Discusses syntactic and stylistic errors in the language of advertising and the reason for these linguistic irregularities. Suggests ways of dealing with the problem. (EL)

Urges extended and broadened use of error analysis in school activities because observing how children perform during varied literacy activities can allow clues to their linguistic rules for using oral and written language and the sociolinguistic rules children are discovering in the classroom. (DF)

This 21st annual progress report summarizes research activities on speech perception and spoken language processing carried out in the Speech Research Laboratory, Department of Psychology, Indiana University in Bloomington. As with previous reports, the goal is to summarize accomplishments during 1996 and 1997 and make them readily available. Some…

This study identified and described the ways in which negative evidence was made available and accessible to learners during two widely practiced classroom activities. One was a teacher-led discussion that emphasized communication of subject matter content. The other was a teacher-led sentence construction exercise that focused on application of…

Commenting on an article by D. Scott, in Mathematics Teaching 52 (Autumn 1970), He present author shows that it is important to know the distribution of error and not just the maximum error. (MM)

Use of contextual information in reading was examined by subjecting pupils to a cloze task (inserting missing words in texts) and an error-detection task (recognizing graphemic, syntactic, or semantic errors in texts). Children in higher grades and good readers (versus poor readers) demonstrated greater use of graphemic, syntactic, and semantic…

Psycholinguistic insights relevant to diagnoses of reading difficulties are considered, and the importance of evaluating oral reading performance on significant word recognition errors rather than on total errors is emphasized. (CL)

Experiment designed to test efficacy of techniques of comprehensive error correction on combined grammatical and orthographic correctness of compositions written by intermediate-level college students studying German found writing skill development favorably affected by appropriate techniques. They are: systematic scoring of compositions;…

Whether overgeneralization of quantified relations in a story reflects reasonable inferences from the story's theme was examined. Subjects read narratives with similar story structures but different thematic conflicts. Recognition results showed that overgeneralization "errors" are systematic, consistent with thematic elements of the…

Discusses two types of student writing problems: error characteristics (spelling, pronoun usage, subject-verb agreement, run-on sentences, and capitalization) and nonerror characteristics (density of ideas, variety of referents, and variety of expression). Suggests ways to diagnose and correct them. (HTH)

Assesses the effects on second language learning of written feedback that either suppressed student errors or made them salient. Planned comparisons showed achievement was consistently superior under salient error conditions and with constructively critical feedback. Relevance of the findings for instructional theory and second language teaching…

Describes a simple teacher-scored method which can be used to determine the proportion of correct usage in freshman ESL compositions. Concludes Correctness Scores provide a useful tool for investigation of hierarchy of significant errors in English and is a technique well-suited to supply data for future work along these lines. (Author/BK)

Describes pilot project on effectiveness of proofreading exercises in English as a second language classes in reducing common student errors in use of tenses, concord, and spelling. Results show some improvement, but not as much as was hoped. (BK)

Shows that hesitation phenomena are intricately connected with propspective and retrospective speech production tasks and mark critical points in processing. Two major hesitation categories exist: stalls and repairs. Stalls head off errors and represent error-free output; repairs take care of errors already committed. English and German examples…

Presents examples of interference phenomena, lexical, grammatical, and orthographic, which occurred in the translation section of examinations given to prospective teachers of English in German university-preparatory high schools. The elements of error are analyzed, and corrected versions are supplied. (IFS/WGA)