Describes a study designed to determine which sentence level errors by nonnative speakers of English are judged to be most serious by an academic community and to discover what factors may influence this judgment. Most respondents saw the errors in relative rather than absolute terms, forming an error hierarchy. (SED)

Assesses the effects on second language learning of written feedback that either suppressed student errors or made them salient. Planned comparisons showed achievement was consistently superior under salient error conditions and with constructively critical feedback. Relevance of the findings for instructional theory and second language teaching…

Describes a simple teacher-scored method which can be used to determine the proportion of correct usage in freshman ESL compositions. Concludes Correctness Scores provide a useful tool for investigation of hierarchy of significant errors in English and is a technique well-suited to supply data for future work along these lines. (Author/BK)

Describes various aspects of written Arabic that have been identified as contributors to observed error production and weaknesses in writing skills of Arabic-speaking learners of English. (EKN)

This study examined the sensitivity of adult second language learners to deviance in English sentences. The subjects were 18 Egyptian, Arabic-speaking students attending classes at the English Language Institute of the American University in Cairo. (Author/CFM)

Describes a study that examines the responses of teachers of English as a second language (ESL) to student writing. Results show that the ESL teachers misread student texts, are inconsistent in their reactions, make arbitrary comments and corrections, impose abstract rules and standards, and rarely offer specific strategies for revising the test.…

Presents study of Japanese- and German-speaking children who were tested on the Sentence Comprehension Test to investigate understanding of various English grammatical structures. Concludes that learning of English as a second language in a natural milieu seems to pass through stages similar to those exhibited by monolingual English children.…

Presents the rationale for and the results of a pilot study attempting to document in detail how automatization takes place as the result of different kinds of intensive practice. Results show that reaction times and error rates gradually decline with practice, and the practice effect is skill-specific. (36 references) (CK)

Reports a study of the written English of native Arab learners which investigated: (1) the extent to which judgments of intelligibility and naturalness differed; (2) the extent to which error type and linguistic context affected the intelligibility, naturalness and interpretability of devian utterances; and (3) the basis for native speakers;…

Reviews the results of research in language acquisition, interactional analysis, pragmatics, repair, error, and social and affective factors. Extracts four language teaching principles relating to acquisition activities in the classroom, the importance of affective factors, the communicative capacity of learners, and the nature and treatment of…

Discusses the influence a first language can have on the acquisition of a second language. Includes some tentative proposals on the interaction of prior first-language knowledge and the creative construction process. (EKN)

Presents three interrelated theses on the mechanisms underlying developmental and transfer errors, and exemplifies these with reference to a number of English L2 developmental structures. Proposes a framework where linguistic factors play a major role in protracting the restructuring of the preverbal negation rule by Spanish learners. (Author/MES)

Reports on a study which investigated the relative merits of indirect and direct feedback on errors in the written work of English-as-a-second-language writers by comparing four types of error treatment, each of which provided the writers with progressively less salient information for making revisions in their compositions. (SED)

Describes the design of the International Corpus of Learner English, outlining the learner and task variables in the corpus of texts written by English-as-a-Foreign-Language university undergraduates. The design of the corpus and sampling of students with different native languages make contrastive interlanguage analyses and error analyses…