Context and Purpose: With heightened attention to medical errors and patient safety, we surveyed Utah and Missouri hospitals to assess the "state of the art" in patient safety systems and identify changes over time. This study examines differences between urban and rural hospitals. Methods: Survey of all acute care hospitals in Utah and…

The stereotype has it that native French Speakers are annoyed by foreign Speakers' errors in pronunciation. The purpose of this pilot study was to assess beliefs about the importance of accurate pronunciation in French held by three afferent groups: (1) 73 second- and third-semester students of French at a large midwestern research university in…

Simple name-retrieval models of spoken word planning (Bloem & La Heij, 2003; Starreveld & La Heij, 1996) maintain (1) that there are two levels in word planning, a conceptual and a lexical phonological level, and (2) that planning a word in both object naming and oral reading involves the selection of a lexical phonological representation.…

English as a Foreign Language (EFL) freshman students at the College of Languages and Translation received direct instruction in adjective-forming suffixes, then they took an immediate and a delayed test. Error analysis showed that 36% of the responses were left blank or the subjects duplicated the stimulus word. In 32% they mismatched the word…

The treatment of errors in mathematics classrooms has gained attention in recent years, with many researchers suggesting that errors should be used as starting points for student inquiry into mathematics. In the study reported in this article, we examined how teachers used discourse around errors to generate inquiry by looking at the treatment of…

This paper summarizes an experiment conducted to examine the counting performance of 7- and 8-year-olds. Analysis of variance was computed on counting errors produced when enumerating a set of squares on a computer screen. The factors included in the analysis were age, gender, array size, error type, proximity, and error form. The primary…

A discussion of guides to English usage intended for Hong Kong speakers of English as a Second Language offers general comments on such guides, often written in Chinese and less commonly written in English, and more specific comments on one guide, written in English. The latter guide was analyzed for errors and misleading information. A large…

Victor Raskin's taxonomy of knowledge, based on semantics theory, is adapted and applied to composition in English as a Second Language (ESL). Raskin's classification of knowledge as linguistic and encyclopedic is converted to a continuum from textual to extra-contextual, with contextual knowledge situated between the two. Textual knowledge is…

Diagnosing cognitive errors possessed by examinees can be considered as a pattern classification problem that is designed to classify a sequential input of stimuli into one of several predetermined groups. The sequential inputs in this paper's context are item responses, and the predetermined groups are various states of knowledge resulting from…

Item responses by adult Egyptian native speakers of Arabic on the ALIGU test battery were analyzed statistically to determine which items deviated significantly from the expected frequency of correct responses, and which item distractors were chosen most frequently. Thirty-two of 100 grammar responses showed significant incorrect responses, and on…

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)