This study applied a Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) model to explore how 27 first-year university students in two different English proficiency groups improved their lexicogrammatical choices and metafunctions for writing analytical exposition essays during a 15-week course. To explore how "the teaching learning cycle" influences…

The Interface Hypothesis (Sorace, 2000) developed in line with the Minimalist theory of grammar (Chomsky, 1995 et seq.) supports the view of L2 acquisition that syntactic properties are acquired early while the acquisition of interface properties is delayed. One of the interface properties is inflectional morphology on English verbs, which…

The present study investigated the interface between explicit instruction and computer-assisted language learning (CALL) in an effort to reduce plural marking errors among Japanese EFL learners. The instruction involved raising contrastive awareness of cross-linguistic and conceptual features, and was delivered via an online medium. A total of 180…

This article proposes an approach to explicit grammar instruction that seeks to develop metalinguistic knowledge of the L2 and raise L2 learners' awareness of their L1, which is crucial for the success of second language acquisition (Ellis 1997, 2002). If explicit instruction is more effective than implicit instruction (Norris and Ortega 2000),…

The present paper explores the issue of writing in a foreign language as a pedagogic process that may produce a radical subjective transformation. Drawing on Bernstein's notions of the "pedagogic device" and "discursive gap," the paper explores the epistemic make-up of language and the way it has been normalised by academic and…

Second language writers need to develop the ability to revise their writing independently of third party advice; thus, it is important that teachers devise methods by which to promote habits of self-directed revision. This quasi-experimental study investigates three classroom activities designed to encourage students to independently revise essays…

This study extends research on written corrective feedback (CF) by investigating how timing of CF affects grammar acquisition. Specifically, it examined the relative effects of synchronous and asynchronous CF on the accurate use of the hypothetical conditional structure. Participants were 68 intermediate-level students of English at a university…

There have been many studies on the acquisition of English unaccusative verbs which make use of learner corpora. Most of these studies have so far concluded that even advanced learners of English ungrammatically passivize unaccusative verbs and produce sentences such as "*The accident was happened" and "*The mobile phone was…

Despite having studied English for some 33 months, the students at the private junior high school in Japan described in this paper had never before been asked to write original compositions in the language. The researchers undertook a quasi-experimental pilot study in which the 156 (n= 156) participants were each asked to write four compositions,…

The present study investigated the effects of varying lengths of overseas experiences on 37 Japanese students' English writing ability and motivation over 3.5 years. The students were observed at the beginning of their first year and in the middle of their second, third, and fourth years at their university. During the 3.5-year observation period,…

Multifaceted Rasch measurement was used in the present study with 91 student and 4 teacher raters to investigate how self- and peer-assessments work in comparison with teacher assessments in actual university writing classes. The results indicated that many self-raters assessed their own writing lower than predicted. This was particularly true for…

The current study examined 24 Japanese university students' processes of negotiation in conditions of self revision and of peer revision about their English as a foreign language (EFL) writing. Analyzing their negotiation episodes and text changes, I categorized within a common coding scheme the types of negotiation from (a) think-aloud protocols…

While the noticing function of output has been increasingly researched by a number of applied linguists, the nature of such noticing and its effect on subsequent learning in the context of EFL writing have not been fully investigated. In a four-stage writing task consisting of output, comparison, and two revisions, this study examined what…

Japanese university English-as-a-Foreign-Language (EFL) students have problems structuring English sentences, especially complex compound sentences. This study reviewed undergraduate EFL student writings from three Japanese universities to identify common sentence structure aberrations. Four types of sentence structure aberrations were examined:…

A survey of 34 professors teaching English as a second language in 20 Japanese universities elicited information about common errors in student writing. In open-ended questions, respondents identified 40 student error types, which were grouped into 18 categories. The most common problem category was sentence development, and other high-frequency…