There has been plenty of observational evidence displaying that L2 English learners whose L1 do not have article systems undergo persistent difficulties. It is known that functional categories of grammar are especially difficult for L2 learners, and the Korean language does not have a functional equivalent to English articles. The current study…

Language is inherently variable, and learner language is particularly variable. The variationist paradigm considers learner language a heterogeneously variable yet inherently rule-governed system. Specifically, learners' alternation between native-like and nonnative-like variants of a variable or invariable target native speaker (NS) form…

The present study investigates the Thai quantifier 'laay' ([Thai characters omitted]) and its two major English lexical equivalents: 'several' and 'many', using data from an English-Thai parallel corpus, the Thai and British National Corpora. An examination of the parallel corpus reveals that the quantifier 'laay' has a broad semantic property as…

The purpose of this research is to investigate the variable production of English Object-Experiencer (OE) psych predicates among 80 L1 Thai EFL first-year university students. Psych verbs are notable for posing difficulty for learners due to a unique property that violates Grimshaw's (1990) Thematic Hierarchy. The participants were given a cloze…

Usage of definite and indefinite articles is known to vary across different varieties of English, especially in the outer circle. As a semantic/pragmatic category, definiteness is notoriously slippery to define -- is it uniqueness, familiarity, inclusiveness or identifiability? Literature has shown that the lack of an agreed definition can…

This study examined how students of English as a foreign language (EFL) with different first language (L1) backgrounds use interactional metadiscourse markers in argumentative writing. Specifically, to explore unique patterns of metadiscourse features that reflect context and development, the essays written by Chinese, Japanese, and Korean EFL…

Referential expressions such as pronouns are frequently used in conversations, and native speakers seem to understand who these expressions refer to effortlessly. Although the process of pronoun resolution seems to be easy, interpretations of pronouns are dependent on various sources of information from the discourse including morphosyntax (e.g.,…

This study aims to exemplify how language teaching can benefit from learner corpus research (LCR). To this end, this study determines how L1 and L2 English speakers with diverse L1 backgrounds differ with respect to adjective amplification, based on the "International Corpus of Learner English" (ICLE) and the "Louvain Corpus of…

This paper presents the results of a multidimensional analysis to investigate stylistic patterns and their communicative functions in language teaching research articles. The findings were that language teaching research articles contained six stylistic patterns and communicative functions. Pattern I consisted of seven salient positive features…

This semester-long study was designed to benefit developing Second Language Acquisition (SLA) instructional methods, specifically honing French language instruction, creating a foundation on which to explore the connection between input frequency during instruction and aural comprehension of difficultly acquired forms. Concurrently, five current…

This article reports the findings of sociolinguistic research investigating the use of second-person singular pronouns in Costa Rica. The study was carried out onsite and involved 132 interviewees from all seven provinces of the country. These subjects reacted to scenarios in which they had to choose their preferred pronoun of use…

Linking adverbials are important for creating textual cohesion in both written and spoken English. While there are reference grammar books describing the usage patterns of linking adverbials and studies investigating learners' difficulties in using these cohesive devices, there is little discussion on how to effectively teach and learn them. By…

Previous research on reference tracking has revealed a tendency towards over-explicitness in second language (L2) learners. Only limited evidence exists that this trend extends to situations where the learner's first and second languages do not share a sensory-motor modality. Using a story-telling paradigm, this study examined how hearing novice…

Monolingual and parallel concordancers have both been found to benefit second-language (L2) grammatical development. However, the relative benefits of these two concordancer types remains unclear. The present study compares learning outcomes and learners' perceptions of a monolingual English (Corpus of Contemporary American English, COCA) and a…

While it is a well-known fact that speakers of article-less mother tongues, such as Polish, experience problems with articles in English, this study seeks to investigate the problem from a different perspective. Namely, it poses the question of whether the correct use of the article system of the L2 is indeed a purely grammatical task (as it is…