The aim of the current study is to determine the distribution of verb valency-driven errors of secondary school students. To this end, this study is framed as a survey research. The sample of the study consists of 200 secondary school students in three schools with different socioeconomic levels. The content and teaching of morphological verb…

The present study employs regulatory focus theory (Higgins, 1997) to investigate the effects of L2 speakers' chronic regulatory focus on their L2 pragmatic versus grammatical awareness. It involved the participation of 121 Chinese students, who are English language learners, at a university in the United States. Haws et al.'s (2010) questionnaire…

First language (L1) has been an affecting factor in learning English as a foreign language (EFL) that causes negative transfer including in thesis writing. The effect can be observed by looking at English productive skills, more specifically written form, as well as thesis writing. This research investigated how L1 interfered student's English…

The present study was focused on acquisition of Chinese relative clauses (RCs) by second language (L2) learners and whether this acquisition was influenced by RC linguistic features, learners' Chinese proficiency levels, and their first language (L1). Data were gathered via a Chinese reading comprehension test, a grammaticality judgment task, a…

Writing proper English sentences poses a significant challenge for Arabic-speaking postsecondary students studying English as a Foreign Language (EFL) due to substantial differences between Arabic and English syntactic structures. This basic qualitative study explored the perceptions of Arabic-speaking EFL learners at an Arabian university…

Writing proper English sentences poses a significant challenge for Arabic-speaking postsecondary students studying English as a Foreign Language (EFL) due to substantial differences between Arabic and English syntactic structures. This basic qualitative study explored the perceptions of Arabic-speaking EFL learners at an Arabian university…

The current study endeavours to examine the learning and comprehension patterns of English aspect categories by Yemeni EFL students in the different levels of undergraduate program at the English department, faculty of arts at Sana'a University. The data of the study were collected from a total of 120 students covering the four levels of…

This study demonstrates how native and learner corpora can enhance modal verb treatment in English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) textbooks used in mainland China. Data analysis compares modal verbs in the textbook and native corpus by referring to distributional features, semantic functions and co-occurring constructions; and the analysis of the…

Developing a writer's voice is a challenging task for second-language writers who are new not only to the culture but also to the values associated with the target language. This study aims at exploring the writer's voice of Arabic-speaking learners who study English as a Second Language. The study mainly discusses the following question: Do L2…

Aside from learning the basic and common grammatical structures, English as foreign language learners ("hereafter EFL") have to be familiar with a wide range of lexical chunks called collocations. Being sensitive to collocations is the key of attaining a native-like fluency in English. The aim of this study is twofold: to explore the…

The article attempts to determine whether translation errors (in particular semantic and stylistic ones) in translator-training settings are predominantly the result of translation directionality, i.e. of the fact that the student translators are translating into their L2 and that their language competence in L2 is not as strong as in their L1, or…

The purpose of this research was to identify the common errors made in English writing by Malaysian Chinese primary year 6 ESL students and to determine the extent of the influence of the first language, Mandarin in ESL writing. The Mandarin language uses a logographic writing system while the English language is written in alphabetic scripts. The…

This research explored the most common writing errors of Science and Arts students of the Foundation year program at a Saudi University that hinder them from achieving their course goals, learning outcomes and becoming efficient writers. The importance of this research stems from the fact that, it is a comparative study that shows the differences…

This study draws from the tradition of Corpus Linguistics and attempted to determine the extent grammatical errors manifest in the business correspondence corpora composed by Sophomore BS Business Administration students of Pangasinan State University-San Carlos City Campus, located in San Carlos City, Pangasinan. The study was conducted within…

Negative transfer is a difficulty for Arabic-speaking students of English. This study juxtaposes eight categories of Arabic-to-English transfer errors with equivalent and near-equivalent errors in Arabic. It compares their error gravity as rated by teachers and students to discover whether there are any differences between teacher and student…