The paper aims at discussing the difficulties that students from French speaking countries who are pursuing their education in a Ghanaian university face in identifying English determiners. This is a qualitative study that analysed the difficulties that level 100 Francophone students who have French as a Second Language(L2) and English as a…

To become a native speaker, beyond obligatory rules, children need to learn systematic variation in the language, as it is present at all levels of language structure and is an integral part of linguistic knowledge. To give an example in English, speakers sometimes pronounce words ending in -ing with -in' (e.g., working vs. workin') depending on…

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…

In recent years, an array of studies has focused on 'translationese' (i.e., unique features that manifest in translated texts, causing second language (L2) writings to be similar to translated texts but different from native language (L1) writings). This intriguing linguistic pattern has motivated scholars to investigate potential markers for…

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…

The present study aimed to catalogue and compare usage patterns of verb-particle constructions (VPCs) in Modern Standard Arabic and English by native and learner writers. Building upon an analysis of a multi-genre monolingual Arabic corpus, use of both Arabic and English VPCs was explored in a bilingual L1 (first language) Arabic L2 (second…

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 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 study investigated second language distribution of Chinese connectives by tallying responses on a mini-discourse completion test taken by English-speaking learners with different language learning backgrounds and at different proficiency levels. The results showed that an underuse pattern underlay practically all Chinese connectives as a…

We examined case-marking variation in heritage Polish, Russian, and Ukrainian. Comparing heritage to homeland Polish and Ukrainian speakers, we found only a few types and a few tokens of systematic distinction between heritage and homeland varieties. A total of 6,291 instances of nouns and pronouns were extracted from transcribed conversations…