Fifty Romanian 2nd-year students of German were tested, and their errors tabulated. Most frequent sources of error were polysemy and verbs ending in -ieren ("deceptive cognates"). A contrastive linguistic description of German and Romanian can help the teacher steer students away from interference errors. (Text is in German.) (IFS/WGA)

Presents four chief categories of common mistakes in French along with some of their causes and cures. (EKN)

This study investigated Taiwanese English as a Foreign Language (EFL) students knowledge of English collocations and the collocational errors they made. The subjects were 60 students from a college in Taiwan. The research instrument was a self-designed Simple Completion Test that measured students knowledge of four types of lexical collocations:…

Students of French are now more fluent orally than their counterparts of a few years ago. They are using, however, a more anglicized French. The causes are three: (1) unawareness of the value of words; (2) infrequent use of reference material, specifically the dictionary; (3) lack of adequate knowledge of basic rules. (CFM)

The research on which this study is based found that 50% of the errors in English of French-speaking students were due to interlingual causes and 50% had their source within the target language itself. The question of a correlation between the errors and the teaching method used is explored. Five methods are discussed and evaluated:…

Reports on a study investigating the occurrence of spelling errors in the French dictations of French-speaking Ontarians. The frequency of errors was compared to that of French speakers from Quebec. Results indicate that spelling interference from English is present for French-speaking Ontarians in far greater degree than from French speakers from…

Analyzes observations of the pronunciation of French by 32 undergraduate students at the University of Ilorin (Nigeria). The phonological analysis includes: 1) sound variation; 2) terminal sound loss; 3) sound intrusion; 4) assimilation; and 5) liaison. Many factors appear to have affected performance, especially having had a Francophone teacher…

Describes a study of those areas that experience suggests are major sources of error for native English-speakers studying German. Students' writing samples of different proficiency levels were analysed to establish (1) changes in error rate per student over the three semesters and (2) degree of negative transfer for each group. (SED)

Quantitative and qualitative analysis of lexical choice errors made by native Arabic-speaking learners of English in written compositions indicated that first-language interference is a major variable in lexical choice. Results lend support to the development of problematic word lists to help learners adopt practical strategies for improving…

In five picture-word interference experiments, this article explores the gender-congruity effect in Dutch in two languages, Spanish and Catalan. Performance was not affected by the relationship between the gender of the picture and the gender of the word. Results show that the gender-congruity effect is not a universal effect, but varies from…

A study examined the errors in the use of prepositions, particularly of prepositional verbs, made by native Greek speakers learning English. Two tests were constructed, one a translation of a Greek text into English and the other a series of English sentences to be completed with the appropriate prepositional word based on the Greek equivalent…

Looks at the role of linguistic contrasts between dialect and standard Italian in the theory of interference in second-language learning and proposes strategies for better standard-Italian teaching in Canadian and U.S. universities and colleges. (SED)

Examines lexical interference from the perspective of language proficiency in a study of Iranian English-as-a-Foreign-Language learners. Subjects were given two tests--a proficiency test and a test on similar lexical forms--to investigate whether there is any relationship between the two variables in question. Results indicate that there is a…

This paper reports on a small-scale study of the outcomes generated by 15 underachieving English-as-a-Foreign-Language university writers copying text displayed on a computer monitor under pressure of time. Analysis of student's copied texts showed that various inaccuracies that were not in the original had passed into the copied version,…

The role of sensory attributes in a vocabulary learning task was investigated for a non-oral language using deaf and hearing individuals, more or less skilled in the use of sign language. Skilled signers encoded invented signs in terms of linguistic structure rather than as visual-pictorial events. (Author/RD)