Special issue devoted to the second conference on structuro-global-audio-visual methodology, at Mons, Belgium, 1971; text of a talk which formed the basis of discussion during the conference. (VM)

Fries' definition of knowing a language rejects the layman's notion that the criterion is knowing a certain number of words. It involves, rather, knowing a set of items--sound segments, sentence patterns, lexical items--which must be made a matter of automatic habit. Various approaches to testing someone's use of a language have failed to take…

This book presents a three-part discussion of the causes and prevention of errors in foreign language learning with particular reference to English as a second language. The first part provides a survey of error analysis, defining what is meant by the term "error" and establishing a model of error production. Other terms explained in this section…