It is asserted that the optimum method of describing the stages of an interlanguage (IL) and the development of learner competency toward the target language (TL) is one of self-analysis and subsequent reanalysis. A nine-page letter written by a native speaker of German in 1987 is compared with her correction of the letter in 1991. Analyses…

Recommends composition writing on carefully chosen subjects in the initial stages of French training. The teacher corrects compositions and creates an "error frequency profile" for the entire class. (MLA)

Nonsense utterances were presented to subjects for immediate recall in order to test two hypotheses: (1) the more complex sounds should be more difficult to recall under memory-taxing conditions; (2) the erroneous recall of a less marked for a more marked sound should occur more frequently than the converse error. (CFM)

Attempts to answer several questions posed by researchers in agraphia. The questions concern analysis of errors in sensory aphasia; a typology of sensory agraphia; a possible relationship between sensory agraphia and sensory aphasia; and questions of a neurolinguistic order and those of a purely linguistic order. (Text is in French.) (AMH)

Comparison of two methods for teaching grammatical exceptions in an introductory college French course suggested that the "Garden Path" technique, where teachers presented canonical exemplars encouraging students to induce the exception, was less effective than simply teaching the exception as an exception. (Author/CB)

A study examined lexical specificity, the occurrence of pragmatic information, and a syntactic aspect (presence or absence of inversion) of the acquisition of both indirect and direct wh-questions in children aged five through eight years. (MSE)

Analysis of the spelling errors of three college students with varying writing abilities and a history of spelling problems suggests that students must be taught spelling remediation along with vocabulary development and writing, with emphasis on helping students understand the underlying logic and regularity of the writing system and effective…

A sequel to a report of acoustic characteristics of oral reading by 36 (aged 10-12 years), children, this article describes results: of perceptual analyses of oral reading proficiency on a five-point scale; of reading error analysis; and of multiple regression analysis for testing predictability of the oral reading proficiency from the perceptual…

The article examines two topics important to educators working with learning disabled college writers: error patterns of college learning disabled, normal, and basic writers across different tasks and instructional approaches successful in improvng the written language skills of college learning disabled writers, such as sentence combining and…

Discusses the theories of contrastive analysis and error analysis in second language learning with regard to the idea that a language closely related to one's own native language is easier to learn that a remotely related one. (EKN)

Discusses linguistic competence and performance and how analyzing second language learners' errors can provide clues about their interlanguage, which is useful not only for pedagogical reasons, but also for the forwarding of general linguistic theory. (EKN)

Describes study to determine how native speakers would react to those second-language errors perceived by intermediate Spanish instructors as being most troublesome in their classes. Results show 90 percent or more of the native speakers could comprehend 40 of the 48 errors in sample. (Author/BK)

Concludes that methodological problems must be overcome and certain critical assumptions validated before the results from oral reading error analysis can be used confidently. (AEA)

Reviews the research concerning correction behavior and offers suggestions for encouraging students to correct miscues in oral reading. (FL)

Patterns of misspelling common to children's writing are examined to help teachers recognize the strategies used by developing spellers so that they can provide more focused and individualized spelling instruction. (HTH)