This study intends to shed light on the most occurring grammatical and lexical (pragmatic) errors which students make in their compositions. For this purpose, 23 male and female undergraduate students from different majors were asked to take part in the present study. Each week, for four weeks, students were asked to write 4 compositions on…

Complement constructions vary significantly in English and Persian. There are more complementation structures in English than in Persian and a complement structure in Persian might have more than one equivalent in English. Producing complement structures (CSs) in English is very difficult for native speakers of Persian, especially in an EFL…

To address questions about information processing at the message level, pronoun errors of second language (L2) speakers of English were studied. Some L2 pronoun errors--"he/she" confusions by Spanish speakers of L2 English--could be due to differences in the informational requirements of the speakers' two languages, providing a window into the…

In this paper an updated overview of the main errors that Spanish students make when writing the English exam in the University Entrance Examination is provided. To do so, a Computer-aided Error Analysis (CEA) (Dagneaux, Denness & Granger, 1998) was conducted on a representative sample of the students who took the exam in June 2008 in Jaen,…

This article describes the effects of an interventionist form-focused course on the written English of first-year second language university learners. For two semester courses the form (or grammar) of the language was concentrated upon. During the first semester the use of correct grammar was focussed on intensively, while during the second…

The present study explores knowledge of Spanish grammatical gender in both comprehension and production by heritage language speakers and second language (L2) learners, with native Spanish speakers as a baseline. Most L2 research has tended to interpret morphosyntactic variability in interlanguage production, such as errors in gender agreement, as…

Within a Dynamic System Theory (DST) approach, it is assumed that language is in a constant flux, but that differences in the degree of variability can give insight into the developmental process. This longitudinal case study focuses on intra-individual variability in accuracy rates and complexity measures in Finnish learner language. The study…

Heritage speakers (HSs) of Russian in the United States form a very complex and diverse group of learners. Research in heritage linguistics has examined key parameters of the HSs' oral production. Important work has been done in heritage language (HL) pragmatics, morphology, and lexicon. However, very few studies have been conducted to…

Research on bilingual word recognition suggests that lexical access is nonselective with respect to language, i.e., that word representations of both languages become active during recognition. One piece of evidence supporting nonselective access is that bilinguals recognize cognates (words that are identical or similar in form and meaning in two…

In an attempt to explore effective instruction in the English as a Foreign Language (EFL) setting, this study investigated language errors identified by students and teachers in three different revision stages: self-revision, peer revision, and teacher revision. It gave the focus to the effects of the three different methods on learners' writing…

This research describes a method applied at a U.S. university in a third-year Russian language course designed to facilitate Advanced and Superior second language writing proficiency through the forum of argumentation and debate. Participants had extensive informal language experience living in a Russian-speaking country but comparatively little…

Using English as a global communicating tool makes Taiwanese people have to speak in English in diverse international situations. However, consonants and vowels in English are not all effortless for them to articulate. This phonological reduction study explores concepts about phonological (articulating system) approximation. From Taiwanese folks'…

Detailed research concerning the issue fluency, specifically relating to pauses, mean length runs, and fluency rates in Japanese EFL learners, is limited. Furthermore, the issue of tracking fluency gains has often been ignored, misunderstood or minimized in EFL educational research. The present study, which is based on six monologues conducted…

This study tries to answer some ever-existent questions in writing fields regarding approaching the most effective ways to give feedback to students' errors in writing by comparing the effect of error correction and error detection on the improvement of students' writing ability. In order to achieve this goal, 60 pre-intermediate English learners…

This study investigated first language (L1) influence on the acquisition of second language (L2) collocations using a framework based on Kroll and Stewart (1994) and Jiang (2000), by comparing the performance on a phrase-acceptability judgment task among native speakers of English, Japanese English as a second language (ESL) users, and Japanese…