Distance-invoked difficulty as a trigger for errors in Chinese and Japanese EFL learners’ English writings

Abstract

Abstract This study investigates how distance-invoked difficulty, proficiency level and cross-linguistic similarity affect error occurrences by analysing 240 English compositions from Chinese and Japanese learners of English as a foreign language (EFL). Dependency distance was used as a metric to measure distance-invoked difficulty and four major types of dependency relations were investigated. The findings reveal that low- and middle-level Chinese and Japanese EFL learners have higher error rates with long-distance dependency relations, but high-level learners can overcome the distance-invoked difficulty and make fewer errors. Chinese and Japanese EFL learners make more errors in long-distance adverbial and relative clauses than in short-distance ones, which are L1-dissimilar dependency relations. They make fewer errors in L1-similar relations, i.e., long-distance subject-predicate dependency relations. Japanese EFL learners, however, showed no significant differences in error rates between long- and short-distance predicate-object dependency relations. The results indicate the complex interaction between the EFL learners’ cognition, proficiency and L1.