Describes how a computerized text analysis program can help students discover error patterns in their writing, and notes how students' responses to analyses can reduce errors and improve their writing. (MM)

Examines reading and spelling errors made by children learning Arabic within a developmental framework. Finds that errors in reading and spelling persisted throughout primary school, pointing to the difficulties involved in mastering the Arabic written language. Notes that misreadings involved mainly diacritics whereas misspellings were related to…

Studies the kinds of errors made by American learners of Russian, the reasons for these errors, change in error patterns, and resemblance between the errors of foreign and primary language learners. (42 references) (CK)

Data from a transcript database of 12 children collected in 1-hour samples every month from 1;0 to 3;0 support the hypothesis that there should be strong differences in the frequency and types of errors between pronouns with suppletive nominatives and those without. The suppletive nominative forms "I" and "she" are blocked from overextension in a…

Examined how object shape, taxonomic relatedness, and prior lexical knowledge influenced children's overextensions (e.g., referring to pomegranates as apples). Researchers presented items that disentangled the three factors and used a novel comprehension task where children could indicate negative exemplars. Error patterns differed by task and by…

Examined the effect of regional accent on children's processing of speech. Children ages 4 to 7 were tested on their ability to repeat and define single words presented in their own and another accent. Word comprehension was significantly reduced in the other accent. Younger children performed less successfully and showed different error patterns…

Egyptian English majors in the faculty of Education, South Valley University tend to mistranslate the plural inanimate Arabic pronoun with the singular inanimate English pronoun. A diagnostic test was designed to analyze this error. Results showed that a large number of students (first year and fourth year students) make this error, that the error…

Dell, Burger, and Svec (1997) proposed that the proportion of speech errors classified as anticipations (e.g., "moot and mouth") can be predicted solely from the overall error rate, such that the greater the error rate, the lower the anticipatory proportion (AP) of errors. We report a study examining whether this effect applies to changes in error…

This guide to ERRATA, a set of HyperCard-based tools for response analysis and error diagnosis in language testing, is intended as a user manual and general reference and designed to be used with the software (not included here). It has three parts. The first is a brief survey of computational techniques available for dealing with student test…

This article deals mainly with the pedagogical application of error analysis and error correction, and directs itself to foreign language and second language teachers and to teachers of speakers of nonstandard dialects. (CLK)

Results of a diagnostic test revealed that Thai students have no more trouble in learning English prepositions than others learning English as a second language; all the groups had difficulty. Error analysis was found to be just as effective in explaining mistakes as contrastive analysis. (AG)

It is argued here that childhood phonological errors systematically simplify the child's inventory of phonetic elements and strings. (Author/KM)

Error analysis has been presented as a means of "finding a shorter way" in the analysis of learners' difficulties in foreign languages. The alternative starts with a comparison of the native and foreign languages in order to predict such difficulties. The two types are complementary rather than mutually exclusive. (Author/MSE)

Some results of seven studies of children's native Finnish language acquisition from 1971-1980 are summarized, focusing on two aspects: the main features in the development of Finnish inflection forms in 2-7-year-old children, and selected information derived from children's errors at the various age levels. Subjects were 260 children attending…

A study examined the effectiveness of English dictionaries in assisting in error correction by beginning learners of English as a second language. Lexical errors made in examinations were collected and coded by type, and the usefulness of the "Longman Active Study Dictionary", designed for ESL learners, in helping to correct the errors was…