Reflections on a small word: the position of “also” in learner language

This article reports on research conducted on a quasi-longitudinal corpus of learner language collected students ranging from Junior School to Post-graduate. The research investigated whether the same mistakes were being made at each level, or whether certain grammatical categories or syntactic errors diminish as the level of schooling rises. It picks up on one category, word order, which continues to be problematic for learners, even at post-graduate level. The example that illustrates this is the small adverb, also.