This paper contends that classrooms should be safe places for students and their teachers to be wrong, suggesting that this concept should provide the mainspring for educational reform in Hong Kong and in other places in the world. It notes that education in Hong Kong is harsh and has a tendency to label students; for the majority of students,…

A study investigated the use of teasing as a teaching technique in a first-year college-level Russian class at a major university in California. The instructor is a native Russian speaker, and the class consisted of nine undergraduate students. A review of literature on teasing reveals its dual nature for conveying both a literal message of insult…

Describes a parser-driven Japanese tutor, "BANZAI," designed for second-language instruction and presents an empirical study of the program. Results indicate that ongoing rule-driven deductive feedback is more effective than example-driven inductive feedback for learning relatively complex structures whose grammatical rules are not…

Discusses a study of concord phenomena in spoken Brazilian Portuguese. Findings indicate the presence of disfluencies, including apparent corrections, in about 15% of the relevant tokens in the corpus of recorded speech data. It is concluded that speech is not overly laden with errors, and there is nothing in the data to mislead the language…

Reports on a small-scale study of recasts--a form of corrective feedback. Subjects were eight adult second language learners (L2) of English. Data consisted of oral and written narratives primed by cartoon series and produced by both subjects in both groups. Recasts were found to be successful because they heightened the L2 learners awareness and…

The tips discussed here center around favor asking and English as a Second Language, a collaborative writing activity, e-mail assignments nd online correction, and facilitating full-time employment in TESOL (Author/VWL)

Explores psycholinguistic processes underlying second language (L2) self-repair behavior by means of analyzing the timing of various types of self-corrections found in the speech of 30 Hungarian speakers of English at three proficiency levels. Discusses relevance of timing data for existing models of speech monitoring and examines how level of…

Explores the relationship between teacher feedback and student revision in two academic writing classes. Adopts a case study approach and looks at all the feedback given to six students over a complete course. Examines the extent to which teachers focused on formal language concerns when they gave feedback and the use that students made of this…

Teachers are encouraged to learn to codify student errors of selection and usage and to promote use of dictionaries and other lexical tools so students can achieve proper pronunciation and identify colloquialisms, misuse of idioms, and lack of grammatical logic in complex constructions. (MSE)

Compared six-year olds learning on a computer task using LOGO in four different social conditions--alone, with peer, with adult, with peer and adult. Found that children working with an adult performed significantly better than those working without an adult. However, adults' interventions did not consistently result in either the prevention of…

This study investigated effects of speech synthesis on proofreading efficiency among 33 postsecondary students with learning disabilities. Using a speech synthesis system enabled subjects to detect a significantly higher percentage of errors, though having text read aloud by another person remained the most effective way to find…

Examined 1 hour of conversation between 12 mothers and their 23-month-old children. Children were more likely to imitate correct grammatical morphemes after mothers' corrective recasting of children's errors than after three types of maternal responses that did not correct an error but did model a morpheme. (BC)

Eight elementary school students who exhibited articulation impairments outside the treatment setting but not in treatment were provided with an articulatory self-monitoring strategy. No subject clearly demonstrated a positive treatment effect. Differences in variables between this study and earlier studies with positive treatment effects are…

An error in the data analysis for a study reported in a 1988 paper by Kail is cited. The paper postulated a model that explained individual differences in the speed of processing on cognitive tasks. Reanalysis of the data suggested that support for the original conclusions is considerably weaker than reported. (LB)

Compared effects of peer-delivered (PDF) and self-delivered (SDF) immediate corrective feedback intervention on multiplication performance of six second grade students. SDF resulted in greater multiplication performance for four of six students, suggesting that SDF interventions may be more efficient and less obtrusive than PDF interventions and…