In our globalised world, the desire for the acquisition of English has led to increased research into the appropriate pedagogical approaches for learning and teaching the language. This manuscript focuses on the use of learners' mother tongue in the learning and teaching of English in an effort to identify ways in which cross-linguistic awareness-raising practices can be utilised to maximise EFL written performance. The study's targeted grammatical features were articles and plural suffixes of countable nouns and the study's EFL population was drawn from two Japanese universities. A quasi-experimental design was employed with an experimental group receiving cross-linguistic instruction and a control group continuing without cross-linguistic input. Statistical analyses demonstrate that the experimental group outperformed the control group. Although the empirical project is located within the context of Japanese tertiary education, the study is of international relevance as it deals with the perennial issue of how best to harness learners' familiar L1 for the improvement of their L2 within the frameworks of cross-linguistic instruction and awareness-raising.