Research has found that, during speaking activities, instances of students' collaborative repair are most often lexicon-focused. Collaborative writing tasks have been credited with the potential to force students to confront broad issues, such as content and register, along with more narrow lexical and morphological choices. The present study…

Discusses the theoretical foundations of both basic approaches to contrastive analysis, the predictive, "a priori" version, and the explanatory, "a posteriori" version. Analyzes problems in both approaches, and states that explanatory investigations must be divorced from "classical" contrastive analysis and used with a more realistic methodology…

The applied linguist, who most commonly uses interlanguage analysis for nonstandard language forms, and the language teacher, who relies heavily on error analysis, each need to learn the usefulness and viability of the other method in his own professional context. Examples focus on the written preterit form in Spanish. (44 references) (Author/MSE)

A collection of gross errors in language usage can be used effectively for classroom practice in error analysis and can increase students' understanding of the conceptual and functional frameworks of language use by appealing to their sense of humor. (MSE)