While it is common for teachers to focus on learners' errors in the EFL classroom, little attention is given to the "errors" that native English speakers make in their mother tongue. This paper reports on a study to assess the reaction of Japanese university students to an activity that primarily required identifying…

Whether words are or are not activated within the lexicon of the nonused language is an important question for accounts of bilingual word production. Prior studies have not led to conclusive results, either because alternative accounts could be proposed for their findings or because activation could have been artificially induced by the…

Compositions written by 48 university students of English as a Second Language (ESL) were examined as a step in the development of an index for proficiency in a second language. A feature analysis of the compositions revealed the following tendencies: (1) syntactic sophistication and tense usage improved as proficiency increased, (2) errors in…

This paper reports results of a preliminary analysis of the errors made by Russian exchange students learning English at S.U.N.Y. in Albany. Error samples are taken from a taped panel discussion containing prepared and spontaneous speech, from a TOEFL test, and from a quiz. Errors are divided into intralingual, or those reflecting general…