The criteria employed in most textbooks to differentiate "ser" and "estar" followed by an adjective are mainly semantic. Most exercises offer to second language learners too high a proportion of "estar" usages, a practice that leads to overgeneralization with regard to the use of "estar." An experiment was…

Speakers of languages without a surface case system tend, when learning German, to place predicate nominals erroneously in the accusative case when the verb is passive or the sentence governs a passive rather than an active situation. Three hypotheses are offered to explain this phenomenon: (1) the learner carries over the deep structure relations…

Based on the assumption that major sentence errors are caused by a deficit in syntactic fluency that can be aided by sentence combining instruction, student writing errors are analyzed in this paper and explanations are provided showing how these errors could have been prevented or reduced through instruction in sentence combining. Some types of…

This is a quarterly report of a project involving the analysis of the language of four Puerto Rican children living in the Boston area who are learning Spanish as a first language. The children, all male, ranged in age from 17 months to 37 months during the period of study. All had some contact with English. The data were transcriptions of…

This report consists of two major sections. The first describes the theory and methodology of the Romanian-English Contrastive Analysis Project (RECAP), and the second section presents the first aberrant corpus in RECAP. Also provided are a list of signs and abbreviations and three annexes consisting of two translation exercises and one…

This report, the fifth in a series of working papers issued by the Project on Applied Contrastive Linguistics (PAKS) at the University of Stuttgart, is dedicated to a consideration of error analysis in language learning, here seen as relevant not only for the teacher but for the text book writer and the curriculum planner as well. An introduction…

Discusses the correction system for German-French translations used in German universities. The following are proposed: (1) Differentiation of, and a grading scale for, errors; (2) Distinguishing interstructural vs. intrastructural errors, (with suggestion for grading); (3) Localizing errors in grammar or vocabulary, with consequences for grading.…

Describes ongoing research into errors in spontaneous speech. (RM)

Eleven language teachers were videotaped teaching the same lesson to determine how they treated students' errors. Analysis showed types of errors treated and treatments used were similar; grammar errors seemed less important than incorrect meaning. Suggested alternative treatments are based on the importance to learning of contrasts, redundancy…

Retrospective study of case records of speech-delayed children (N=73) given 14 different management programs over seven years suggested that age and error type may be predictors of potential spontaneous generalization and that the inclusion of self-monitoring procedures may increase the probability of early spontaneous generalizations of target…

A study of a brain-damaged subject's impaired performance on tasks involving production of verbal numbers found that lexical errors occurred in spoken production but not in written production, while syntactic error occurred in both modes. (Author/CB)

Proposes a method for describing the relationship between writing error and style shifting rates across communicative situations. Finds that errors diminished in proportion to the tendency of students to select grammatical features that are shared by Black American English and Standard American English in formal communicative situations. (RAE)

Effects of speech sampling conditions (labeling and connected speech) on the phonological error pattern of 14 moderately to profoundly phonologically impaired children were examined. More phonological processes were observed in the connected speech samples than in the labeling task. Similarities in performances in the two contexts were far greater…

Form-oriented errors of verbal inflection in speech are examined as indicators of cognitive processing in six experiments with college undergraduates. Appendices list words used as stimuli in the six experiments. (LMO)