The turn exchange behaviors of 5 specifically language-impaired (SLI) children, aged 8 to 13, were examined in adult-child interaction. Results indicated qualitative differences from those of normal language children in terms of turn errors, interruptions, interactive attention, responsiveness, and turn switch times, as well as variability related…

This guide to ERRATA, a set of HyperCard-based tools for response analysis and error diagnosis in language testing, is intended as a user manual and general reference and designed to be used with the software (not included here). It has three parts. The first is a brief survey of computational techniques available for dealing with student test…

This study compared the spoken and written English errors of 20 severely hearing-impaired postsecondary students with intelligible speech but poor English language. Writing samples exhibited a greater number of function word errors than did speech samples; there were no significant differences in content and structure errors. Implications for…

The technique individuals use to narrow the possible responses in "solicits" (demands, requests, or questions requiring a response) in and outside the classroom often helps to avoid miscommunication and can be a useful tool for classroom teachers. A narrowing exercise was completed by 35 classes of native English and English as a second language…

A language typology based on common errors made in pronunciation of English by speakers of other languages is presented and discussed. The classification system was developed from the concept of interlanguage, the intermediate step between a language learner's native and target languages, and the notion that interference in learning a new language…

It was found that the seemingly greatly increased oral fluency of Middlebury College seniors who had studied in college-sponsored junior year abroad programs did not carry over to written skills or to comprehensive grammatical knowledge. In the oral proficiency interview for Spanish, many returning students had no control of the subjunctive, a key…

A study investigated the roles of phonological encoding and visual processes in word recognition in American learners of Arabic as a foreign language. Subjects were 36 individuals with proficiency ranging from beginning to native. Two experiments in word recognition were conducted, one at word and one at sentence level. At each level, the word…