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Purpose: This study examines online speech processing in typically developing and late-talking 2-year-old children, comparing both groups' word recognition, word prediction, and word learning. Method: English-acquiring U.S. children, from the "When to Worry" study of language and social--emotional development, were identified as typical talkers (n = 67, M[subscript age] = 27.0 months, SD = 1.4; Study 1) or late talkers (n = 30, M[subscript age] = 27.0 months, SD = 2.0; Study 2). Children completed an eye-tracking task assessing their ability to recognize both nouns and verbs, to use verbs to predict an upcoming noun's referent, and to use verbs to infer the meaning of novel nouns. Results: Both typical and late talkers recognized nouns and verbs and used familiar verbs to predict the referents of upcoming nouns, whether the noun was familiar ("You can eat the apple") or novel ("You can eat the dax"). Late talkers were slower in using familiar nouns to orient to the target and were both slower and less accurate in using familiar verbs to identify the upcoming noun's referent. Notably, however, both groups learned and retained novel word meanings with similar success. Conclusions: Late talkers demonstrated slower lexical processing, especially for verbs. Yet, their success in using familiar verbs to learn novel nouns suggests that, as a group, their slower processing did not impair word learning in this task. This sets the foundation for future work investigating whether these measures predict later language outcomes and can differentiate late talkers with transient delays from those with language disorders.

Previous research has shown a strong positive association between right-handed gesturing and vocabulary development. However, the causal nature of this relationship remains unclear. In the current study, we tested whether gesturing with the right hand enhances linguistic processing in the left hemisphere, which is contralateral to the right hand. We manipulated the gesture hand children used in pointing tasks to test whether it would affect their performance. In either a linguistic task (verb learning) or a non-linguistic control task (memory), 131 typically developing right-handed 3-year-olds were encouraged to use either their right hand or left hand to respond. While encouraging children to use a specific hand to indicate their responses had no effect on memory performance, encouraging children to use the right hand to respond, compared to the left hand, significantly improved their verb learning performance. This study is the first to show that manipulating the hand with which children are encouraged to gesture gives them a linguistic advantage. Language lateralization in healthy right-handed children typically involves a dominant left hemisphere. Producing right-handed gestures may therefore lead to increased activation in the left hemisphere which may, in turn, facilitate forming and accessing lexical representations. It is important to note that this study manipulated gesture handedness among right-handers and does therefore not support the practice of encouraging children to become right-handed in manual activities.

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 involves subject-verb agreement at the syntax-morphology interface. Previous studies have revealed that for learners of L2 English, acquiring third person singular "-s" is harder than regular past "-ed" due to the absence of meaningless morphemes in L1. However, one question has been disregarded: Where in a clause are these morphemes inserted more successfully? Given that subordinate clauses are more complex than main clauses, this study examines the clause-sensitivity of L2 inflectional morphology. 44 Japanese university students learning English as L2 were asked to complete a grammaticality judgment test and write an essay about a specified topic. The learners' inflection pattern was surveyed through the test scores and text analysis of the essays. Results show that "-s" tends to be omitted regardless of clause types, but "-ed" is omitted more frequently in complement clauses than main clauses. These are due to negative L1 transfer on L2 inflectional morphology and our findings imply the importance of clauses as meaningful units in L2 grammar instructions.

Purpose: Children with cochlear implants (CIs) are more likely to struggle with spoken language than their age-matched peers with normal hearing (NH), and new language processing literature suggests that these challenges may be linked to delays in spoken word recognition. The purpose of this study was to investigate whether children with CIs use language knowledge via semantic prediction to facilitate recognition of upcoming words and help compensate for uncertainties in the acoustic signal. Method: Five- to 10-year-old children with CIs heard sentences with an informative verb (draws) or a neutral verb (gets) preceding a target word (picture). The target referent was presented on a screen, along with a phonologically similar competitor (pickle). Children's eye gaze was recorded to quantify efficiency of access of the target word and suppression of phonological competition. Performance was compared to both an age-matched group and vocabulary-matched group of children with NH. Results: Children with CIs, like their peers with NH, demonstrated use of informative verbs to look more quickly to the target word and look less to the phonological competitor. However, children with CIs demonstrated less efficient use of semantic cues relative to their peers with NH, even when matched for vocabulary ability. Conclusions: Children with CIs use semantic prediction to facilitate spoken word recognition but do so to a lesser extent than children with NH. Children with CIs experience challenges in predictive spoken language processing above and beyond limitations from delayed vocabulary development. Children with CIs with better vocabulary ability demonstrate more efficient use of lexical-semantic cues. Clinical interventions focusing on building knowledge of words and their associations may support efficiency of spoken language processing for children with CIs.

This article hypothesizes that one of the reasons for Chinese EFL learners' rigid use of nominalization and insufficient use of hedging in academic writing can be attributed to the unclear understanding of the relationship between these two expressions. The aim of the research is to first prove and then explain the possible co-occurrence of nominalization and hedging in scientific papers, with the intention of deepening Chinese EFL learners' understanding of the reasons for their possible co-occurrence. After a corpus-assisted statistical analysis of sixty abstracts selected from leading scientific journals written by native English speakers, it's been found that there is indeed a tendency for nominalization and hedge to co-occur both at the textual-level and clause-level. Besides, a tentative analysis is conducted to explain the pattern of their co-occurrence. It has been observed that the number of nominalized expressions in clauses is inversely correlated with the probability degree of hedging, and the position of nominalization in the clause (theme or rheme) influences the generalization level of hedging. The research results could shed light on the pedagogic approach in improving Chinese EFL learners' academic writing by making evident that the elusive Grammatical Metaphor competence could be enhanced by deepening the understanding of the inter-relationship between seemingly different in-congruent expressions like nominalization and hedges.

Sixty-eight undergraduate translation students received direct instruction in the features of news headlines and news stories. A week later, they took a test that required them to identify the syntactic and lexical features of a sample of news headlines and news stories, supply deleted word, and substitute punctuation marks, infinitives, and block language by their meanings. Results showed that 75% of the subjects could identify initials, 72% recognized surnames and infinitives used instead of the "future", 51% recognized deleted articles, 49% identified block language, 21% identified passive without agent, 19% recognized instances were verb "to be" was deleted, and 6% identified ellipted words. Incorrect responses revealed syntactic and semantic/lexical problems, lack of knowledge of current world events, and insufficient ability to apply features of newspaper language to news headlines and news stories unseen before. To help students read and comprehend news headlines and news stories, pedagogical implications are given.

The complexity of the linguistic environment in Cameroon raises the question of context and its role in the acquisition of another language. This paper draws a dichotomy between learners in such contexts considered rural and those regarded as urban or cosmopolitan. Using the irregular verb as a yardstick, an evaluation of the acquisition of irregular verb patterns by 80 final year primary school learners from 2 contexts in the Northwest Region of Cameroon was done. Oral and written tests were administered to check learners' acquisition of verb inflectional categories, verb tenses and general written and oral productions. The findings reveal similar trends in the acquisition of inflectional categories and verb tenses by learners in both contexts and divergent trends in general oral and written productions. For instance, learners in both contexts had similar challenges using the Vs, Ved and Ven inflections with a very low average frequency of 26% and with a high frequency of 67.2 % for the Ving and Vo inflections. Though learners in the urban centres had higher degrees of efficiency in oral productions, their counterparts in the rural areas had more challenges in verbal as against written productions. The paper concludes that second language acquisition is not a consequence of a unilateral context but a result of a plethora of other factors both within and without the learning environment with evident pedagogic implications for stakeholders in the second language acquisition industry.

Background: Augmented reality has been widely applied in various fields, and its benefits in language learning have been increasingly recognized. However, the investigation of effective learning behaviours and processes in augmented reality learning environments, taking into account temporality and analysis of differences in learning behaviours between learning achievements from the perspective of learning strategies, is still a topic that requires further research. Objectives: The goal of this research is to explore effective learning processes in AR language learning environments and learning behavioural patterns of learners with different performance levels via LA taking into account temporality. Methods: We used the learning application designed and developed in previous studies to understand the learning process and behavioural patterns of acquiring Japanese compound verbs with augmented reality. Lag sequential analyses were conducted to analyse the learning behavioural transitions using learning data. Additionally, frequent sequences were analysed using frequent sequence mining to compare the learning behavioural patterns of learners with different learning performances. Results and Conclusions: We investigated the learning process and behavioural patterns and discussed the language learning strategies employed in the augmented reality learning environment. The results indicated that learners primarily performed strategies of performed expressions, recombining, and structured reviewing in AR compound verb learning activities. Furthermore, the results revealed the different types of strategies applied by different learning performance learners, whereby the low group learners used the least variety of strategies, and the middle and high group learners employed repeating and deductive reasoning strategies that were not followed by the low group.

This study investigates the use of high-frequency cognitive verbs - think and believe - in Turkish L2 learners' interlanguage, both in terms of their verb senses and complementation patterns. In line with this purpose, a Sentence Production Task consisting of context-independent items and a Sentence Completion Task consisting of context-dependent items were developed by using the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). These tasks were applied to 182 students at four different vocabulary levels. The findings indicated that the learners showed a strong tendency to use verb think in the verb sense of expressing a personal opinion and in the complementation pattern of [zero that-CL]. Along with these results, the acceptability levels of learners' productions with the verbs think and believe showed differences. The learners had problems with the use of believe more than they had with the verb think. The findings have pedagogical implications by shedding light on the learner preferences for verb complementation patterns and senses. The findings also provide an insight into the learners' performance on the syntactic and semantic properties of the cognitive verbs through context-dependent and independent tasks.

Purpose: Children with developmental language disorder (DLD) have well-documented verb learning difficulties. In this study, we asked whether the inclusion of retrieval practice during the learning period would facilitate these children's verb learning relative to a similar procedure that provided no retrieval opportunities. Method: Eleven children with DLD (M[subscript age] = 60.09 months) and 12 children with typical language development (TD; M[subscript age] = 59.92 months) learned four novel verbs in a repeated spaced retrieval (RSR) condition and four novel verbs in a repeated study (RS) condition. The words in the two conditions were heard an equal number of times, in the context of video-recorded actors performing novel actions. Results: Recall testing immediately after the learning period and 1 week later revealed greater recall for novel verbs in the RSR condition than for novel verbs in the RS condition. This was true for both groups, and for immediate as well as 1-week testing. The RSR advantage remained when children had to recall the novel verbs while watching new actors perform the novel actions. However, when tested in contexts requiring the children to inflect the novel verbs with "--ing" for the first time, the children with DLD were much less likely to do so than their peers with TD. Even words in the RSR condition were only inconsistently inflected. Conclusions: Retrieval practice provides benefits to verb learning--an important finding given the challenges that verbs present to children with DLD. However, these benefits do not appear to automatically translate to the process of adding inflections to newly learned verbs but rather appear to be limited to the operations of learning the verbs' phonetic forms and mapping these forms onto associated actions.

When the written language that children learn to read and write is distinct from the oral language they acquired as their mother tongue, they may encounter substantial challenges. The linguistic distance between two varieties of the same language could have an impact on the literacy acquisition journey. The present study focuses on Arabic, a prototypical case of diglossia, where the distance between the spoken and standard varieties has been intensively examined phonologically and lexically. However, a paucity of studies has addressed their morphological distance. This study takes one step in this direction by describing, analyzing, and quantifying the distance of morphemes in content words from spoken Palestinian dialect (SPD) to Modern Standard Arabic (MSA). It is the first to map this distance by form and function in the three predominant systems: derivation, inflection, and clitics in nouns and verbs. All morphemes were arranged on an axis targeting four main levels that varied in the extent of the morphological distance from SPD to MSA, beginning with 'identical' morphemes (same form, same function), followed by 'strongly overlapping' morphemes (morpho-phonological difference in form, same function), then 'partially overlapping' morphemes (different form, same function), and ending with 'unique' morphemes (unique form, same/different function). The mapping showed significant findings indicating that most morphemes are non-identical between SPD and MSA, comprising 81.4% of the total. Most of these non-identical morphemes (64.9%) were assembled to the 'partially overlapping' and 'unique' levels, appearing mainly in the verb inflection category. Implications for the possible impact of morphological distance on reading acquisition are discussed.

Relative clauses have long been examined in research on first (L1) and second (L2) language acquisition and processing, and a large body of research has shown that object relative clauses (e.g. 'The boy that the girl saw') are more difficult to process than subject relative clauses (e.g. 'The boy that saw the girl'). Although there are different accounts of this finding, memory-based factors have been argued to play a role in explaining the object relative disadvantage. Evidence of memory-based factors in relative clause processing comes from studies indicating that representational similarity influences the difficulty associated with object relatives as a result of a phenomenon known as similarity-based interference. Although similarity-based interference has been well studied in L1 processing, less is known about how it influences L2 processing. We report two studies -- an eye-tracking experiment and a comprehension task -- investigating interference in the comprehension of relative clauses in L1 and L2 readers. Our results indicated similarity-based interference in the processing of object relative clauses in both L1 and L2 readers, with no significant differences in the size of interference effects between the two groups. These results highlight the importance of considering memory-based factors when examining L2 processing.

Previous studies in the acquisition of clitic se in Spanish have focused on the syntactic processes needed to perform detransitivization. However, current approaches on event structure reveal that "se" encodes aspectual information which is crucial for its acquisition. We examine the use, intuition and interpretation of the aspectual features constraining the clitic se in Spanish with physical change of state verbs and psychological verbs in declarative sentences, and in a set of "why"-questions. Twenty Spanish heritage speakers (HSs), 20 English-speaking L2 learners of Spanish, and 20 Spanish monolingual speakers participated in the study. Results showed a clear advantage among the HSs over the L2 learners across conditions. In general, the use of se with change of state verbs at advanced levels of proficiency seems to be harder to acquire than with psych verbs due to the aspectual morphological marking in L1 English. Interestingly, L2 learners and HSs were less sensitive to the [+inchoative] feature with psych verbs in "why"-questions. Results are also discussed in terms of the age of onset of bilingualism as an affecting factor on the acquisition of the aspectual values of inchoative "se."

Heritage speakers (HS) have been shown to experience difficulties with inflectional morphology (particularly with irregular morphology) and to frequently overapply regular morphology. The present study seeks to get further insight into the inflectional processes of HS by investigating how these are generalized to nonce words in language production, the first study of this kind for heritage Turkish. We specifically examined morphological generalization processes in the Turkish aorist which -- unusual for this language -- includes both regular and irregular forms. A written elicited-production experiment containing nonce verbs with varying degrees of similarity to existing verbs was administered to Turkish HS and native monolingually-raised Turkish speakers (MS). We also explored how well a formal model that was trained on a large lexical corpus of Turkish matches the human speakers' performance. Our main finding is that HS employ both similarity-based and rule-based mechanisms for morphological generalization of the Turkish aorist, with subtle differences to the way these mechanisms are applied by Turkish MS.

This study examines the quantity and quality of child-directed speech across household activities in a socioeconomically diverse sample of Argentinian Spanish-speaking children, an understudied population. Thirty children (mean: 14.3 months) and their families were audio-recorded for four hours. The middle two hours were transcribed and analysed using computerised language analysis (CLAN) to: (a) calculate lexical quantity (tokens) lexical diversity (VOCD) and syntactic complexity (MLU); (b) identify nouns and verbs. The procedures also involve the coding of regulative versus referential utterances and ongoing activities with defined spatial and temporal boundaries --feeding, play, booksharing, grooming and household chores -- as well as calculating the proportion of 21 types of concrete nouns and action verbs. Regression analysis showed effects of SES and type of activity on: (a) the quantity, lexical diversity and syntactic complexity of child-directed speech; (b) the proportion of referential and regulative utterances addressed to the child; (c) certain degree of semantic regularity in word-activity associations; and (d) an effect of SES on a variety of nouns and verbs (e.g. toys; utensils). These results highlight qualitative differences in input across daily activities and the contribution of SES to variance in lexical diversity and word semantics. Results provide evidence needed to inform public policies responsible for the promotion of early childhood language development and education.

Studies have shown that test-takers tend to use keyword-matching strategies when taking listening tests. Keyword-matching involves matching content words in the written modality (test items) against those heard in the audio text. However, no research has investigated the effect of such keywords in listening tests, or the impact of gazing upon these keywords on listening test scores. Thus, this study examined whether test-takers' performance on a listening test can be explained by their gaze behaviors across three types of content words in the written modality: nouns, verbs, and adjectives. Using eye-tracking technology, this study measured the gaze behavior of 66 listening test-takers during reading content words in test item stems. Using linear mixed effect model, binary probit regression, and multinomial logistic regression, we found that test-takers' performance was predicted by gaze behavioral measures on content words. Among the content words, fixating on nouns in written test items had the most significant role in predicting test performance, followed by adjectives and verbs. By shedding light on how keywords in test items are attended to by test-takers and the relationship between keyword-matching and listening test performance, this study has provided significant evidence for the overwhelming role of reading in listening tests. Implications for test score interpretation are discussed.

Source-based writing is a complex and frequently occurring task type in postsecondary education. While a large body of research now exists investigating source-based student writing, few studies have used corpus-based methods to investigate L1 student performance on source-based writing tasks and to connect this performance to the holistic quality of source use. The current study investigates the relationship among functional dimensions of source use, operationalized for each text (N = 150) as factor scores from a previously conducted multidimensional analysis, and the quality of source use through a simultaneous multiple regression. Then, using the two functional dimensions that emerged as significant predictors of the holistic quality of source use, a qualitative analysis was conducted to investigate how the most strongly loading variables on those two functional dimensions may be contributing to the effectiveness of source use. Implications are discussed as they relate to the development of source-based L1 student writing.

This study quantifies second language (L2) knowledge of aural single words and aural phrasal verbs (PVs) and investigates their relationship with L2 listening comprehension. An aural first language (L1) meaning recall test format was used to measure knowledge of 81 single-word and 81 PV target items (with equivalent frequencies of occurrence) among 224 Chinese tertiary-level learners of English as a Foreign Language (EFL). Participants' L2 listening was measured with a version of the Test of English for International Communication (TOEIC). Participants' aural single-word and aural PV knowledge were compared, and their relationship with L2 listening were examined using correlation and multiple regression analysis. These analyses also included comparison between participants of relatively high (Independent Users) and relatively low (Basic Users) L2 listening proficiency. Although regression modelling showed that single-word test scores were most predictive of L2 listening comprehension, it also showed that PV test scores made a substantial contribution to the model's predictive capacity. In combination, single-word and PV test scores could predict 42.7% of the variance observed in the listening scores. The theoretical and practical implications of these results are discussed.

Dialogic reading during shared book reading between adults and children is an effective way to promote vocabulary acquisition. However, there is limited research on what strategies parents are spontaneously using during book reading sessions, which are important to understand for optimizing parent training in dialogic reading. The current study investigates what strategies parents are currently using to teach vocabulary to their children and what parts of speech and tier of vocabulary they choose to discuss. The current study recruited low-income parents and their preschool-age (42-65 months), typically developing children from Head Start classrooms in the United States. Twenty-seven adults filmed themselves at home reading "Giraffes Can't Dance" by Giles Andreae and Guy Parker-Rees to their child, given the instruction to read as they normally would. The videos were coded looking at a dialogic reading framework: CROWD and PEER. Child behaviors and the vocabulary discussed were included in the coding. Results show that although there is a large amount of variability between parents in their use of strategies during shared book reading, in general, parents are using very few dialogic reading strategies to explicitly teach vocabulary. However, parents' use of dialogic reading strategies was significantly correlated with child extratextual talk. When they did provide instruction, parents discussed mostly tier 1 nouns and verbs, rather than tier 2 words which are necessary for academic success. These results reinforce the need for parent training on interactive reading strategies.

The ability to express oneself through written language is a critically important skill for long-term educational, emotional, and social success. However, despite the importance of writing, English Learner students continue to perform at or below basic levels which warrants additional efforts to identify specific areas of weakness that impact writing quality. To that end, this study aims to describe the effect of verb accuracy on writing quality ratings of 5th-grade written expository samples. This study examines the responses of 243 students in the 5th grade who differed in English proficiency. The sample included 112 English Learners and 131 English-proficient students. Verb error patterns in written samples by English Learner students are described and compared to the patterns of their monolingual English-proficient peers. Group differences were examined in verb accuracy, types of verb errors, and overall grammaticality. A regression analysis was used to examine verb accuracy as a predictor of writing quality. Findings showed that English Learner students demonstrated more verb errors than their English-speaking peers and the total number of verb errors was a significant predictor of writing quality ratings.

Embracing gamification in education is, indeed, inevitable, especially with the arrival of the millennials whose lives are greatly influenced by digital technologies and favor learning in a fun, interactive, and engaging environment. Quizizz, a gamified educational tool, has gradually gained the interest of researchers and stakeholders in education as this application has presented positive outcomes towards learning with the integration of unique game elements such as leader boards, memes, and quiz reports, each of which can assist in enhancing engagement and provide a positive learning experience in a non-stressful setting. This research was conducted to explore the influence and effects of Quizizz in enhancing young Malaysian ESL learners learning irregular English verbs. This quasi-experimentally designed research gathered data from a sample of 30 primary pupils using a pre-test/post-test approach. The data attained were analyzed descriptively using sample t-tests to explain the increment of the pupils' performance on the post-test associated with learning via Quizizz. The results are discussed both in terms of overall pupil performance involving the use of Quizizz and in terms of gender comparison to examine any significant difference in performance between male and female users of Quizizz.

This study was conducted to identify Iranian EFL teachers' perceptions regarding the most serious written errors made by young adult EFL learners, along with the most effective types of written corrective feedback to deal with them. Data were collected from 253 Iranian EFL teachers through a questionnaire made by the researchers and were analyzed using descriptive statistics. The results showed that the most serious errors perceived by the teachers were verb form and verb tense, and word order driven by psychological verbs. The most effective feedback types to treat these errors were (a) direct, non-negotiated feedback and (b) indirect, negotiated. The findings contribute to the research concerning the most frequently noticed errors by EFL teachers along with the most frequently employed corrective feedback strategies to address them.

The study examined the types of written corrective feedback given by second language writing teachers on Taiwanese secondary school students' collocation errors. First, the written corrective feedback that teachers provided on learners' word choice errors was examined to uncover the types of feedback provided. Then, analysis focused on verb-noun collocations to draw attention to how students had been receiving different types of written corrective feedback from teachers on a single collocation error type. Results showed that some sentences tagged as including word choice errors only contained rule-based errors. Furthermore, for verb-noun collocation errors, teachers chose to provide indirect and direct feedback almost equally at the expense of metalinguistic feedback. Based on the results, we suggested options for second language writing teachers when providing feedback on word choice errors.

Functional connectivity studies have demonstrated that creative thinking builds upon an interplay of multiple neural networks involving the cognitive control system. Theoretically, cognitive control has generally been discussed as the common basis underlying the positive relationship between creative thinking and intelligence. However, the literature still lacks a detailed investigation of the association patterns between cognitive control, the factors of creative thinking as measured by divergent thinking (DT) tasks, i.e., fluency and originality, and intelligence, both fluid and crystallized. In the present study, we explored these relationships at the behavioral and the neural level, based on N = 77 young adults. We focused on brain-signal complexity (BSC), parameterized by multi-scale entropy (MSE), as measured during a verbal DT and a cognitive control task. We demonstrated that MSE is a sensitive neural indicator of originality as well as inhibition. Then, we explore the relationships between MSE and factor scores indicating DT and intelligence. In a series of across-scalp analyses, we show that the overall MSE measured during a DT task, as well as MSE measured in cognitive control states, are associated with fluency and originality at specific scalp locations, but not with fluid and crystallized intelligence. The present explorative study broadens our understanding of the relationship between creative thinking, intelligence, and cognitive control from the perspective of BSC and has the potential to inspire future BSC-related theories of creative thinking.

Morphological knowledge has been identified as a significant sub-skill in bilingual listening comprehension, and lexical researchers consider listening comprehension an essential means for language learning. The current research attempted to examine the crucial four derivative word classes (adverb, adjective, verb, and noun) to represent knowledge of morphology. The objective was to find out if morphological knowledge can predict students' listening comprehension and investigate the correlation between the four derivative word classes and listening comprehension. The participants of the present study comprised 171 English as a foreign language (EFL) undergraduate university students. This study was quantitative in nature and a multiple regression analysis was administered. Two tests of English language proficiency were conducted: listening comprehension and morphological knowledge. The findings of the research showed that there were positive and significant correlations between all four major derivative word classes and listening comprehension. In addition, verb derivative form not only had the most significant, positive correlation with the dependent variable, (i.e., listening comprehension), but it was also the most statistically significant contributing predictor of listening comprehension.

The aims of the present study are: (1) to examine the methodological issues on the development of context-dependent and context-independent task development process in investigating the cognitive verb complementation patterns in English; and (2) to design and administer task items to analyze the learners' recognition and production levels in the use of verb complementation patterns and their related verb senses. The paper adopted an exploratory sequential mixed methods design and followed a three-phase procedure covering the creation of task items and the development of instruments, administration of context-dependent and context-independent tasks to 200 Turkish EFL learners and conducting the reliability and validity measurements based on the interpretation of the results. Based on the validity and reliability analyses results, the tasks designed for factive and nonfactive cognitive verb complementation analysis were found to be acceptable. Thus, this study offers valid and reliable context-dependent and context-independent tasks to examine the learners' competence at the recognition level and their performance at the production level in the use of cognitive verb complementation patterns and their related verb senses in the English language. These tasks provide a novel application by shedding light on the developmental relationship between the learners' state of knowledge regarding verb complementation and their vocabulary knowledge and address both the learners' comprehension and production of cognitive verbs. In this sense, a number of implications are suggested for pedagogical purposes and further inquiries.

While the significance of corpus-based research in the teaching of foreign language and native language is increasing, the need for such studies is also increasing accordingly. The priority of the vocabulary taught in language education are identified through corpus-based studies in line with the international criteria set in the relevant field. Corpora and sub-corpora consisting of many layers, written and oral, improve the efficiency of the teaching/learning process for both teachers and learners. Corpus-based studies aiming to create word lists to be taught at the basic level are significant in this context to meet the needs of learners and teachers. In this study, 7 different A1 level textbooks and about 114-thousand-word data set used in teaching Turkish as a foreign language were examined based on the relevant corpus, and the type/token ratios of the sub-corpus were identified. The most frequently used words in A1 corpus in the field of Turkish teaching as a foreign language are classified according to their types. Frequency lists of the words that are considered to be functional and useful in the teaching of Turkish as a foreign language for both teachers and learners have been prepared; 250 most frequently used nouns, adjectives and verbs; 750 different words, which are considered to be a fairly comprehensive number for the basic level, are presented as suggestions within the scope of this study.

The COVID-19 pandemic, has greatly affected the lives of everyone. One major concern during this period has been that of communication including content dealing with possibilities and ideology concerning freedom. This study aims to analyze the application of if-conditionals expressing options and possibilities during the COVID-19 pandemic using data in the Coronavirus Corpus developed in May 2020 by Mark Davies. The extracted if-conditionals were divided in accordance with Puente-Castelo's (2017) framework of if-typology, and grammatical aspects of all the verb strings were also analyzed in terms of tense and aspect, sentential modality, and voice. It was discovered that speech act conditionals--relevance conditionals--were most commonly applied to provide specific suggestions to deal with the pandemic. The second and third-ranked choices, scope-restricting conditionals and hypothesizing conditionals helped to specify scopes and definitions and to emphasize possibilities and predictions or statistical estimates based on evidence, respectively. The grammatical aspects also corresponded to the COVID situation and helped to convey messages in accordance with the if-conditional functions. The results suggest that the if-construction provides communicative functions fitting various contexts relating to the pandemic. It can facilitate interpersonal communication, allow message receivers freedom to evaluate the proposed option, and provide some safety for the speaker in their choice of phrasing since COVID-19-related circumstances are uncertain. The information can be useful for those seeking linguistic tools for effective communication and for instructors developing material for English for specific purposes.

The current study examines the verbs used by pre-service primary school teachers in everyday language in the context of the hierarchy of needs using the SOM-Ward clustering method. The study group of this survey research consists of 271 pre-service primary school teachers studying at a public university in Turkey. In this research, pre-service primary school teachers were asked to list the most 10 frequently used verbs in everyday language. Descriptive analysis was conducted by coding the verbs according to the themes of the hierarchy of needs. The intercoders reliability was calculated as 96 percent. The mean ranks were calculated on the data obtained according to this coding. Through the SOM-Ward clustering analysis, it was observed that the pre-service primary school teachers were separated into four clusters. Although not hierarchic, the C1 cluster is compatible in terms of basic needs; biological and physiological needs were preferred, and then the personal preferences of individuals were prioritized in determining the needs. Individual preferences prevent the hierarchical approach in determining the needs of the C2-C3-C4 clusters; it was seen that the love, safety and the aesthetic needs of those who formed these clusters are far greater than their basic needs. This reveals that there may be greater and higher priority life needs than biological and physiological needs in an individual. In addition, it was determined that the needs of esteem and superiority shown in the pyramid did not play a decisive role in the clusters since they did not make a significant impact.

The aim of this research is to investigate the effectiveness of teaching English grammar tense based on the concept of two English grammar tenses, past and present. The focus group is EFL/ESL learners of English. Prior research in the area of EFL/ESL teaching reveals that a number of teachers, linguists, and publishers of EFL/ESL texts claim that there can be anywhere from two to 16 tenses in English. However, in the sphere of traditional grammar teaching, a number of educators and linguists argue conversely that there are just two tenses, past and present, which work in conjunction with two other grammar concepts, aspect and mood. To investigate the effectiveness of teaching two tenses, third-year EFL/ESL undergraduate students from an international university in Thailand were observed during a real-time course. Ahead of comprehensive instruction and practice, the participants were given a pretest to evaluate their pre-existing knowledge of tense, aspect, and mood. Initial data showed that a majority of the participants had knowledge of 12 tenses with the "future tense" being among them. Initial results also showed that aspect and mood were relatively unfamiliar to the majority of the participants. At the end of the course, the participants were given a posttest which was identical to the pretest. The difference in data between the pretest and posttest showed that the majority of the participants now had a firm grasp of the idea behind two grammar tenses and how aspect and mood can be looked at as separate entities from tense. The overall results indicate that teaching English grammar tense based on two tenses is a viable alternative that could lead students to have a clearer understanding of English grammar tense and how it is interconnected yet separate from both aspect and mood.

Post-predicate that clauses are one of the indicators of evaluative language which shows the attitude, position, and personal evaluation of the writers in academic discourse. Therefore, this study aims to investigate the distribution and frequently used controlling verbs of post-predicate that clauses controlled by verb (VTHAT) in academic writings of Turkish learners of English and to compare them with those of native English students and expert writers. For this purpose, a specialized research corpus with three main sub-corpora was compiled: MA and PhD theses written by L2 students and native English students and published research articles written by native experienced writers. The results of the study showed that both L2 and native English students significantly overused VTHAT structures compared to the native experienced writers; however, Turkish students used VTHAT structures more frequently than their native peers in academic discourse. The analysis of the controlling verbs in VTHAT constructions showed that eight out of the 10 top frequent verbs in the Turkish students' theses were common across either three or two sub-corpora. However, there were various significant differences in the frequencies of these controlling verbs between the subcorpora, which can imply that Turkish students use such constructions to have a low authoritative presence in terms of their authorial stance in academic writing. The findings were discussed with reference to the previous findings, and pedagogical implications were offered.

To achieve a high level of language fluency, learners need to possess sufficient collocational competence. However, collocation is considered a problematic area for many EFL learners, partly because of its arbitrariness. To gain more insight into the problems involving learners' productive collocational skills, the current study examines lexical collocational use by Thai EFL learners in their writing. The writing of 90 university students were analyzed to show the proportion of six types of lexical collocations. Some observations regarding the differences in the use of lexical collocations by three groups of learners categorized according to language proficiency levels were made. The results suggested that verb-noun, adjective-noun, and noun-verb collocations were most frequently produced by all the three groups of learners. Interestingly, the higher level of language proficiency, the higher number of lexical collocations produced. Regarding the differences in their collocational use, the results point to the likelihood that the high-proficiency group used a wider variety of lexical collocations when compared to the other two groups, and that low-proficiency group used more generic and unclear vocabulary and produced several mistakes in terms of word choice. Based on the study results, some suggestions regarding how collocations could be taught more efficiently are presented.

The present study investigated the production of English passive constructions among Thai learners as syntactic asymmetry of the construction in question in Thai and English can be attested. In this study, English verbs were categorized into two types: Verb Type 1 and Verb Type 2. The former refers to those that can naturally occur in Thai "thùuk" passives while the latter includes those that sound unnatural when used with the same marker. Forty undergraduate students, including 20 advanced and 20 intermediate learners, were asked to complete sentences, each of which consisted of at least three given words: one noun placed as the subject, one verb, and another noun. Results showed that it can be assumed that language transfer is a factor leading to high and low numbers of passivization with Verb Type 1 (positive transfer) and Verb Type 2 (negative transfer), respectively, regardless of their groups. Learners' proficiency levels play a vital role in the number of passive sentences produced in both verb types, showing statistical significance (p < 0.05). The differences between the verb types, conversely, are not statistically significant across the two groups

This study aims to explore how corpus-based approaches can be used to address the distinctions of English near-synonyms effectively. Especially, it collected source data from the British National Corpus (BNC) and adopted Sketch Engine (SkE) as an analyzing tool to compare the near synonymous pair "damage" and "destroy" commonly misused by Chinese-speaking learners of English in terms of frequencies, genre distribution, colligation and collocation, differences in meanings and uses. It is found that "damage" and "destroy" are near-synonyms because they are relevant words and share most collocates but they are not fully intersubstitutable for certain contexts. Some words related to the human body or physical health are more collocated with "damage" and some such as military affairs and one's thought or belief more with "destroy." In addition, the core meaning of "damage" gives more emphasis on something that can be recovered but does not work well as before, while "destroy" offers more senses for something that no longer exists. Furthermore, the British tend to collocate the two near-synonyms with the same word to create a build-up, because "destroy" is endowed with a stronger degree of destruction than "damage." The study ends by suggesting corpus-based analysis should be promoted in language teaching and learning to improve the accurate use of English vocabulary by language learners.

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 valency and the problems encountered were elaborated in the light of Turkish teachers' views. The data of the study were compiled through document analysis. Frequency analysis was employed to determine the occurrence of morphological verb valency-driven errors. Besides, content analysis was used to analyse teachers' views. The research findings revealed that secondary school students made verb valency-driven errors at 393 times while using 145 different verbs. The mean value of verb valency-driven errors per student was 1.96. Furthermore, the verbs with the most common verb valency-driven errors were respectively as follows: çik- (to leave), al- (to take), bul- (to find), söyle- (to tell), yasa- (to live), git- (to go), gör- (to see), ver- (to give), çöz- (to solve) and gel- (to come). Teachers, however, stated that students had difficulty in analysing and writing morphemes in morphological verb valency, and they, in particular, made verb valency-driven errors in long sentences in writing and speaking skills. Moreover, activities towards knowledge and comprehension in terms of words and sentences are inadequate in respect to such cognitive processes such as synthesis and evaluation of texts. Therefore, it is recommended that teaching of morphological valency should be integrated with language skills in order to minimize morphological verb valency-driven errors that have an impact upon literacy skills of students in their mother tongue.

This corpus-driven study explores the linguistics phenomenon of mental verbs in English song lyrics from 1960s until 2000s. This study aims to identify the frequency distributions of lexical verbs, mental verbs, and to analyze the language uses of mental verbs in the Diachronic Corpus of English Song Lyrics (DCOESL). Quantitative and qualitative methods of analysis were applied. First, quantitative data covering frequency distributions of general verbs was produced via LancsBox. Top three mental verbs in song lyrics were selected for analysis and discussion. The frequency distributions of mental verbs and collocations were produced via LancsBox. Collocational patterns were illustrated through collocational graphs constructed via LancsBox. Frequency distributions of mental verbs were compared to reference corpus Contemporary Corpus of American English (COCA) for the purpose of generalizing the findings from this study as representative of English language. The statistical data were submitted for four statistical tests of significance namely Chi-square, Mutual Information, Loglikelihood, and t-score. Second, qualitative data was composed of corpus annotations. Corpus annotations were conducted via CLAWS for assigning part-of-speech C7 tagset to identify verbs. Semantic categories of mental verbs were identified via UCREL Semantic Analysis System (USAS). Findings uncovered significantly high frequencies of mental verbs "know," "want," and "love" in English song lyrics through 1960s until 1990s. These three mental verbs possess high inclination to occur alongside personal pronouns "I" and "you," depict social actions, high predilection for simple present tense, and simple sentence structure. These attributes illuminate that song lyrics emulate spoken English, predominantly the informal conversation register.

This study aims at specifying cultural words in teaching Turkish as a foreign language according to their proficiency levels (A1/2, B1/2, and C1/2) and analyzing the difference between the proficiency levels of these cultural words in terms of their frequency. For this purpose, a cultural corpus of 112.350 tokens in total has been created based on written and oral cultural texts. In this cultural corpus, nouns and verbs in the first 2000 in terms of their frequency have been compared with nouns and verbs in the most common 2000 Turkish words, and nouns and verbs that are not in the most common 2000 Turkish words have been marked as cultural words. Then, the cultural words have been compared with the textbooks used in teaching Turkish as a foreign language. The proficiency levels of their English equivalents in Cambridge Learner's Dictionary and the context in which they are used in the corpus have been checked and listed according to their levels. Finally, the list has been edited according to the opinions of two experts teaching Turkish as a foreign language at university level. The differences in the frequency of cultural words according to their proficiency levels have been analyzed using Kruskal-Wallis and Mann-Whitney U tests. Findings show that there is a statistically significant difference between A1 and A2; A2 and B1; B1 and B2; C1 and C2 levels of the cultural words in terms of frequency, whereas there is no significant difference between cultural words at B2 and C1 levels in terms of frequency. In these findings, it has been seen that the most cultural words are at B1 level in terms of number and concept diversity, and it has been concluded that B1 level could be a threshold in the teaching of cultural words.

By adopting a usage-based approach to language acquisition, this study investigated the emergence and development of L2 constructional knowledge. A total of 19 English verb-argument constructions (VACs) and their associated verbs were extracted from a learner corpus and three verbal fluency tasks, each conducted in L1 and L2 English and L1 Korean. We compared verb usage in the target VACs across proficiency levels between the L1 and L2 groups and between data types for VAC productivity and verb-VAC associations. The results identified three stages through which Korean learners' VAC knowledge develops in L2 English: emerging through the frequent use of a few general verbs, expanding the range of verbs associated with a VAC to include more specific and prototypical verb types, and then developing them into a creative constructional schema. Moreover, we determined similarities between L1 and L2 English VAC knowledge in higher L2 proficiency levels, as well as L1 Korean influences related to L1 typology and L1 collocational transfer.

Near-synonyms in English often cause considerable confusion among EFL students. This study aims to clarify this confusion through a corpus-based investigation of the target synonymous verbs "persist" and "persevere" with focus on distribution across genres, collocations, and semantic preference/prosody. The results, based on the Corpus of Contemporary American English, reveal that "persist" and "persevere" occur with the highest frequency in academic texts and webpages, respectively. Despite similarities in cognitive meanings, the two synonyms co-select different sets of collocations. An analysis of the semantic prosody suggests that while "persist" tends to co-occur with words or phrases that express negative meanings related to continual unpleasant situations, the co-occurring lexical items around "persevere" denote strong determination and great effort in completing a difficult task. Moreover, although it is stated in a learner dictionary that "persevere" is used only as an intransitive verb, corpus evidence proves that this verb can also be used transitively. It is recommended that corpus data be incorporated in vocabulary instruction, alongside learner dictionaries, the former of which can provide more authentic linguistic information on collocational and grammatical patterns.

As far as the main purpose of teaching and learning of the Grammar of a language is concerned, it should tell the teachers and learners the principles and parameters of sentence construction in the given language, i.e. English Language in the context of the discussion in this paper. Incidentally, the grammatical device of tense becomes more important and relevant at the level of discourse and communication. However, a predominantly common approach to teaching and learning of the system of tense in English language has been to understand it in synonymous terms with the notion of three timelines of present, past and future, which poses situations of systemic difficulties and makes it confusing and misleading to comprehend and communicate sentences and utterances in terms of communicative clarity within the parametric confines of the linguistic system of the English Language. Focusing on this issue, this paper demonstrates the ways to unfold the dichotomies involved in the traditional ways of teaching and learning of the grammar of tense, times and aspects of verbal action in English Language and suggests an instructional framework to resolve the related pedagogical issues of concern.

The subject at hand of this paper is intransitive prepositions, which E. Klima (1965) defined as prepositions that do not select syntactic objects. This word group comprises those linguistic units which traditional grammar used to consider as bicategorical, sometimes as adverbs, and in other instances as prepositions created through conversion. Through syntactic and lexical analysis, we intend to confirm that such words in both uses are prepositions rather than adverbs. This type of phrases that are projected only X head does not take complement semantically and structurally. From this point of view, PPs that are generated at level X [P + compl] are opposed, where the presence of a complement is mandatory. Prepositions that project a PPs component at level X have [- compl] feature and are called intransitive prepositions, while prepositions with [+ compl] feature which project a PP at level X are called transitive prepositions. This means that the intuition of an Albanian speaker for the PP component is elaborated not only within the traditional framework PP-P -- NP but also within PP-P structures. Another hypothesis of this paper is that the [- compl] feature of this type of prepositions is not an absolute feature, but rather a relative one -- which means that we do not have genuine intransitive prepositions but rather double feature prepositions [- compl, + compl] which sometimes appear as intransitive, sometimes as transitive which -- similar to transitive verbs with intransitive use -- we have called "ergative prepositions."

This paper has been written to fall within the orbit of the moraic framework of the syllable, particularly the syllable weight, of Basrah Arabic. Universal as its nature is, mora, when studied and then applied, has, metaphorically speaking, the power of casting its phonological 'spell' over the problems of the morphophonology of Basrah tri-segmental verbs, adjectives, and nouns which have popped up in the context of investigating the behavior of Basrah syllabicity, and thus the mora 'spell' gets these problematic issues easily solvable and surmountable. The problems overcome by applying the moraic model are of two facets: some of them are phonologically-based problems and others are morphologically-based ones. Either case, mora is manipulated to throw its shadow on them equally and adequately. With this in mind, the application of moraic aspects to some Basrah verbs presupposes a drastic shift in segmental durations, namely, vowel ones when occurred word-medially. Among different results reached by this paper is that Basrah Arabic syllabic templates of certain verbs, adjectives, and nouns need to be pinpointed from the mora-tier angle other than from the CVtier and X-tier angles.

Adopting Hyland's (2002) framework of reporting words (RVs), the paper investigates the use of RVs in Master's theses written in English by students of two disciplines, Economics and Management and Natural Resources. The data were drawn from two sub-corpora, each consisting of 82 Literature Reviews, where other authors' research is summarised and commented on. Besides determining the most frequent communicative functions, in this paper, the RVs are further analysed in terms of the verb tense, voice, and subject-agent. The findings revealed significant differences between the two disciplines. In the former, most RVs were in the present active with named-author as the subject, conveying a neutral attitude towards the reported message and neutrally summarising previous research outcomes. Most RVs were in the past tense in the latter, reporting on past research procedures or outcomes. The findings reveal infrequent use of evaluative or critical verbs. Each discipline's predominant choice may suggest writers' lower ability to highlight the cited sources' direct relevance to their research. The study hopes to contribute to the efficacy of teaching English for Academic Purposes to non-native speakers. It has pedagogical implications for academic writing in both undergraduate and postgraduate courses at non-philological tertiary education institutions.

Citation is an essential part of academic writing and allows writers to make strong arguments, review previous research, and express their opinions. This study investigates reporting verbs as a part of citation practice in the research articles published in Iranian and international journals (with different linguacultural backgrounds) in humanities and medical sciences from 2015-2019. In this cross-disciplinary study, 60 research articles (RAs) from Applied Linguistic (AL) and Nursing and Midwifery (NM) as part of humanities and medical sciences respectively were selected and classified based on Hyland's (2002) frameworks. The results demonstrated that the Iranian journal articles utilised more reporting verbs (RVs) than the international journal articles whereas, the international articles used RVs with a wide variety. Although the types of verbs were different, the research verbs had a clear preference in the corpus. The finding suggests some pedagogical implications for novice scholars and EFL (English as a Foreign Language) students to become familiar with differences in using RVs and select the correct choice of reporting verbs in the field of humanities and medical sciences.

This paper is an attempt to present the morphological processes that have been observed in Sanzari Boro, an eastern variety of the Boro language. Boro belongs to the Tibeto-Burman language family. The Standard variety of Boro is mainly spoken in the present Bodoland Territorial Region (BTR) of Assam, India but Sanzari Boro speakers primarily reside outside and eastern part of the BTR. For this research data have been collected from native Sanzari Boro speakers of the Nagaon district of Assam. After examining the data, it has been noticed that affixation, mainly suffixation and prefixation, plays important role in the morphological processes in Sanzari Boro. The major morphological processes that have been observed in the language variety are inflection, derivation, compounding, and reduplication.

This paper aims to determine the functions of hybridizing languages in the television talk show discourses in Bangladesh. Though hybridization of Bangla is harshly criticized in the media discourses for its alleged pollution of Bangla language, this linguistic practice, which seems to be rampant and pervasive in the society, is demonstrated not only as part of their habitual and natural linguistic behaviour but also to accomplish certain discourse functions. Analysing the video-recorded episodes selected from the archives of "Tritiyomatra", a popular television talk show broadcasted on Channel i, a privately owned satellite television channel in Bangladesh, this study reveals that the speakers are found to use hybrid Bangla in their talk show conversation for a variety of discourse functions such as to establish cohesion in the discourse, to clarify concepts, to give emphasis and focus on the particular notions, to draw glocal attention, and to make the discussion more topic-specific and relevant. Moreover, the speakers are found to perform these discourse functions through the hybridization of languages very strategically and purposively.

Students of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) are expected to master the fundamental of grammar so they can produce good essays. However, despite having learned English at the secondary or university level, students tend to make many grammatical errors in their writing. This study presents the grammatical errors made by college EFL students in their essays and the pedagogical implications viewed from those errors. This is descriptive research with 30 second-year students who enrolled in an Essay Writing class as participants. Thirty written essays produced by the students were analyzed for grammatical errors. The findings revealed that there were 368 grammatical errors found in the students' essays. The most common one was in verb use (48%). If teachers do not assist students to comprehend the concept of parts of speech, and essential and nonessential clauses, these students will continue to make errors in their more advanced writing. The findings may have useful pedagogical implications for English language teachers, syllabus designers, and test developers. Understanding students' difficulties and providing appropriate grammar instructions are the keys to teach grammar.

The current study attempted to investigate English collocations used in written translation among fourth-year English majors at a university. The participants included forty-one fourth-year English-majored students and three translation teachers who are teaching English-Vietnamese translation courses in the university. To gather data, the researchers used two instruments: a test of English collocations including five types of collocations: an adjective going with a noun, a verb going with a noun, a noun going with a verb, a noun going with a noun and a verb going with an adverb. After data analysis, it revealed that just slightly over half of the student participants were able to find the correct collocations in written translation. Furthermore, a noun going with a verb and a noun going with a noun are the two main lexical errors made by most of the students. The interview was also used to seek translation teachers' perspectives on students' ability to translate texts in general and strategies of translation in particular. They perceived that most of their students were not aware of collocations in written translation and still had difficulties in both grammatical and lexical collocations. Finally, some recommendations on improving English collocations in written translation were also made based on these findings.

In the path of academic writing, authors accomplish certain interactions with their readers through the means of meta-discourse markers such as hedges and boosters. There have been many studies that dwell on the function of meta-discourse markers (Abdi, Rizi, & Tavakoli, 2010; Crismore, 1984; Hyland, 1999, 2000, 2001; Longo, 1994). However, the ones that focus solely on hedges and boosters and comparison of the level of students such as MA versus PhD in a specific field of study are not as many. Therefore, the present corpus-based study investigates the possible reasons for changes of frequencies of hedges and boosters from MA to PhD level Turkish EFL students who proceed on their academic journey in the field of English Language Teaching. The discussion parts of ten MA theses and ten PhD dissertations were selected, written by the same students to be able to compare the possible improvements between levels. The texts were analyzed with the concordance program AntConc 3.5.7.0. The investigation revealed that the frequency of the occurrences of boosters was higher in PhD than in MA level, whereas the students used more hedges in their MA theses than in PhD dissertations. These findings may imply an increase in students' self-confidence while conveying ideas and discussing their findings from MA to PhD level, based on a broader academic experience and expertise having been gained in time by PhD students, as well as a certain degree of unawareness by both levels of students as to the use of meta-discourse markers and academic writing styles.

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 undergraduate program. From each level, a group of thirty students were considered. The data on aspectual categories were analysed by using statistical models like one-way analysis of variance ANOVA in SPSS 16.0 and Tukey Post Hoc test. The statistical analysis indicates that (1) there is significant differences in the correct uses of the various English aspect categories across the four levels and (2) errors were not equally distributed within all English aspect categories. (3) the use of Tukey Post Hoc test further suggests that performances at specific levels are significantly different from each other. Furthermore, present perfect tense has received the lowest correct answers across all levels, hence it is considered to be the most problematic among the other categories. The role of Arabic influences has been noticed to be negatively affecting the process of learning and comprehension of aspect categories in the initial years, especially in level one students. Some pedagogical implications have been given.