Across many language backgrounds, a consistent hurdle to accessing United States higher education is understanding the basic information necessary to apply for admission and financial aid and complete the many enrollment management processes necessary to begin one's college career (apply for housing, receive and submit vaccinations, register for…

This paper attempts to demonstrate the differences in writing between International English Language Testing System (IELTS) bands 6.0, 6.5 and 7.0. An analysis of exemplars provided from the IELTS test makers reveals that IELTS 6.0, 6.5 and 7.0 writers can make a minimum of 206 errors, 96 errors and 35 errors per 1000 words. The following section…

The purpose of this study was to: (1) describe differences in performance by non-native learners of English, when writing in different genres; (2) determine communicative value of grammatical errors as judged by a panel of native speakers; and (3) demonstrate inconsistencies in native speaker judgment of error gravity. Subjects were 20…

Two samples of college student writing, paragraphs from freshman compositions, are analyzed for presence or absence of two characteristics of literate prose, decontextualization and autonomy. Writing is decontextualized and autonomous when whatever is needed for its comprehension is included in the words of the text, and comprehension is not…

A survey of teachers of composition in English as a Second Language in Japan addressed the perceptions of native-English-speaking and non-native-English-speaking teachers of the acceptability of specific error types within sentences. The native speakers of English were one British and 16 Americans. The non-native group was comprised of 26 Japanese…

The influence on interlocutors' relative content knowledge on conversational participation in interactions between native speakers (NSs) and nonnative speakers (NNSs) with limited oral skills is investigated. Results indicate that both NSs and NNSs appeared conversationally active, but there were different patterns of participation that could to…

This study argues that positive second-language (L2) data do not necessarily rule out inappropriate L2 grammar. Rather, L2 learners appear to postulate first-language (L1) grammar as an interim theory about the L2, at least in the initial stages of L2 acquisition. The case where L2 grammar intersects L1 concerning time adverbial clauses was chosen…

A study compared the perceptions of two experts from different cultural backgrounds concerning salience of a variety of errors typical of the English written by Hong Kong secondary and college students. A book on English error types written by a Hong-Kong born, fluent Chinese-English bilingual linguist was analyzed for its emphases, and a list of…

Papers on linguistics and language teaching in this volume are the following: "Language in Education: Hard Choices for Hong Kong" (Jo Lewkowicz); "EL2--Medium Education in a Largely Monolingual Society: The Case of Hong Kong" (Nigel Bruce); "A Programme for Semantics" (Laurence Goldstein); "Semantics and Its…

An examination was conducted of the planned and unplanned speech of 24 native speakers of Mandarin and Korean who were serving as teaching assistants at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Each was videotaped on two occasions two weeks apart in a preparation course for international teaching assistants (ITAs), in which instruction in the use of…