The volume consists of articles on issues relating to the morphosyntactic development of foreign language learners from different L1 backgrounds, in many cases involving languages which are typologically distant from English, such has Polish, Greek and Turkish. It highlights areas which may be expected to be especially transfer-prone at both the interlingual and intralingual levels. The articles in the first part report empirical studies on word morphology and sentence patterns and also look at the interface of lexis and grammar in the discourse and syntactic processing of foreign language learners. The second part elaborates on pedagogical issues concerning the acquisition of difficult grammatical features such as the English article system or the ‘s’ ending in the third person singular. It also comments more generally on the way pedagogic grammar functions in the learning of the L2.

This book presents a selection of empirical papers dealing with second and multiple language acquisition, in which qualitative research methodology is employed. Each of the studies reported in individual chapters is based on a solid theoretical background and an overview of studies in a given area. Although the main focus is on qualitative methods, some of the papers demonstrate the complementarity of quantitative and qualitative approaches in studying language acquisition.