Discusses problems encountered in reading of English by foreign students who are unaccustomed to English script. Considering two levels of reading, students having difficulties at one level will regress by reason of vertical decalage to a lower level of learning strategy. This is manifested by a more intent focus on individual letters if the pupil…

Describes a study undertaken to assess interference from two languages for learners of French. Suggests that susceptibility to interference is related to a number of factors, such as level of proficiency in the target language, and the degree and type of similarity between the target and the base language. (MES)

Questions the value of the theory of interlanguage for language learning research. (AM)

Examines the differential use of formal explicit knowledge and intuitive implicit knowledge in a second language grammaticality judgement tasks. (Author/AM)

The syntactic distribution and behavior of five English and Persian "measure" nouns and their adjectives are compared. From this, errors attributable to transference and those due to inconsistencies in English are enumerated. A unified analytic model of Persian errors in learning English suggests useful teaching strategies. (PMJ)

Compares variant pronunciations of "clothes" in British and American colloquial with the D. Jones "norms" taught in German schools and with the mostly incorrect pronunciations of German students of English. Considers the genesis of the errors, and discusses possibilities for correcting and preventing such errors. (IFS/WGA)

Presents results of a study that sought to test the pronunciation problems of a large number of American students in a beginning college-level French course. Learner difficulties over a 15-week period were used to create a hierarchy of minimal contrasts representing major, secondary, and minor problems for the students in learning French sounds.…

Describes a sequence for teaching the Russian passive construction to exemplify how a learning sequence based on a contrastive analysis and on error analysis can lessen student errors. These errors are caused either by interference from the first language or over-generalization in the second language. (PMJ)

Argues that tests have always been used as a means of political and social control. Maintains that test results are unreliable, especially at the extremes, that their predictive power is weak and that language testers need to be skeptical and need to insist on complete information on candidates' backgrounds for selection decision making. (10…

Describes a preschool child's gradual acquisition of a play language, Pig Latin, and discusses the abilities and errors that were measured over the course of acquisition. Acquisition improved as the subject developed language abilities involving word identification, first-consonant deletion, suffix creation, and short-term memory for speech units.…

Investigates the acquisition of selected English short and long vowel spellings by German learners of English in order to answer the questions: who acquires the short and long vowel spellings (a,e,i), and when and what governs their order of acquisition? Statistical data is included. (Author/OD)

This article discusses case studies of subjects labeled as learning disabled (LD) who have gained a degree of proficiency in a second language. The subjects' performance on written dictations, oral readings, and comprehension after oral and silent reading are compared qualitatively between their first and second language. (60 references) (JL)

An error analysis based on phonetic transcription of French utterances by native speakers of Cantonese yielded a scale of difficulty for word-initial and word-final consonants. The Markedness Differential Hypothesis explained some errors. Evidence also pointed to interaction of language acquisition with markedness reversals. (35 references) (CNP)

Comparison of the effects of error- versus message-oriented written feedback on second-language students' essays found that error corrections and rule reminders did not significantly improve students' written accuracy or enhance the ideational quality of their writing, whereas message-related comments promoted writing proficiency. (63 references)…

This investigation encompassed a full-scale experiment for both Japanese and Korean university students and looked at the following: the role of grammaticality-judgment tasks (GJT) in second-language acquisition; the learners' behaviors when they were asked to do GJT; and the reasons why the learners made the wrong grammatical judgments.…