Studies of grammatical development in second language acquisition fall into two categories: (a) studies investigating formal characteristics of the acquisition process and (b) studies proposing developmental indices for assessing the overall progress of second language learners (BardoviHarlig & Bofman, 1989). This study belongs to the first of these categories; its aim is to identify and characterize features of second language use in Japanese learners of English that explicitly indicate developmental progress. Towards this end, the study also attempts ― by making use of learner corpora ― to characterize Japanese learners’ errors of spoken and written English in terms of noun-, verb-, and other part-of-speech-related errors. As previous studies of language acquisition have been restricted to relatively small amounts of data, research using larger data sets may lead to significant advances in the understanding of language acquisition (Biber, Conrad, & Reppen, 1998). For this study, a substantial body of spoken and written data were used to investigate differences between spontaneous spoken production and less time-pressured written production to show the acquisition sequence of certain grammatical features in the different production modes.
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