This article studies students' use of sentence variety in an ESL writing course. The study includes three sentence features: (a) sentence types, (b) sentence combining, and (c) sentence patterns. Although sentence variety is part of the curriculum, the actual use of sentence structures has not been measured so far. By understanding students' use…

Formulaic sequences are found to be processed faster than their matched novel phrases in previous studies. Given the variety of formulaic types, few studies have compared processing on different types of formulaic sequences. The present study explored the processing among idioms, speech formulae and written formulae. It has been found that in…

This article presents a corpus-based investigation on English prepositions of time presented in the argumentative essays of Form 4 and Form 5 Malaysian secondary students in the MCSAW corpus. The aims were to find out the distribution patterns and the common errors in the use of preposition of time, "on" and "at". This corpus…

To make a spelling program more effective, use the children's spelling tests to analyse their errors and indicate spelling patterns. (JH)

Examines some of the theoretical and practical objections to error analysis and proposes it would be more appropriate for teachers to lead students through the use of creative language exercises into the use of many of the possible sentences in a language. (HOD)

One important but undervalued aspect of productive vocabulary is collocation--the ways in which words are combined with one another. To move from receptive to productive vocabulary, students need to learn a wide variety of ways that words collocate with each other. This paper describes the major types of collocations, typical collocational errors…

Types of hierarchies of pronunciation difficulty are discussed, and a hierarchy based on contrastive analysis plus informal observation is proposed. This hierarchy is less one of initial difficulty than of error persistence. One feature of this hierarchy is that, because of lesser learner awareness and very limited functional load, errors…

The second volume in this series on Serbo-Croatian-English contrastive analysis contains seven articles. They are: "The Use of Contrastive and Error Analysis to Practicing Teachers," by Rudolf Filipovic; "Some Problems in Teaching English Noun Phrases as Subject to Serbo-Croatian Speakers,""Problems in Teaching the Structure of Some English Noun…

A review of literature on error correction shows a lack of agreement on the benefits of error correction in second language learning and confusion on which errors to correct and the approach to take to correction of both oral and written language. This monograph deals with these problems and provides examples of techniques in English, French,…

Inexperienced writers, including both basic writers and learning disabled, commit errors that often follow a discernible pattern due to applying erroneous or incomplete rules. Techniques for teaching editing skills are described, including textual analyses of students' writing, interviews with students, structuring the editing task, and providing…

Errors can be considered concrete representations of stages through which one must go in order to acquire one's native language and a second language. It has been discovered that certain errors appear systematically, revealing an approximate system, or "interlanguage," behind the erroneous utterances. Present research in second language…

The reflections in this paper represent part of a study of disadvantaged 13 to 15 year-old children of immigrants in Switzerland. This section deals with the process of learning spelling. In order to observe the students' learning, the same dictation was given four times during the school year. The results were studied intuitively and…