In the area of language teaching, a large number of learner corpora investigations have tended to rely on empirical data to identify common types of errors which illustrate inauthentic usages in a target language. One consequence of this kind of investigations is that such studies rarely, if ever, consider the inextricable link between language…

The study investigated reading errors made by Ethiopian learners of Hebrew (n=34). These newcomers to Israel, unlike other groups such as the Russian Jews, typically have low literacy skills in their first language (Amharic). Their ability to read Hebrew, as judged on a reading comprehension test, was still poor after living in Israel for seven…

In a classroom, a teacher attempts to convey his or her knowledge to the students, and thus it is important for the teacher to obtain formative feedback about how well students are understanding the new material. By gaining insight into the students' understanding and possible misconceptions, the teacher will be able to adjust the teaching and to…

Visual selective attention is the ability to attend to relevant visual information and ignore irrelevant stimuli. Little is known about its typical and atypical development in early childhood. Experiment 1 investigates typically developing toddlers' visual search for multiple targets on a touch-screen. Time to hit a target, distance between…

Spelling strategies were examined based on error analysis and strategy reports for errors and correct spellings for 50 Grade 4 and 5 students with and without spelling difficulties. Based on their own reports, all students possessed a repertoire of effective spelling strategies. Strategy use, however, differed as a function of spelling accuracy…

In this study, the authors compared the phonological accuracy and patterns of sound change of boys with fragile X syndrome, boys with Down syndrome, and typically developing mental-age-matched boys. Participants were 50 boys with fragile X syndrome, ages 3 to 14 years; 32 boys with Down syndrome, ages 4 to 13 years; and 33 typically developing…

Background: English-speaking children with specific language impairment (SLI) perform more poorly than their typically developing peers in verbal working memory tasks where processing and storage are simultaneously required. Hungarian is a language with a relatively free word order and a rich agglutinative morphology. Aims: To examine the effect…

This article emerges from a recent review of evidence, conducted by the authors and others, on the lifelong barriers to widening participation in higher education in England. This has led us to a consideration of the quality and relevance of the research activity in this large field of endeavour, and to the creation of a typology of the kinds of…

A study investigated the use of negative polarity items (NPIs) in child language, and in particular, how children acquire the restrictions on these items. Data are drawn from studies of NPIs in the spontaneous speech of Dutch- and English-speaking children. Results show the first NPIs to appear in Dutch and English are widely different…

This monograph provides an historical overview of handwriting assessment, followed by suggestions for informally assessing student handwriting errors and implementing improvement strategies. The monograph specifically addresses: (1) research on handwriting; (2) a rationale for remediation of handwriting errors; (3) techniques for evaluating…

This study investigated the extent to which home exposure (HE) to the Chinese language affected the oral proficiency of students of intermediate-level college Mandarin Chinese. In fourteen hypotheses, it was predicted that HEs would perform at a higher level than would non-home-exposure students (NHEs). Students were given a simulated oral…

Two studies of adult aphasia, focusing on phonological disturbances, are presented. In the first study, subjects were 15 adults wit moderate aphasia and five age-matched controls. A variety of speech production and speech perception tests were administered, including tests of syllable discrimination, auditive word-picture matching, articulation,…

The projection of shadows task developed by Inhelder and Piaget was used to identify error patterns and solution strategies used by diverse populations in a sequence of proportion tasks. In Study A, two group tests were administered to 607 students from science and mathematics classes in grades 9 and 10. A sub-sample of 69 students was involved in…

A survey of teachers of composition in English as a Second Language in Japan addressed the perceptions of native-English-speaking and non-native-English-speaking teachers of the acceptability of specific error types within sentences. The native speakers of English were one British and 16 Americans. The non-native group was comprised of 26 Japanese…

English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) students in general, and Chinese speakers in particular, often omit or misuse English prepositions in speaking or writing. A study traced the history and structure of the English preposition, using contrastive analysis and error analysis to find sources of Chinese error. To determine if Chinese speakers exceed…