced reading task. The participants were divided into two groups depending on the initial age at which…

The study investigates whether differences in metalinguistic information contained in written corrective feedback (CF) mediate its effectiveness for second language (L2) development. To address this, metalinguistic CF was distinguished into three types in terms of how specific its metalinguistic information was. They were then compared among…

Variationist researchers are increasingly adopting intersectionality approaches to analyse identity-linked practice. However, the field of sociolinguistic variation is yet to embrace the full ramifications of intersectionality as an analytical framework. The current paper offers a new method for integrating intersectional approaches into…

This article explores the online processing of singular he and she and singular they by learners of English to discover whether singular they presents a processing problem for non-native speakers (NNSs). It also examines the extent to which such issues may vary as a function of L2 proficiency at B2, C1, and C2 levels. A self-paced reading study…

Complex nominal groups are common in technical English (i.e., English for Specific Purposes, ESP) since they allow lexical items to be tightly packed into a clause which consequently leads to increased lexical density and syntactic ambiguity. In this paper, we analyse (complex) nominal groups in technical English. We propose that, in addition to…

In this article, we address the issue of targeted instruction on interpretive contrasts between native and second-language grammatical meanings. Such mismatches are predicted to create challenges for learners. We illustrate this with French and English pronouns. In French, clitic pronouns (le, la) point to human as well as inanimate referents,…