This paper examines the English grammatical errors and their patterns in the written assignments of a General Education course at City University of Hong Kong. Subjects are 60 local and non-local (exchange) undergraduate students who are all L2 learners with diversified education and disciplinary background (i. e. their major of study) which are…

The ability to spell correctly is a fundamental skill for participating in society and engaging in professional work. In the German language, the capitalization of nouns and proper names presents major difficulties for both native and nonnative learners, since the definition of what is a noun varies according to one's linguistic perspective. In…

This study investigates the effect of Facebook on Arabic language attrition, i.e., decrease in language proficiency, as exhibited in the use of Colloquial instead of Standard Arabic, use of foreign words although Arabic equivalents exist, and committing spelling errors. A sample of Facebook posts and a corpus of spelling errors on Facebook were…

A growing body of research suggests that accounting for student specific variability in educational data can improve modeling accuracy and may have implications for individualizing instruction. The Additive Factors Model (AFM), a logistic regression model used to fit educational data and discover/refine skill models of learning, contains a…

The current study examined relationships between expert human judgments of text quality and grammar and mechanical errors in student writing. A corpus of essays (N = 100) written by high school students in the W-Pal system was collected, coded for grammar and mechanical errors, and scored by expert human raters. Results revealed weak relations…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of integrating blogging into the English as a Foreign Language (EFL) curriculum on students' performance in expressive writing. Previous studies have shown that integrating blogging into EFL learning raises students' motivation and develops their linguistic and social skills as a result of…

According to recent studies, there is a persistence of adverb placement errors in the written productions of francophone learners and users of English at an intermediate to advanced level. In this paper, we present strategies for the automatic detection and correction of errors in the placement of manner adverbs, using linguistic-based natural…

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…

In recent years, there has been a growing research interest in the analysis of errors adults make while learning a second language. The underlying objective of most of these analyses has been to reveal the systematicity of adult errors in an effort to understand the process of adult second language learning. This paper deals with errors from a…

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…

An alternative to the standard theory that language learners always formulate the simplest rule to accommodate data is proposed. This new position states that the system of formulating rules and the generalizations made from it by children and adults in the stages of language learning needs to be more specific. The present theory excludes the use…

An exercise in the evaluation of errors in Spanish (second language) composition is reported. The exercise, based on J. M. Hendrickson's "discovery" approach to learning, concerned correction of three error types: lexicon; grammar; and spelling. Subjects were 13 native English-speaking university students in a Spanish language program. In the…

Instructors of Composition I at Lansing Community College (LCC) in Lansing, Michigan, are required by the Department of Communication to grade a paper in four areas: content, structure, style, and mechanics. The policy, in effect in its present form since 1982, places heavy emphasis upon the conventions or "mechanics" of writing Edited…

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.…