Graded reading is one of the important ways of English learning. How to automatically judge and grade the difficulty of the English reading corpus is of great significance for precision teaching and personalized learning. However, the current rule-based readability assessment methods have some limitations, such as low efficiency and poor accuracy.…

This article provides a Poverty of Stimulus argument for the participation of a dedicated linguistic module in second language acquisition. We study the second language (L2) acquisition of a subset of English infinitive complements that exhibit the following properties: (a) they present an intricate web of grammatical constraints while (b) they…

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…

Linguistic complexity serves as an important measure of second language (L2) writing development. Complexity indices, however, rarely feature in the studies of learner languages other than English. Additionally, L2 writing studies have been criticized for the lack of consistency in defining proficiency. The current study addresses these gaps by…

How strongly a verb is associated with a construction plays a crucial role in the learning of argument structure constructions. We examined the effect of verb-construction association strength on second language (L2) constructional generalization by analysing L2 learners' production and comprehension of two complex constructions (i.e. ditransitive…

This study explored the differences in the writings produced by both male and female students in colleges of education in Ghana with respect to syntactic complexity. The study was based on a corpus of two hundred examination essays which were collected from two hundred students in Assin Fosu, Wesley and Presbyterian colleges of education who took…

The present paper explores the use of connectives in the persuasive discourse of 30 Tunisian third-year English majors and 30 Tunisian third-year Arabic majors. The study aims to look at the potential impact of Arabic rhetoric on Tunisians' EFL writing. A quantitative analysis of the students' Arabic and English essays on the same argumentative…

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…

Writing is one of productive skills and a way of conveying information considered to be the most complex and the most challenging skill for EFL English learners to acquire, hence many studies have been conducted on the revelation of the characteristic of writings of EFL learners and how to improve them. Among them, pronoun study has attracted…

While learners may have access to reference tools during second language (L2) writing, the latest developments in machine translation (MT), such as "Google Translate" requires examination as to how using the tool may factor into the second language learners' writing products. To this end, the purpose of this study was to examine how MT…

This article uses the clitic left dislocation (CLLD) construction in L2 Spanish to investigate whether generative SLA has valuable insights to contribute to language teaching. Although CLLD is a structure that is commonly used by native speakers, as reported anecdotally and in at least one corpus, we found that native-Spanish and native-English…

Spontaneous motion is one of the most basic event types, but different languages use varying patterns to express it. For example, English usually encodes path information in prepositional phrases or adverbial particles, while Korean maps path information onto verbs (Talmy, 1985). This study predicts that this typological difference would affect…

This paper will present a translation project with second-year bachelor students together with some observational data. The students firstly translated an academic abstract from Italian (their first language) to English by using the language resources they were acquainted with. Then they translated a second abstract by using a pre-compiled offline…

Machine translation (MT), especially Google Translate (GT), is widely used by language learners and those who need help with translation. MT research, particularly that which examines the quality and usability of the translation produced by the MT, only makes up a handful of studies. Moreover, only a few of them have looked at translation quality…

Based on writing produced by second language learners at different proficiency levels (CEFR A1 to C1), we adopted a usage-based approach (Ellis, Römer, & O'Donnell, 2016; Tyler & Ortega, 2018) to investigate how German and Spanish learner knowledge of 19 English verb-argument constructions (VACs; e.g., "V with n," illustrated by…