Background: Aphasia is characterized by difficulties in connected speech/writing. Aims: To explore the differences between the oral and written description of a picture in individuals with chronic aphasia (IWA) and healthy controls. Descriptions were controlled for productivity, efficiency, grammatical organization, substitution behaviour and…

This research was conducted to investigate how frequently Turkish advanced learners of English use the logical connector "thus" in their academic prose and to investigate whether it was overused, underused or misused semantically in comparison to English native speakers. The data were collected from three corpora; Corpus of Contemporary…

This paper reports the findings of a study aiming to reveal the recurring patterns of lexical, syntactic and textual errors in student translations of a specialized EU genre from English into Hungarian. By comparing the student translations to the official translation of the text, this article uncovers the most frequent errors that students made…

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…

Questions the universality of academic genres and discusses ways in which national rhetorical styles affect strategic choices in writing. Recommends that teachers of English for academic purposes should take seriously the role of raising the awareness of differences in rhetorical style among discourse community members. (42 references) (Author/CK)

Examination and comparison of the forms and functions of the passive structures used by native and second-language writers of English and Japanese yielded strong empirical proof of definite interplay and transfer of native language form and function to the target language, resulting in awkward, if not completely incorrect, sentences. (27…

The case study examined the development of English writing skills in a native Russian-speaking college student with no previous instruction in English as a Second Language. It drew on writing samples from 2 years of English language instruction. Theories of first and second language acquisition, especially in written expression, are analyzed in…