This study focuses on the use of learners’ mother tongue in the learning and teaching of English in an effort to identify ways in which cross-linguistic awareness-raising practices can be used to maximise EFL written performance in two Japanese universities. The study’s targeted grammatical features were articles and plural suffixes of countable nouns. It handles the perennial issue of how best to harness learners’ familiar L1 for the improvement of their L2 within the frameworks of cross-linguistic instruction and awareness-raising.