Miscue analysis has been used by teachers and reading specialists for more than 30 years. Its purpose is to reveal strengths and weaknesses in how children process text and thereby inform instruction for individual learners. But is it still a useful approach? The authors assert that miscue analysis can indeed be a useful tool, though not for all…

This article analyzes the braille spelling errors of 16 Greek students who are blind. More specifically, it explores the types of spelling errors, the students' attitudes toward spelling, and the relationship between spelling and reading strategies.

Four recent volumes on acquisition of French by different populations cover a range of areas, particularly the development of verbal tense/agreement and nominal gender/concord in first language (L1) acquirers, as opposed to second language (L2) learners; the generalizability of grammatical deficits (e.g. difficulty acquiring parametrized features…

English as a Foreign Language (EFL) freshman students at the College of Languages and Translation received direct instruction in adjective-forming suffixes, then they took an immediate and a delayed test. Error analysis showed that 36% of the responses were left blank or the subjects duplicated the stimulus word. In 32% they mismatched the word…

Just as learning a first language is sometimes compared to existence within the relatively sheltered world of the Garden of Eden, the process of learning a second language is viewed as analogous to survival after expulsion from the Garden into a relatively harsh world, in which the learner must come to a conscious understanding of form and meaning…

The use of connectives in 41 academic papers written for an English writing course by Japanese students ranging from university sophomores to graduate students was examined. Connectives were categorized as additive, adversative, causal, and temporal. Each connective type was subject to certain types of error. Additive connectives tended to be…

This paper adopts the activation spreading theory to explore how lexical items are accessed. Approximately 3300 errors from both public sources and ordinary conversation in Japanese are analyzed. Analyses suggest that there are two types of environment in which contextual lexical errors occur, and that these two types of environment correspond to…

A review of the relevant literature reveals that reading reversals, whether in sequence or orientation, comprise a very small proportion of the total errors made by even poor readers. Young children tend to make more reversals, yet this tendency generally disappears with age. Top-down theorists feel that the reversal tendency of young children is…

The patterns of acquisition of the passe compose and imperfect tenses in French among 16 adult beginning and intermediate students were studied. Based on 15-minute speech samples in which both verb tenses were elicited by seeded questions and cues for descriptive and narrative monologues, the intermediate learners had greater success with the…

Common problems encountered in teaching Chinese that involve classical, intentional malapropisms (learned errors) are discussed. Three aspects unique to Chinese are addressed: (1) since Chinese writing is logographic, some malapropisms occur because of similar graphs; (2) since many expressions come from classical Chinese, and instruction in…

Recommendations for remediation of 28 distinct common error patterns in arithmetic computation are described. (SD)

Endpoint and distance effects have been observed in the protocols of subjects learning linear orderings. These were produced by subjects learning the frequency of word occurrence as the greater member of a relationship. Error patterns were similar on all trials. (CHK)

A remedial approach involving review, contrast, and re-review for remedying second language learners' errors is suggested. (RM)

The position here is that error analysis is inadequate, particularly from the language-teaching point of view. Non-errors must be considered in specifying the learner's current command of the language, its limits, and his learning tasks. A cyclic procedure of elicitation and analysis, to secure evidence of errors and non-errors, is outlined.…