Cross-Linguistic Influence on EFL Learners’ Use of Punctuation

This study investigated the influence of first language (L1) on English as a foreign language (EFL) students’ awareness and use of commas and semicolons in varied tasks with a view to identifying the areas that need to be highlighted by instructors in order to improve students' punctuation use and second language (L2) writing. Data were collected from 55 Korean college freshmen via a survey questionnaire, a fill-in-the-blank task, and a free writing task. Errors were analyzed according to four selected categories of comma usages (with nonrestrictive elements, with coordinating conjunctions, after introductory elements, and with items in a series) and two categories of semicolon usages (in compound sentences and in a series with elements containing internal commas) and coded as one of four types of error: omission, addition, misuse, or misplacement. The results showed that participants’ awareness of L2 comma usage was higher than that of semicolons and that the relative frequency of error types differed for each punctuation category and across the varied contexts of the fill-in-the-blank and free writing tasks. L1 influence was found to manifest more notably with respect to the comma, a punctuation feature with a high degree of L1-L2 similarity, than the semicolon, a punctuation mark with no L1 availability. The findings suggest that learners’ perceptions of L1-L2 similarity/dissimilarity can play a greater role in cross-linguistic influence (CLI) than the actual relationship between the two languages, as well as that greater understanding of and attention to both punctuation and CLI on the part of EFL educators could contribute positively to efforts to improve learners’ uptake of this and other features of the target language.