Studies in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) indicate that the use of discourse markers (DMs) in the academic writing of second language learners improves the overall quality of these texts by contributing to their cohesion and comprehensibility (Saif Modhish 2012; Jalilifar 2008; Intaraprawat & Steffensen 1995). However, despite the…

With the purpose of understanding plausible reasons as to why Hispanics learners of Spanish, or heritage language learners (HLL), tend to obtain lower grades than their non-Hispanic counterparts (L2) in the same courses, forty-four students of Spanish (17 HLLs and 27 L2s) provided written production once a week for a period of six weeks. The data…

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…