Describes a study designed to determine which sentence level errors by nonnative speakers of English are judged to be most serious by an academic community and to discover what factors may influence this judgment. Most respondents saw the errors in relative rather than absolute terms, forming an error hierarchy. (SED)

Reviews the results of research in language acquisition, interactional analysis, pragmatics, repair, error, and social and affective factors. Extracts four language teaching principles relating to acquisition activities in the classroom, the importance of affective factors, the communicative capacity of learners, and the nature and treatment of…

Presents three interrelated theses on the mechanisms underlying developmental and transfer errors, and exemplifies these with reference to a number of English L2 developmental structures. Proposes a framework where linguistic factors play a major role in protracting the restructuring of the preverbal negation rule by Spanish learners. (Author/MES)

Describes the development and organization of the Colt (Communicative Orientation of Language Teaching) observation scheme and Lyster and Ranta's (1997) error treatment model, instruments including predetermined categories to describe features of instructional input and interaction in second language classrooms. Concludes that the choice of…

Limitations of language acquisition research are: the restricted linguistic scope of studies; lack of data in cognitive processes and learning strategies, the role of individual variables, second language acquisition, and the role of social and environmental variables; and undeveloped methodology for data collection and data analysis. (SCC)

Reports on the progress being made in an attempt to establish a second language acquisition index of development that would gauge a learner's second language proficiency. A project was undertaken involving the analysis of 212 compositions written by university students of English as a second language. (CFM)