According to the linguistic theory of "natural order," eight English morphemes have been ranked in an invariant order of difficulty for learners of English as a Second Language (ESL). Pedagogical implications of this theory have led to the "natural approach" as a comprehensive second language teaching methodology. A case study that suggests the…

English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) students in general, and Chinese speakers in particular, often omit or misuse English prepositions in speaking or writing. A study traced the history and structure of the English preposition, using contrastive analysis and error analysis to find sources of Chinese error. To determine if Chinese speakers exceed…

The argument is presented that good writing begins with adult inner speech that ignores audience and then gradually evolves into a form of communication adding the vital component of audience into its focus. It is suggested that when second language writers are not trained to go beyond the inner speech in their own language, they do not have the…

Focusing on spelling as an integral part of the writing process, this annotated bibliography addresses the problem of developing individualized, focused, and relevant methods for teaching spelling to elementary students. The annotations are organized around two specific questions: What strategies do children use to spell words and what…

Some errors in adult black students' writing cannot be analyzed merely within the traditional hierarchy of grammatical rules; a look at sociological factors is germane to an evaluation of students' writing ability or inability. Data for an analysis of black adult students' writing at the syntactic level have shown that problems of clarity might be…

A study investigated the variability of language performance on different types of testing task, global versus discrete-focus. Three tests (cloze, multiple-choice, and fill-in-the-blank) were developed to measure learners' knowledge of five verb forms. The tests, containing corresponding items designed to elicit equivalent structures, were…

Researchers investigating the cerebral information processing of visual stimuli have usually followed the pattern of stimulating the subject's eyes with light and observing accompanying changes in brain wave patterns. Such visually evoked responses (VERs) have been found to discriminate bright from dull children and dyslexic from normal readers.…

In teaching standard English to non-native students or students with different dialects, teachers must gain the students' trust by demonstrating an egalitarian attitude toward all dialects, and by explaining that the acquisition of a new dialect does not require rejection of the old one. Also, in order to teach written English effectively to…

Error pattern analysis is a teaching technique that emphasizes identifying, classifying, and keeping a frequency count on only those errors actually occurring in students' writing. Application of error pattern analysis in a workshop format requires three steps: preparing an error pattern analysis, teaching from this analysis, and integrating it…

The problems encountered by English as second language (ESL) students in selecting verb tenses for their written discourse were investigated. Tape recorded interviews with four freshman composition students who had been referred for intensive work on verb errors were analyzed for students' explanations of their errors and the contexts in which…

A collection of 32 conference papers is presented as reflecting the state of the art in contrastive linguistics studies of English and other languages. The reports cover the following topics: 5 English contrastive projects (Romanian-English, Yugoslav-Serbo-Croatian English, English-Hungarian, and Finnish-English analysis, and a project from the…

Two studies were conducted to determine whether the consonant errors displayed by readers with severe reading disabilities are the result of phonetic rather than visual substitutions. In the first study, the reading and spelling performance of three groups of readers with average IQs but with reading levels two years below grade level, was…

Characteristics of DART (Didactic Augmented Recursive Transition), an ATN-based system for writing intelligent computer assisted instruction (ICAI) programs that is available on the PLATO system are described. DART allows writing programs in an ATN dialect, compiling them in machine code for the PLATO system, and executing them as if the original…

A study investigated errors in the writing of black students to determine how those errors were influenced by black oral English. Writing samples were gathered from 99 third grade and 68 sixth grade students in a school in an inner city, low income neighborhood. All errors in the samples were listed and analyzed. In the samples produced by the…

This report discusses the results of a study of children's spelling errors to determine whether vernacular black English (VBE) speakers and standard English speakers (SE) infer different underlying phonological representations according to their respective dialects. Subjects included two groups of beginning second graders from schools in two…