Native and nonnative (Indians) English as a Second Language (ESL) teachers' evaluations of certain errors in the written English of ESL college students were compared. Results indicated that native and nonnative perceptions of error gravity were not alike, although both groups saw verb-related error categories like tense, agreement, and question…

Discusses student communication in a second language in terms of comprehensibility, irritation, acceptability, communicative strategies, the personality of the second-language speaker, and the differences in perception of the communication by native speakers and nonnative speakers, who are teachers of the language. Recommendations for classroom…

Reports on a survey of how laypeople responded to errors in usage, their attitudes toward the acceptability of certain errors, and the values they placed on certain language styles. (RL)

A study investigated the relationship between writing proficiency and two aspects of proofreading: (1) the ability to detect structural errors, and (2) the ability to accurately correct them. During the fall of 1986 seventeen English-as-a-Second-Language students in the intermediate-level grammar review and paragraph writing class at Biola…

Discusses complexities inherent in correcting second language students' spoken and written errors. Alternatives to current error correction methods (1) focus on the use of error correction to improve students' language form, (2) involve the real communicative consequences of inaccuracy, (3) suggest strategies for attending to form when listening…

No single foreign language teaching method can produce speakers with competence in all areas of the target language. Teachers should be aware that the relative importance of form versus function varies with the specific goals of language use and should consider the consequences of fossilization, error correction, and comprehensibility in teaching…

How does a computer analyze the appropriateness of a language student's response? Issues arising in the development and use of language-learning software are discussed. (MSE)

The report describes improved algorithms within a computer program for identifying spelling and word order errors in student responses. A "markup analysis" compares a student's response string to an author-specified model string and generates a graphical error markup that indicates spelling, capitalization, and accent errors, extra or…

The purpose of this study was to: (1) describe differences in performance by non-native learners of English, when writing in different genres; (2) determine communicative value of grammatical errors as judged by a panel of native speakers; and (3) demonstrate inconsistencies in native speaker judgment of error gravity. Subjects were 20…

Some errors in adult black students' writing cannot be analyzed merely within the traditional hierarchy of grammatical rules; a look at sociological factors is germane to an evaluation of students' writing ability or inability. Data for an analysis of black adult students' writing at the syntactic level have shown that problems of clarity might be…

Describes the development in progress of a syntactic parser of German called "Syncheck," which uses the programing language "Prolog." The grammar is written in a formalism called "Definate Clause Grammar." The purpose of "Syncheck" is to provide advice on grammatical correctness to intermediate and advanced…

This study investigated the relationship between grammatical errors and communication breakdown by examining native speakers' ability to correct grammatical errors. The assumption was that communication breakdown exists to a certain degree if a native speaker cannot correct the error or if the correction distorts the information intended to be…

Analysis of responses of native French-speaking (N=10) and English-speaking (N=10) college French instructors rating students' errors in French revealed that (1) native French speakers were more critical evaluators than native English speakers; (2) teachers were generally more critical evaluators than students; and (3) more fluent speakers were…

This article examines instances of "para-poetic" writing produced by beginning and intermediate learners of English as a Second Language. It is suggested that the instructor or reader look beyond the conventional grammar and usage rules to appreciate the imagery of unusual juxtaposition of words and phrases in student work. Provides examples of…

This study explored the dichotomy between global errors, that is, those violating rules of overall sentence structure, and local errors, that is, those violating rules within a particular constituent of a sentence, and the relationship of these to communication breakdown. The focus was tense continuity across clauses (TC) and subject-verb…