Investigates the readability of four authentic German texts by high school students at five levels of German language instruction and analyzes six kinds of student comprehension: word recognition, phonemic/graphemic, syntactic feature, intratextual perception, metacognition, and prior knowledge. (MSE)

Considers pragmatic competence and misinterpretations in foreign-language use. Findings indicate that too many language teachers are still clinging to prescriptive views of language use. Practitioners should reevaluate the ways students' use of the language adds to its wealth and scope. (CB)

Written and oral data were evaluated by native speaking judges to ascertain the extent to which they could identify the members of the same native language group on the basis of either phonological or syntactic evidence. Results are presented and other research data are examined to see if they support these findings. (SED)

A cross-sectional and a longitudinal study of two-year-old children was performed to investigate the developmental relationship between understanding differences in spatial point of view and correct comprehension and production of I/you pronouns. Results suggest that understanding spatial points of view is a cognitive prerequisite to understanding…

Discusses results of study that attempted to determine whether subject-auxiliary inversion occurs in yes-no questions before wh-questions and whether noninversion errors are characteristic feature of acquisition of wh-questions. Findings do not support previous claims that inversion is acquired in yes-no questions before wh-questions. Rather,…

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)