This study adopted a corpus-based, contrastive approach to lexical complexity in the academic writing of first language (L1) and second (L2) postgraduates. Lexical scores were extracted using Complexity Analyzer from Corpus Arab Proficient Users English (CAPUE), consisting Saudi academics’ dissertations applied linguistics. To investigate potential differences between this corpus native speaker...

This study examined the nature of morphology-based cross language transfer from Korean to reading and writing acquisition in English and Chinese among Korean-speaking 9th graders who had studied English for seven years and Chinese for one year as foreign languages. One hundred and sixty students were administered a set of comparable Korean (L1), English (L2), and Chinese (L3) tasks tapping into...

There is insufficient rigorous research examining which features of EFL/ESL learners’ writing can be improved through their awareness/knowledge of collocation. This study, therefore, addressed this issue and examined the effect of this awareness on Iranian EFL learners’ writing performance with respect to the specific features of each writing sub-component (i.e., content, organization, vocabula...

This special issue of Linguistics and the Human Sciences offers a collection of original contributions to the study of languages in contrast from discourse, corpus, and functional perspectives. The papers were presented at the Sixth International Conference on Contrastive Linguistics, held in Berlin 29 September–3 October 2010, in the context of two panels: ‘Discourse analysis and contrastive l...

Numerous studies have been conducted to ascertain the relationship between first language (L1) and second/foreign (L2). However, it is unclear how vowels consonants affect a foreign speaker pronounces Indonesian. Thus, objective of this study was Indonesian that were incorrectly correctly pronounced by Lao men Japanese women. This descriptive qualitative in nature. Following data collection via...

Alveolar flaps are non-contrastive allophonic variants of alveolar stops in American English. A lexical decision experiment was conducted with Japanese learners of English (JE) to investigate whether second-language (L2) learners are sensitive to such allophonic variations when recognizing words in L2. The stimuli consisted of 36 isolated bisyllabic English words containing word-medial /t/, hal...

Error Analysis is one of the major topics in the field of second language acquisition research. Errors are an integral part of language learning. The learner of English as a second language is unaware of the existence of the particular system or rule in English language. The learner’s errors have long been interested for second and foreign language researchers. The basic task of error analysis ...