This study analyzes Spanish and German errors committed by adult native speakers of English enrolled in elementary and intermediate levels. Four written samples were collected for each target language, over a period of five months. Errors were categorized according to their possible source. Types of errors were ordered according to their…

Examines the use of computers for error detection in natural language texts. Focuses on a computer program designed to teach students to edit their papers for errors using pattern matching in error detection. Describes a "pedagogy for editing" and speculates on ways to improve computer detection of errors in natural language texts. (AEM)

Describes a computer-assisted research project into the writing errors of English as a second language college students. Sentences with error types and first languages of students were entered into a database and analyzed for the most common errors of all students and the most prevalent patterns within each language group. (Author/SED)

Compares the performance of German school learners of English in a communicative writing task and of their teachers in assessing it with that of native English pupils and teachers carrying out the same task. Raises questions about the appropriate performance model for communicative tasks and the role of usage in teacher assessments. (Author/SED)

Presents a framework for dealing with errors in natural language sentences within the context of automated second-language teaching. Using a feature grammar, it is possible to describe various types of errors in a uniform framework, clearly define an error, and analyze the error source. (24 references) (Author/CK)

A study investigated the way in which children make use of morphemic information when they are learning to spell. Specifically, it examined the use of morphemic information in spelling compound words; the use made of morphemic information when adding suffixes to words, and the way the morphological rule governing the formation of the past tense is…

Native speakers of Egyptian Arabic make errors in their pronunciation of English that cannot always be accounted for by a contrastive analysis of Egyptian analysis of Egyptain Arabic and English. This study focuses on three types of errors in the pronunciation of voiced and voiceless "th" made by fluent speakers of English. These errors were noted…

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…

A study of overregularized use of verbs by two children over a period when they were 2 1/2 to 5 years of age shows overregularizations in two directions: non-causative verbs were used as causatives; and causative verbs were used non-causatively. According to terminology from logic, predicates were classified according to the number of noun-phrase…

In order to attempt to identify the linguistic difficulties of slow learners, errors made by two groups of English-speaking adults learning French as a second language were compared. The subjects of the two groups shared similar characteristics, with the exception of the amount of time required to cover the same linguistic material (Group 1: 17…

Error analysis concerns the investigation of negative influences on the foreign language learning process. Errors are usually thought of as caused by interference from the native language to the target language. In this article it is shown that interference occurs in the other direction as well, i.e. from language 2 to language 1. Jakobovits has…

The major purposes of the study reported on in this paper were as follows: (1) to compare the errors made by advanced learners of English as a native language (American nine- to eleven-year-olds) and as a foreign language (native Spanish-speaking adults); (2) to investigate the usefulness of a modified cloze test in obtaining errors for profitable…

Analysis of errors collected from English essays of native Arabic-speaking university students and their translations from Arabic into English identified 14 error classifications, with the vast majority of errors attributable to negative transfer or interference from Arabic. (CB)

Concludes that in the first stage of reading, students appear to make relatively few nonsense errors on familiar words, whether they are taught with a meaning-based or phonics approach. However, if initial instruction emphasizes phonics, real word substitutions tend to be graphically constrained; with initial meaning-emphasis instruction,…

This study compared the spoken and written English errors of 20 severely hearing-impaired postsecondary students with intelligible speech but poor English language. Writing samples exhibited a greater number of function word errors than did speech samples; there were no significant differences in content and structure errors. Implications for…