As part of a larger study of the oral reading of elementary school students representing eight linguistic populations in the United States, a study was conducted to discover why readers make the same miscues at the same point in a text and to discover factors in the text that contribute to this phenomenon. Subjects were second, fourth, and sixth…

Most of the mechanical and content errors in the sentences written by journalism students can be attributed to four faulty patterns that can be traced to errors in the thinking process: fragmented sentence parts, personification, bureaucratic coding ("officialese"), and compressed sentences. While acceptable in spoken communication where…

Areas of interference between English and the Spanish of some Puerto Ricans and Cubans in Chicago is the subject of this study. Fifty-nine informants were provided with a list of everyday expressions in English, which they were to express in Spanish. The informants were classified according to education, degree of knowledge of English, and degree…

The study was designed to test the effects of a limited amount of sentence-combining practice on the syntactic development and overall writing ability of foreign students. Participants were freshmen studying English as a second language during an eight-week period. Twenty-four students were divided into a control and an experimental group. The…

The goal of this study is to discover the phonetic difficulties encountered in the acquisition of French as a second language by English-speaking children. The children are studying French in a total immersion situation without benefit of structural exercises or special French language laboratory classes. Of particular interest here is the extent…

Certain categories of grammatical errors made by 42 teacher trainees at Lund University in Sweden are described and explained. Each student was asked to write two summaries in English, one an account of a book that appeared on a list of books for extensive reading and the other an account of a 40-minute tape recording in the language laboratory,…

A multiple-choice test of English vocabulary and grammar was administered to college-bound Swedish-speaking and Finnish-speaking students studying English in Finland. Erroneous responses were analyzed to determine differences in learning strategies between the two groups. Swedish speakers were found to choose incorrect alternatives based on…

Error analysis is considered both a part of the methodology for the psycholinguistic investigation of the second language acquisition process as well as a part of the teaching-learning methods and materials re-evaluation process. The language acquisition process is a dynamic process governed by the principles of hypothesis formulation, testing and…

A major problem in learning a second language is the interference of a structurally different native language. Contrastive analysis (CA) combined with learner error analysis (EA) provide an excellent basis for preparation of language instructional materials. The Yugoslav Serbo-Croatian-English Contrastive Project proved that full application of CA…

Three methods for second language data collection are compared: free composition, picture description and translation. The comparison is based on percentage of errors in a grammatical category and in a source category. Most results obtained from the free compositions and picture descriptions tended to be similar. Greater variation was found for…

This study focuses on a native speaker of Chinese, in her 40's, who began to learn English in her late 20's when she emigrated to the United States. It was discovered that the subject was able to self-correct nearly every error she made in casual speech when the errors were pointed out to her after their commission. Furthermore, in nearly every…

The errors of 187 bilingual students, aged 10 years, 11 months to 19 years, 8 months were analyzed as they studied English as a third language. Errors were categorized with two major learning strategies in mind: transfer and overgeneralization. Types of errors were related to degree of bilingualism, English proficiency level and age of the…

This study examined the most frequent communicative and linguistic errors made by 24 intermediate ESL students, and determined the effect of direct teacher correction upon these students' writing proficiency. Students were identified as having high or low communicative proficiency and were randomly assigned to one of two error correction…

Inexperienced writers, including both basic writers and learning disabled, commit errors that often follow a discernible pattern due to applying erroneous or incomplete rules. Techniques for teaching editing skills are described, including textual analyses of students' writing, interviews with students, structuring the editing task, and providing…

Elementary learning-disabled boys (N=48) were randomly assigned to four feedback treatment conditions that involved orally reading nonsense words. Results demonstrated significant differences for: any type of feedback compared to no feedback, corrective feedback (modeling and sound-it-out) compared to general feedback, and modeling compared to…