This study examines the learning patterns of intermediate and advanced Korean learners in the acquisition of causative expressions according to their proficiency and the causative sentence type. We measured their grammatical knowledge using three types of grammaticality judgment tasks (GJTs) and self-paced reading tasks (SPRTs) differing in time…

Artificial intelligence revolution becomes a trend in most aspects of life. ChatGPT, an AI chatbot, has impacted various domains, including education and language learning. Enhancing writing abilities of ESL learners requires frequent writing practice and feedback, which ChatGPT can easily provide. However, ChatGPT's accuracy in identifying and…

The present study investigates whether or not Thai students' English writing skills can be improved by using an online grammar checker. First, typical syntactic errors made by undergraduate students majoring in English and English for Careers were examined. Secondly, possible reasons for syntactic errors in English writing in the light of Lado's…

Scope ambiguity arises when a sentence contains scope-bearing logical operators like quantifiers and negation (Fox, 2003). For instance, in English, the sentence 'Every horse didn't jump over the fence' can be interpreted as either 'None of the horses jumped over the fence' (surface scope) or 'Not all of the horses jumped over the fence' (inverse…

This study aims to analyze the use of tense and aspect in academic writing in engineering with a major focus on the use of simple past and present perfect. In general, one of the most difficult items for Japanese EFL learners is the appropriate use of tense and aspect. The previous literature pointed out that ESL learners are often confused about…

This article investigates whether explicit instruction can affect second language (L2) competence in the domain of English quantifier scope. An intervention study was conducted with L1-Mandarin L2-English learners in order to examine (1) whether these learners can learn inverse scope for the structure on which they are instructed…

Previous studies in the acquisition of clitic se in Spanish have focused on the syntactic processes needed to perform detransitivization. However, current approaches on event structure reveal that "se" encodes aspectual information which is crucial for its acquisition. We examine the use, intuition and interpretation of the aspectual…

Development of child language is tremendously complex, remarkable and wondrous. In a second language acquisition context, a child can acquire his second language in either acquiring both languages at the same time or learning the second language after mastering the first one. This present research is concerned to describe the syntactical…

This mixed-methods study uses concept maps to investigate the effects of an English pedagogical grammar course on the beliefs of teachers-in-training (n = 40) enrolled over a 2-year period at a private university in the U.S. Midwest. The course takes a functional approach to grammar based on systemic-functional linguistics and is typically the…

The results of a self-paced reading study with advanced German, Dutch and French second language (L2) learners of English showed that their online comprehension of early closure (EC) sentences which are initially misanalysed by native English speakers (e.g. "While John hunted the frightened rabbit escaped") was affected by whether or…

Background: English Second Language (ESL) learners have difficulty constructing sentences due to internalising information in their home language and thereafter translating it into English. Learners who have difficulty speaking English generally encounter problems writing it, which hampers their creative writing ability. Objectives: The purpose of…

Which conditional verb forms proved most difficult for Thai secondary school students to produce, and what errors resulted in written and spoken English, were studied. Data was collected from two tasks: 1) a gap-fill task by 68 twelfth-grade students in an integrated English program at a public high school in Bangkok, Thailand and 2) a spoken task…

Processing morphemic elements is one of the most difficult parts of second language acquisition (DeKeyser, 2005; Larsen-Freeman, 2010). This difficulty gains prominence when second language (L2) learners must perform under time pressure, and difficulties arise in using grammatical knowledge. To solve the problem, the current study used the tenets…

This study aimed at analyzing writing errors caused by the interference of the Thai language, regarded as the first language (L1), in three writing genres, namely narration, description, and comparison/contrast. 120 English paragraphs written by 40 second year English major students were analyzed by using Error Analysis (EA).The results revealed…

The present article provides an exploration of ultimate attainment in second language (L2) and its limitations. It is argued that the question of maturational constraints can best be investigated when the reference population is bilingual and exposed on a regular basis to varieties of their first language (L1) that show cross-linguistic influence.…