Two areas of study in the composition field, grammar and style, have fallen below the critical and professional radar, left to the handbook writers, old-school theorists, and secondary educators. Though a few voices remain, their conspicuous absence in the scholarly journals and at professional conferences clearly suggests that the field has moved…

Examines the various roles which grammatical consciousness can assume in the planning stages of a language teaching syllabus. Gives examples of learning activities that can engender unconscious awareness of crucial aspects of language organization. (EKN)

Presents study involving university Spanish students testing predictive power of contrastive analysis in terms of accuracy of predicted hierarchy for persistence of phonological errors. Results show problems involving allophone use or nonuse are more persistent than those involving phoneme use or nonuse, and the degree of difficulty of a sound…

College students and 6- to 10-year-old children searched four 50-word passages for instances of the letter "n". The subjects made most letter detection errors on the function words "in" and "and," and on the suffix morpheme "-ing." Developmental trends in detecting the target letter were noted. (Author/DB)

Summarizes recent empirical research in second language acquisition. Discusses relationship between age and second language learning, implications of invariant order of acquisition of morphemes obtained in various second language acquisition studies, and role of errors in second language acquisition. (Author/BK)

Article investigates Frenchpersons' tolerance for grammatical errors typical of Americans learning French and attempts to establish priorities for correcting errors in classroom. Study looks at degree to which errors interfered with comprehensibility, irritation caused by errors, whether errors were more tolerated in speaking or writing, and rank…

Discusses the problems inherent in the most common approaches to evaluating children's oral reading and proposes a more flexible diagnostic teaching approach. (FL)

Contradicts a previous assertion by C. Tanz that children commit substitution errors usually using objective pronoun forms for nominative ones. Examples from Dutch and German provide evidence that substitutions are made in both directions. (CHK)

Examines growth of word reading skills in first- and second-grade Italian children by analyzing the pattern of reading errors. Tailors the selection of reading material to permit a meaningful cross-language comparison with pre-existing findings on English-speaking children. Finds that, in English and Italian, spatially related errors constituted a…

Discusses various theories of spelling development including their relevance to regularly spelled languages. Concludes that, as in other languages, children are integrating many different types of linguistic knowledge in their attempt to spell words correctly; dialect, orthography, and grammatical knowledge are all important. (SG)

Conducts a small-scale survey similar to one conducted by Maxine Hairston in 1979 to test whether nonacademic professionals' attitudes towards usage errors have changed in 20 years. Indicates a trend for respondents to find errors less bothersome than the respondents did 20 years ago. Supports the claim made by Hairston and other researchers that…

Four grammar checkers, all of French Canadian origin, were evaluated: "Le Correcteur 101,""GramR,""Hugo Plus," and "French Proofing Tools." Results indicate that "Le Correcteur 101" is the best French grammar checker on the market and worth its premium cost. (two references) (CK)

This study of 40 hearing-impaired college students found that highly intelligible speakers were uniformly consistent in their speech production patterns, whereas speakers who exhibited low overall speech intelligibility were either extremely consistent in their aberrant production patterns or extremely inconsistent in their error patterns.…

Ten language-impaired children, aged 4-6, were found to exhibit more pronounced syntactic deficits than 10 normal children matched by mean length of utterance. Language samples were analyzed with respect to: grammatical marker need index; grammatical marker error index; and grammatical marker errors for nouns, verbs, bound, and unbound forms.…

This paper discusses the validity and utility of contrastive analysis for language teaching, focusing on the utility of contrastive analysis over error analysis in analyzing adverbial positioning in sentences produced by two groups of native speakers of English and Arabic. Contains 13 references. (MDM)