This study aimed to analyze common syntactic errors found in the argumentative essays of third-year English major students at the Faculty of Foreign Languages, Van Lang University, Vietnam. Quantitative and qualitative methods were used to obtain data in this study. The quantitative approach involved counting and calculating the frequency,…

Polysemes are words that have multiple meanings. They exist in all languages as in Arabic [Arabic characters] and English "base," "plant," "system," "present," "left." A sample of Arabic and English polyseme translation errors was collected from homework-assignments and exams to explore the…

Prepositions form a hurdle for several EFL learners, Arabs in particular. One major catalyst is that the preposition systems in English and Arabic rarely correspond to one another. Most scholars who researched this area concentrated on the problem itself, rather than finding a successful remedy that can empower these students to masterfully handle…

The current study attempted to investigate English collocations used in written translation among fourth-year English majors at a university. The participants included forty-one fourth-year English-majored students and three translation teachers who are teaching English-Vietnamese translation courses in the university. To gather data, the…

It is well known that article usage is difficult for learners of English to acquire. Indeed, learner errors such as "*many of people" are not uncommon. A closer look at similar multiword sequences reveals why learners might have difficulty using articles properly in such expressions: No definite article is required in phrases like…

Collocations are one of the areas that create problems for EFL learners. Iranian EFL learners like other EFL learners encounter serious problems in producing collocations. The current study is an attempt to examine the Iranian EFL learners' ability to produce English collocations. It also attempts to identify the strategies that they usually adopt…

When it comes to L1 and L2 differences in second-language writing, some researchers are not fully convinced that there is a fundamental difference. However, when comparing L1 and L2 writing, many would agree that macro- and micro-level writing characteristics exist and overlap (Eckstein and Ferris 2018). This article identifies some of the…

This study identified and analyzed the common linguistic errors encountered by Linguistics, Literature, and Advertising Arts majors in their Thesis Proposal classes in the First Semester 2016-2017. The data were the drafts of the thesis proposals of the students from the three different programs. A total of 32 manuscripts were analyzed which was…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the categories of preposition errors made by EFL learners of elementary and intermediate proficiency levels by comparing the rate of preposition errors (addition, omission, substitution) to their total preposition uses in their essays, and by comparing the overall preposition usage of learners of both…

When readers search for misspellings in a proofreading task or for a letter in a letter detection task, they are more likely to omit function words than content words. However, with misspelled words, previous findings for the letter detection task were mixed. In two experiments, the authors tested the functional equivalence of both tasks. Results…

English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) textbooks and internet resources exhibit various formats and implementations of exercises on phrasal verbs. The experimental study reported here examines whether some of these might be more effective than others. EFL learners at a university in Japan were randomly assigned to 4 treatment groups. Two groups were…

Saudi students encounter many problems in writing skill as several studies revealed (e.g.Alhazmi, 2006; Alsamdani, 2010). Providing effective and useful feedback may help to overcome these challenges. Therefore, this study examines the effect of teachers' written corrective feedback on female Saudi EFL students' written essays and to what extent…

Writing has been assumed to be the most problematic language skill for ESL/EFL learners (Ting, 2003; Ong, 2011) and even for native speakers (Norrish, 1983). Apparently, Prommas and Sinwongsuwat (2011:77) stated that writing is more challenging than speaking since in written communication there is no extra means of help in terms of nonverbal…

Different genres of writing entail various levels of syntactic and lexical complexity, and how this complexity influences the results of Automatic Writing Evaluation (AWE) programs like Grammarly in second language (L2) writing is unknown. This study explored the use of Grammarly in the L2 writing context by comparing error frequency, error types…

This study is aimed at examining how students of selected Teacher Training Colleges handle one important aspect of sentence structure, i.e. "subordination". Data were collected from written scripts, and tests responded to by 150 participants from three selected colleges. These were analyzed by identifying both correct and incorrect uses…