The purpose of this study was to compare two oral reading fluency treatments (repeated readings and phrase drill error correction) which differ in the way they prompt student responding. Repeated readings (RR) and phrase drill (PD) error correction were alternated with a baseline and a reward condition within an alternating treatments design with…

This study reflects a social constructivist theoretical framework in which the zone of proximal development (ZPD) is a central element, as two teaching approaches, communicative language teaching (CLT) and explicit focus on form (FonF) are examined. Research questions include: Are CLT and explicit FonF conducive to reaching the ZPD? Is there a…

A collection of seven essays on errors in second language learning focuses on secondary school instruction in the United Kingdom. The essays address three questions that a foreign language learner might ask the teacher, including: What do you mean, it's wrong?; What do I have to do to make it better?; and Why should I get it right anyway? The…

Participants learning first aid at a distance through printed self-paced materials attempted tasks involving near and far transfer. They performed well on near transfer tasks but the controlled cognitive processing involved in far transfer caused recurrence of errors that had been corrected earlier. (SK)

Assessed the provision and use of implicit negative feedback in the interactional context of adult beginning learners of Spanish working in dyads in the foreign language classroom. Relationships among error types, feedback types, and immediate learner repair were also examined. Findings indicate learners did not provide explicit negative feedback…

Examines types of corrective feedback, their distribution, and effects, most ostensibly uptake, as produced in nonnative/nonnative conversational dyads in French. (Author/VWL)

Explores the combination of on-line chat rooms with regular classroom interactions in a personalized English program and its potentials to enhance second language development. Suggests that the face-to-face interactions may have highlighted the participants' language problems and enhanced their awareness of such problems, whereas the on-line…

Reports on a study in progress. Considers if papers produced by students who learned from reduced-grammar methods have fewer errors than papers produced by students who learned from traditional grammar handbooks. Explores if students who use a computer to search for errors correct more errors than students who search manually. Examines if students…

To overcome obstacles in error detection needed for intelligent feedback in computer assisted language learning (CALL), calls for a new focus on lexical items, both single words and multiword units of various types. Suggests single and multiword lexemes should not only be explicitly taught in CALL but could also provide the key to more effective…

Evaluates CorrecText, Houghton-Mifflin's computer-based grammar checker that fully parses sentences and finds errors in grammar, style, and usage. Argues that, while CorrecText is an improvement over similar programs, it still cannot accommodate the syntactically ambiguous nature of English. Limits current design's usefulness to unedited prose.…

The study reported here investigated the effects of using props to illustrate the meaning of sentences in a syntactic awareness task in which subjects were required to correct ungrammatical sentences. Children scored significantly higher in the props condition though the proportion of meaning-changing errors to total errors was not significantly…

Describes a project that improved the quality of BCIN, the bibliographic database of the Conservation Information Network, by correcting data fields and removing duplicate records. The database is described, deduplication theory is discussed and relevant literature is reviewed, algorithm development and testing is described, and results of…

Examined the effect of linguistic contrast in children's learning of color names. A novel color term for a stimulus color that was contrasted with a child's label helped five-year olds learn the new term. When the contrast was presented more than once, three- and four-year olds performed much like the five-year olds. (BC)

Describes a quick new academic readability estimate; ways to correct adult learners' writing errors; and high school reading programs in Ohio. (RS)

An n-gram is a string of characters, usually adjacent, extracted from a section of continuous text that can be used in spelling error detection and correction, query expansion, information retrieval, dictionary search, text compression, and language identification applications. This article provides an introduction to the use of n-grams in textual…