The misuse and misunderstanding of adverbs by nonnative speakers of English are examined, and the approaches of commonly-used grammar texts to these problems are discussed. Two separate studies provide information for examining adverb use: a longitudinal study of the written work of 23 adult students in two low-to-intermediate level intensive…

Objective rules of sequencing were applied to elementary level instructional material to determine their effect on time, errors made during instruction, and posttest errors. Results are discussed in terms of the application of the rules to various types of instructional material. (Author/BJG)

The utility of the second language French children choose to learn is questioned. Some language teaching approaches are reviewed, and it is shown that a mere learning of rules is not sufficient but that sociological and psychological factors contribute to the comprehension and structure of sentences. (Text is in French.) (TL)

Questions the effectiveness of contrastive linguistics in measuring the difference between two languages and therefore in predicting the ease or difficulty of acquisition from one to the other. The simplicity of a language is not objectively quantifiable since it is measured as relative to other languages. (Text is in French.) (TL)

This article deals with the role in the preparation of foreign language teaching materials of error analysis and of the selection and ordering of linguistic features to be learned. The value for language teaching of contrastive analysis at the morphosyntactic and phonological levels is discussed. (CLK)

This study of the speech of a five-year-old Japanese girl learning English focused on the use of prefabricated routines where items are memorized as wholes. The forms of the copula, "do you" questions and embedded "how to" questions were examined. (AG)

An analysis of speech samples collected from adult ESL students revealed recurring variants indicating that learners attempt to simplify the target language in several ways. A universal process of simplification in language learning is postulated to account for the recurrence of the same variants in different learner idiolects. (Author/KM)

The flow of normal conversation is often impeded by error. These errors can be divided into at least three categories: phonological, lexical, and pragmatic. A study was designed to assess whether different kinds of errors affect conversation in different ways. Forty-four subjects listened to tapes of conversations. Each conversation contained…

The effect that student ability level has on receiving feedback following classroom tests was studied. Forty-four undergraduates enrolled in four educational psychology classes were assigned to low or high ability groups based on their total score from the first four exams. Two classes were trained in a feedback technique, and the remaining two…

An alternative to the standard theory that language learners always formulate the simplest rule to accommodate data is proposed. This new position states that the system of formulating rules and the generalizations made from it by children and adults in the stages of language learning needs to be more specific. The present theory excludes the use…

In a study of very young children's pronunciation of nouns and verbs, ten children aged 20 to 25 months were exposed to experimental nouns and verbs, which had not yet been comprehended or produced by the children. Each of the objects and actions was given an experimental name based on phonemes in the children's speech. These objects and actions…

Present composition teaching and testing techniques do not formally capture student improvement across essays. Contract learning, a procedure in which student essays are error-analyzed for repeated mistakes, can do so. Correction of those repetitions becomes a set of goals on a written contract signed by the teacher and student, and the student…

Students of English as a second language (ESL) often come to the classroom with little or no experience in writing in any language and with inaccurate assumptions about writing. Rather than correct these assumptions, teachers often seem to unwittingly reinforce them, actually inducing errors into their students' work. Teacher-induced errors occur…

A common error in children's attempts to solve verbal analogies is to respond with a word strongly associated with the third term in the analogy. This is known as associative response. A study was conducted to investigate the cognitive processes underlying this response. Subjects, 112 fifth grade students, were administered a battery of tests…

A classical problem in mastery testing is the choice of passing score and test length so that the mastery decisions are optimal. This problem has been addressed several times from a variety of viewpoints. In this paper, the usual indifference zone approach is adopted, with a new criterion for optimizing the passing score. Specifically,…