This study aims to examine how Chinese learners develop in their use and misuse of English modal verbs from Grade 7 to 9. Specifically, it examines form-function connections and explores the factors behind learners' development. The main focus is on the modal verbs "can," "could," "will," "would,"…

This study compares second-year Japanese university students' strategies to write kanji by hand with their strategies to produce the kanji characters on a computer, taking into account factors such as accuracy in writing, the amount of kanji used, the complexity of the kanji used, as well as how the characters used compare with the sequence…

This study aims at providing a comprehensive account of the types of errors produced by Arab students of English as a second language based on a multiple classificatory taxonomy developed for this purpose. The corpus providing the database for the study consists of three parts: (i) short tape-recorded interviews, (ii) translated sentences and…

Second language (L2) learners notoriously have trouble using articles in their target languages (e.g., "a", "an", "the" in English). However, researchers disagree about the patterns and causes of these errors. Past studies have found that L2 English learners: (1) Predominantly omit articles (White 2003, Robertson 2000), (2) Overuse "the" (Huebner…

Presents an analysis of errors in a 400-page corpus of German essays by American college students in second-year language courses showing that syntax is the most problematic area, followed by morphology. This study indicates that 80% of student errors are not of semantic origin and are potentially recognizable by a syntactic parser. (six…