Incorporating counterarguments can be challenging for many student-writers, including those for whom English is a second or other language. In this study, we present findings that may lead to improvements in students' understanding of the benefits of integrating counterarguments. In our study, expert readers were presented with excerpts of student…

The present study attempts to identify difficulties that Japanese students encounter with metadiscursive nouns in writing second language (L2) argumentation essays. Metadiscursive nouns are abstract and unspecific nouns which can serve as cohesive markers by retrieving their meanings in the text where they occur. Using a selected number of nouns…

The first language (L1) use is vital to developing the quality of second-language (L2) writings. Establishing a clear argument with the logical flow in L2 can be a daunting task for learners with low L2 proficiency. To determine if L1 use is positively related to students' L2 texts, the researcher conducted a comparative study with 77 Japanese L2…

College English writing is one of the four basic skills in English learning, which can objectively reflect students' language ability. Whereas, English writing is considered to be the most difficult part to improve. As we can see, in the essays of the Chinese college students, there often appears Chinglish, correct in grammar but unauthentic in…

The aim of this study was an attempt to investigate the use of conjunctions in argumentative essays written by English as a Foreign Language fourth-year undergraduate Libyan students majoring in English at Omar Al-Mukhtar University in Libya. A corpus of 32 argumentative essays was collected from a sample of 16 students in order to be investigated…

The purpose of this study was to determine if first language interference does play a significant role in the use of articles in English by native speakers of Arabic as compared to other ESL learners. An error analysis was conducted on the use of English articles in essays taken from two groups of advanced ESL learners. The essays were composed by…

Idioms have long been regarded as problematic for L2 learners due to the arbitrariness of their meanings and forms. Traditional methods of teaching idioms focus on rote learning and memorization. Recent developments in cognitive linguistics research have considered idioms as analyzable expressions which are motivated by conceptual metaphors and…

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…