A study of children's acquisition of the auxiliary verb system in English is reported. The first section describes the operation of the auxiliary system, and proposes that the behavior of auxiliaries is so complicated that if children were to generalize from one auxiliary to another, they would make predictable errors. The second section reviews…

Noting that while the number of errors gives a general indication of spelling ability, it may represent an oversimplification of the spelling process, a study examined the spelling ability of 40 Canadian third grade students of average ability. Subjects were divided into low and high spelling ability groups on the basis of the Edmonton (Alberta)…

The uses of the present progressive tense in informal English spoken discourse are examined, focusing on the increasing frequency of the so-called stative or non-action verbs found in the progressive aspect. Generalizations are proposed to account for: (1) the discrepancy between grammar book explanations and actual usage, and (2) the meaning of…

Two studies investigated three questions: (1) Do second language learners provide mostly faulty feedback to their peers in evaluating written composition? (2) Is peer feedback more or less effective than teacher correction? and (3) Do second language learners welcome or resist peer feedback? The studies were done in Thailand and Hawaii with…

A study investigated the relationship between writing proficiency and two aspects of proofreading: (1) the ability to detect structural errors, and (2) the ability to accurately correct them. During the fall of 1986 seventeen English-as-a-Second-Language students in the intermediate-level grammar review and paragraph writing class at Biola…

A discussion of the field of contrastive linguistics (CL) begins by defining the relationship between theoretical and applied CL in terms of the concept of finalization, which originated in the philosophy of science. Then, the historical development of CL in the United States and Europe is sketched. This development is seen as characterized by a…

An observable feature of learner language, linguistic variability, is described and used as the basis for speculating about an aspect of the process of second language learning. It is hypothesized that variation in correct use of target language forms varies as a function of the demands placed on the learner to produce these forms. Three groups of…

In order to study the syntactic components which operate in the imitation and recoding of standard English by bilingual and bidialectal children, a sample of 20 multiethnic Spanish speakers and 20 black English speakers was drawn from children in the first, second, and third grades of a metropolitan bilingual program. The ability of these children…

The limitations of both methods, and their practical applications, are discussed. (RM)

Analyzes a corpus of 360 errors made by Polish university students in the German department. Sets up categories of interference-induced and non-interference-induced errors. Relates error analysis to teaching techniques. (Text is in German.) (DH)

This study investigates plural noun forms in Modern Hebrew to show that the pattern of regularization differs for specific words, rather than for classes of words. Early regularization, in which the children add a plural suffix with no stem change, applies unconditionally. Subsequently, the pattern changes and while some words are still…

This discussion is based on the results of an earlier experiment in which four groups of deaf subjects, ranging in age of first exposure to signing from birth to over eighteen, were given lists of sentences in American Sign Language to shadow and recall immediately after presentation. It was found that in terms of overall accuracy, early learners…

A total of 163 teachers were involved in a study to determine whether primary school teachers exhibited different attitudes toward specific kinds of oral reading errors than did teachers of older students, whether the attitudes of teachers of English as a second language and special education teachers were similar to the attitudes of regular…

Two children's spontaneous utterances containing the comparative structure are examined for their semantic content. Many comparatives are found to encode the notion "A has property X," and this use is often found in reference to the presence of X to an extreme, rather than a non-extreme, extent. The uses of the comparative are analyzed…

To determine whether miscue analysis instruction changed their perceptions of the seriousness of certain kinds of errors in children's oral reading, 60 undergraduate and graduate students were given an error survey to complete before and after being given such instruction. Each of the 32 items of the survey consisted of a pair of sentences, with…