This article used a writing sample that contained 27 sentence-level errors of the type found by corporate America to be annoying and bothersome. Five categories of errors were included in the sample: grammar, punctuation, spelling, writing style, and business communication concepts. Students in a written business communication course were asked…

What syntactic patterns emerge in students' use of articles and modals? What are the reasons for these patterns? What implications do the findings of the study have for English language instruction in Botswana? Exactly 1556 essays comprising class assignments, written seminar presentations, test papers and examination scripts from 514 randomly…

Some unsuccessful teaching techniques have been developed, based on certain concepts in generative-transformational grammar and on the equating of linguistics and psychology. We need psycholinguistically oriented research in FL learning and research in error and contrastive analysis and tests. "There," causative "have" and fronted objects are…

The French of English speaking students of French as a second language is compared with "francais populaire" (FP) in order to determine similarities in their tendency toward simplified grammar and morphology. Simplifying characteristics that are typical of FP were obtained from French working class sources, while simplification patterns…

The acquisition of case and gender marking on the definite and indefinite article was studied in a sample of 6 normally-hearing children and 9 children with cochlear implants. Longitudinal spontaneous speech data are used. Children were matched by MLU, with 4 MLU levels: 1.8, 2.8, 3.6, 4.8. Age ranges for normally-hearing children were 1;4 to 3;8…

A discussion of English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) teaching focuses on the relationship of lexical items to the syntactic situations in which they may occur, and the importance of teaching this relationship to language learners. First, common errors made by ESL students that are attributable to lack of syntactic context knowledge are identified.…

A survey of 101 faculty in a variety of disciplines found that most do not give much attention to the composition of electronic mail messages and are not bothered much when receiving messages containing mechanical or composition errors. Results suggest faculty should be cautious about relaxing the rules of grammar, punctuation, and good writing in…

In a study of the relative importance native speakers of French attach to different types of errors produced by second language learners, 231 native French speakers listened to 50 pairs of deviant sentences to determine which sentence in each pair contained a more serious error. The sentences contained 20 different types of errors grouped into…

This selective bibliography lists 2 books, or sections in books, and 6 journal articles dealing with Hebrew-English contrastive studies. The entries range in date from 1965 to 1974. The books cited are Israeli or European publications, and the articles appeared in well-known European or American pedagogical language journals. (TL)

Before any conclusions can be drawn about the relative complexity of grammatical items, the items should be thoroughly analyzed. For example, learning to use French gender involves much more than learning to recognize formal characteristics which account for gender in nouns; it also requires that semantic gender features be mastered, so that…

The purpose of this presentation is to encourage college teachers of writing, inside and outside Appalachia, to look at dialect-based errors in a more expansive way even as they help students to make better choices about standard usage. The discussion, which is presented within the context of a socio-cultural perspective on bias in perceptions of…

Introduces a computer-assisted language-learning system called L2tutor that is designed to provide an immersion experience to travelers before they leave on a trip to a country where a different language is spoken. The learner takes part in a fully mixed-initiative dialog with the system to gain fluency and hone vocabulary and grammatical skills.…

This paper aims to explore advanced ESL learners' ability to make improvements in grammatical accuracy by autonomously noticing and correcting their own grammatical errors. In the recent literature in SLA, it is suggested that classroom tasks can be used to foster autonomous language learning habits (cf. Dam 2001). Therefore, it is important to…

The 12th iteration of the International Conference on Educational Data Mining (EDM 2019) is organized under the auspices of the International Educational Data Mining Society in Montreal, Canada. The theme of this year's conference is EDM in Open-Ended Domains. As EDM has matured it has increasingly been applied to open-ended and ill-defined tasks…