Purpose: A variety of pediatric clinical populations have difficulty with the correct use of pronouns. The available clinical literature labels these errors in inconsistent terms leading to great variation in how treatment objectives are worded. The purpose of this tutorial is to encourage a shift in pronoun assessment and treatment planning…

Having hardly learnt any English or having at best learnt wrong English (which is worse than no English) during their junior and secondary school years and having little or no exposure to English outside their classrooms, and partly due to certain weaknesses and shortcomings in what the teachers teach and how they teach, college students in some…

Jim Carroll noticed basic literacy errors in his Year 13s' writing, but on closer examination decided that these were not best addressed purely as literacy issues. Through an intervention based on clauses, Carroll managed to enable his students to write better, but he did this by teasing out principles of historical discourse that underpin…

An understanding of noun positions in sentences can correct many recurring problems in the writing of English language learners. This article outlines an approach for anticipating and preventing these sorts of errors while providing a framework to explain the errors to students. For this approach to be successful, students need to have an…

Every language has its own rhythm. Unlike many other languages in the world, English depends on the correct pronunciation of stressed and unstressed or weakened syllables recurring in the same phrase or sentence. Mastering the rhythm of English makes speaking more effective. Experiments have shown that we tend to hear speech as more rhythmical…

We present a new feedback strategy implemented in a natural language generation-based e-learning system for German as a second language (L2). Although the system recognizes a large proportion of the grammar errors in learner-produced written sentences, its automatically generated feedback only addresses errors against rules that are relevant at…

Andrea Lunsford and Karen Lunsford conclude "Mistakes Are a Fact of Life: A National Comparative Study," a discussion of their research project exploring patterns of formal grammar and usage error in first-year writing, with an invitation to "conduct a local version of this study." The author was eager to accept their invitation; learning and…

The academic demands of classroom English require students to think about language structure in ways that they are not used to. Everybody "knows" much English grammar intuitively but the academic rules themselves can be difficult to articulate. This goes for punctuation, too: errors often reflect students' lack of explicit knowledge of grammatical…

I examine how American students respond to foreign instructors, who teach English Composition and Research Writing. I discuss how minority teacher's cultural, lingual, and ethnic differences interfere with classroom dynamics in the United States. I rely on my experiences as a Turkish instructor of composition at the University of Wisconsin,…

Errors made by language learners in learning a language are regarded as failure of competence. Linguists believe that errors are committed when the learner makes use of the learning strategies. By analyzing the learner's errors, we can better understand his inter-language and his learning process. It's necessary to understand the roots of errors…

The article examines the need for training children with language disorders to judge the correctness or incorrectness of sentences which reflect error patterns. (PHR)

The authors offer research studies and other documented evidence that teaching grammar without a meaningful context does not improve student writing, largely because that approach does not address the root causes of errors. Several resources that support this position and offer more productive strategies are summarized, including the authors'…

This article reviews the nature and function of recasts, a well-documented way of responding to young children. The paper challenges the definition of recast and argues that it is too broad a category to be useful, either for theories of language development or for practice. In particular, various forms of recast have featured in intervention…

Many current generativist theorists suggest that young children possess the grammatical principles of inversion required for question formation but make errors because they find it difficult to learn language-specific rules about how inversion applies. The present study analyzed longitudinal spontaneous sampled data from twelve 2-3-year-old…

Offers sufficient responses to 60 of the most frequently made errors in German grammar, plus 13 punctuation rules, and proposes that the instructor hand out this list to the students and henceforth "tag" language errors by the corresponding number, then have the student correct them and resubmit the assignment for a better grade. (GLR)