New wine in old skins? A corpus investigation of L1 syntactic transfer in learner language

An important strand of inquiry in second language acquisition (SLA) research is that devoted to the investigation of language learners’ successive approximations of the target language, referred to as interlanguage (IL) in the SLA literature. Similarly to the practice in other kinds of linguistic investigation, SLA researchers are concerned with empirical description of various kinds of interlanguage, with discovering correlations between traits in interlanguage and features of the language learning situation, with explaining those correlations, and finally with the practical application of the knowledge thus acquired to language pedagogy.