This study investigated the efficiency of explicit and implicit written corrective feedback in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) education in higher education. Participants of the study were late-elementary and pre-intermediate adult learners of English who were attending a preparatory school in a Turkish state university. During a period of four weeks, exercises on prepositions were delivered to subjects who were divided into three groups as two treatment groups receiving explicit and implicit written correction and a control group receiving no feedback. A pre-test and a post-test were applied to the groups at the start and the end of the fourweek treatment, respectively in order to examine possible development of the groups. The results indicated significant differences between pre-test and post-test scores of the groups receiving the two types of written corrective feedback.

This study investigates a certain set of semantically categorized verbs, namely Communication Verbs (CV) (Biber, 2006) in learner language. Communication verbs are "a special subcategory of activity verbs that involve communication activities " (2006, p. 247) and they are relatively common both in written and spoken discourse. Two corpora, LOCNESS and TICLE, were analysed to reveal frequencies of these verbs in both corpora and the findings showed that though priming of most frequent verbs in each corpus are identical, Turkish EFL learners significantly underused such verbs in their argumentative essays. In-depth analysis additionally signified distinctive grammatical patterns as well as various semantic frames of nouns collocated with verbs selected in TICLE. Finally, based on the findings, usage based differences were examined and the reasons why learners might have used particular patterns in comparison to the ones used by NSs, were suggested by making references to Hunston and Francis's Pattern Grammar (2000).

This quantitative study aims to reveal the most frequently used phrasal verbs (PVs) by L1 speakers of English and Turkish EFL learners in written and spoken registers. With the purpose of spotting any overuse and/or underuse by Turkish EFL learners, it compares their usage to L1 English speakers’ through four corpora – two learner corpora and two native corpora. Additionally, the study investigates the most frequent adverbial verb particles (AVPs) and lexical verbs (LVs) in phrasal constructions comparing learners and native speakers. The results show that although LV types differ to a large extent, Turkish EFL learners display a similar profile to L1 English speakers in terms of types of PVs and AVPs. However, these verbs and particles are significantly underused, especially in spoken register – a result that contradicts previous research. Specifically, within the scope of this study, regardless of the register Turkish learners tend to favour few AVPs out of the mostly used ten while leaving out the others. The findings might be of use to EFL teachers regarding raising their students’ awareness on the contextual use of PVs in different registers with a combination of both implicit and explicit teaching in mind. In addition, learners can benefit from the ready-made PV lists to enhance their prospective usage in meaningful contexts.