Discusses the correction system for German-French translations used in German universities. The following are proposed: (1) Differentiation of, and a grading scale for, errors; (2) Distinguishing interstructural vs. intrastructural errors, (with suggestion for grading); (3) Localizing errors in grammar or vocabulary, with consequences for grading.…

Describes two studies designed to determine how community college students in remedial freshman English sections defined a written "sentence." Concludes that subjects associated a complete written sentence with a verb-noun sequence of a certain requisite length and with a word string containing a prepositional phrase. (ET)

Points out that writing errors of journalism students can result from faulty thought patterns involving thinking in sentence fragments, personifying objects, using bureaucratic abstractions, and condensing complex ideas; examines ways of dealing with sentence fragments and personification. (First of a two-part article.) (GT)

Describes an attempt to build a computer-assisted language instruction program which can trap and comment on grammatical errors such as subject/verb agreement by a purely syntactic analysis, that is, without recourse to word meanings. The program aims to increase educational effectiveness and to reduce the number of separate stored answers.…

Considers "unpacking" or "deconstructing" sentences (the reverse of sentence combining) an effective teaching technique that helps students to develop clear predication and eliminate their tendency to use vague, confusing nominalized verbs. (RL)

Comparison of college students' (N=14) graded and ungraded Spanish compositions revealed that, when they anticipated receiving a grade, students wrote longer compositions with more complex sentences. However, the type and number of errors varied among students. (CB)

Run-on sentences are common mistakes made by Chinese English as a Foreign Language (EFL) students. One type of these errors, with the structure of an expletive subject "there" and a verb "to be" at the beginning of the sentence, is persistent and not easy to detect and correct. This study proposes that this type of error…

The effect of English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) specific sentence-level errors was examined using 18 randomly chosen essays representing the range of ESL writing found in most large testing situations. Results suggest that graders with insufficient training in evaluating ESL essays differ in their judgment of the weight assigned to ESL error,…

When intermediate and advanced students of English as a second language (ESL) begin an English composition course, they face the task of creating logical extended discourses in English. Often, while the sentences they create are free from obvious grammatical errors, they are stylistically unacceptable, vague in meaning, misrepresentative of the…

An extensive comparative analysis of dysfunctional sentences found in the writing of prefreshmen at Bowling Green State University (Ohio) was conducted to examine and to describe possible differences in dysfunctional sentences produced by remedial and nonremedial writers. Writing samples consisted of randomly selected freshman placement…

A study examined the effect of five types of sentence faults on the method of information processing, recall ability, confidence rating, and comprehensibility rating of college freshman English students. The control text consisted of five passages and the accompanying comprehension questions exactly as they appear on the multiple choice Georgia…

Errors made by Finnish university students in the use of the English article were analyzed using two types of error analyses: a traditional type of error analysis to provide an overall view of the errors found in students' compositions; and a multiple-choice test devised on the basis of the findings and shortcomings of the first test. With the…

Error pattern analysis is a teaching technique that emphasizes identifying, classifying, and keeping a frequency count on only those errors actually occurring in students' writing. Application of error pattern analysis in a workshop format requires three steps: preparing an error pattern analysis, teaching from this analysis, and integrating it…

Details errors commonly made by learners of Korean because of inadequate linguistic description or grammar explanations; suggests that one way of minimizing learner errors is to provide explicit linguistic descriptions (i.e., grammatical rules, explanations, and usage); also attention must be paid to presentation of word order and vocabulary…

Because of open admissions policies at the college level, college English teachers are faced with increasing numbers of students whose writing skills are well below desired standards. This journal, addressed to the concerns of teachers who want to help such students, attempts in this issue to point out ways in which English teachers can examine…