Notes that the basic elements of the English article system are best taught to foreign technical writing students over an extended period of time. Outlines a teaching method that emphasizes reducing errors that native English speakers perceive as wrong rather than teaching the nuances by which native writers fine tune their relationship with their…

Studies in 1974 and 1984 of errors in the writing of Australian university freshmen in a history course found no significant differences between the two groups. The most salient elements in the error-prone writing were less related to writing mechanics than to constitution of meaning, suggesting that grammar instruction is inadequate to improve…

A discussion of English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) teaching focuses on the relationship of lexical items to the syntactic situations in which they may occur, and the importance of teaching this relationship to language learners. First, common errors made by ESL students that are attributable to lack of syntactic context knowledge are identified.…

Inexperienced writers, including both basic writers and learning disabled, commit errors that often follow a discernible pattern due to applying erroneous or incomplete rules. Techniques for teaching editing skills are described, including textual analyses of students' writing, interviews with students, structuring the editing task, and providing…

Offers suggestions for the college teacher with limited opportunity for individual writing conferences with non-native English-speaking students: tolerating some more complex errors; focusing on content; soliciting student ideas for correction; addressing only one or two error types; providing vocabulary choices; and highlighting correct usage.…

A study analyzed the ability of 31 advanced students of English as a Second Language (ESL) to monitor their own use of article and verb errors in their compositions. Subjects were 31 foreign graduate students enrolled in an advanced composition course at Iowa State University. The two categories of grammatical errors were monitored in three…

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 perceptions of native English-speakers concerning the spoken grammatical and phonetic (accent) errors of non-native speakers. Speech samples were collected from three non-native speakers of English of varied linguistic backgrounds (German, Spanish, and Arabic) and one speaker of North American English. Each of the four…

The four 1984 quarterly numbers of the journal include feature articles, techniques for teaching English as a second language (ESL), research summaries, and book reviews. The feature articles include: "The English Language Center at King Faisal University"; "English Language Training at ARAMCO"; "AlBank AlSaudi AlHollandi's Practical English…