Follows the approach developed in Dendrinos (1992) for English-as-a-foreign-language textbook analysis and presents a content analysis of 11 Indian "Common Errors in English" (CEIE) guidebooks to illustrate how access to English is institutionally withheld from large parts of the Indian population. (Author/VWL)

Spelling errors of 215 Grade 6 English-as-a-Second-Language learners were examined with a view to gaining an understanding of how these children construe and misconstrue the structure of their second language. It was found that unstressed grammatical function words proved particularly difficult for the learners to render in writing. They had…

A pilot study concerning the range of writing skills of intermediate students of English as a second language (ESL) is reported. The study identified the clause structures and relative low-order linguistic skills in the writing samples of 25 college students in this group. The method of evaluation of writing samples was a model of conformity to…

A study compared subjective and objective methods of evaluating college students' second-language communicative competence as expressed in their writing. (MSE)

An approach to teaching grammar that combines an understanding of the error patterns of nonnative speakers and a theoretical model that describes that language is better suited than most to the actual audience of that instruction. (MSE)

One important but undervalued aspect of productive vocabulary is collocation--the ways in which words are combined with one another. To move from receptive to productive vocabulary, students need to learn a wide variety of ways that words collocate with each other. This paper describes the major types of collocations, typical collocational errors…

Synthesizes findings from observational classroom research on corrective feedback and presents an observational study of patterns of error treatment n an adult English-as-a-Second-Language classroom. Examines the range and types of feedback used by the teacher and their relationship to learner uptake and immediate repair of error. (Author/VWL)

Examined reactions of anxious and nonanxious foreign language learners to their own errors. Native Spanish speaking students were videotaped as they took part in an English conversation with the researcher and as they watched themselves in the taped interview. Analysis of participants' English interactions and responses to their performances…

The present study examines 20 writing samples in English and Spanish selected from portfolios of first grade children at a bilingual school in Ecuador. Based on earlier findings that paragraphs composed in English and Spanish by children, adolescents and adults are different (Lux & Grabe, 1991; Montano-Harmon, 1991; Reid, 1990; Reppen &…

This article explores the attribution of linguistic resources to multilingual students in a primary school in the Netherlands. Drawing on an ethnographic study of a regular, multicultural classroom, it describes patterns of attribution emerging from observations of classroom activities and interviews with the teacher. Its focus is on the…

What syntactic patterns emerge in students' use of articles and modals? What are the reasons for these patterns? What implications do the findings of the study have for English language instruction in Botswana? Exactly 1556 essays comprising class assignments, written seminar presentations, test papers and examination scripts from 514 randomly…

Based on the premise that teaching basic writing involves first understanding what tends to go wrong when students write, a computer assisted system of error prediction and analysis was designed to improve college students' writing skills in both English and French. Students were to complete a sequenced series of writing assignments first in…

Introduces the technique of computer-aided error analysis, a new approach to analyzing learner errors in second-language learning. Data used to demonstrate the technique consist of a 150,000-word corpus of English written by intermediate and advanced-level French-speaking learners. The study concludes that error analysis is worthwhile,…

Although it is recognized that ESL students often need assistance to become more comprehensible speakers, their teachers usually have limited time to devote to pronunciation instruction. Research should help teachers set priorities for pronunciation teaching to address these students' needs as efficiently as possible. Here we test the usefulness…

A discussion of English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) teaching focuses on the relationship of lexical items to the syntactic situations in which they may occur, and the importance of teaching this relationship to language learners. First, common errors made by ESL students that are attributable to lack of syntactic context knowledge are identified.…