Some aspects of foreign language classroom discourse are examined from a social theoretical perspective, and an attempt to raise the learners' awareness of the social reality created in interaction with other learners in the foreign language being taught is described. Through peer observation and the retrospective evaluation by the participants of…

This study was designed to test the hypothesis that students who are given common errors matched with correct performance as part of their instruction in carrying out a procedure will perform better than students who are given only the correct performance. The task was the procedure for correcting color imbalances in color slides, and 56 college…

College students from colleges and universities throughout the United States were surveyed about the location of the world's 50 most populous countries. Over 3,300 responses were examined to determine the perceived geographic range of given countries, the regional degree of accuracy among students, and the overall significance of response errors.…

This paper highlights the importance of phonology in the acquisition of the English monophthong system and offers English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) teachers practical suggestions for enhancing the efficacy of their daily classroom performance. The paper is based on a comparative analysis of phonetic mistakes made by Georgian and Turkish adult…

Concludes that junior high school students encode movies better than prose, but that college students encode both equally well. (FL)

A survey of 101 faculty in a variety of disciplines found that most do not give much attention to the composition of electronic mail messages and are not bothered much when receiving messages containing mechanical or composition errors. Results suggest faculty should be cautious about relaxing the rules of grammar, punctuation, and good writing in…

Examines two case studies which illustrate that specific syntactic and semantic difficulties in writing are related to reading problems in syntax and comprehension among basic writers. Asserts that looking at writing miscues can be an appropriate way to analyze writing errors in a reading context. (MM)

Describes a study conducted at Ohio State University that used data obtained from the interlibrary loan process to determine why some users failed to find existing entries in the online library catalog. User errors as opposed to catalog errors are examined, and implications for bibliographic instruction are suggested. (eight references) (LRW)

One technique for teaching college-level report writing consists of an essay that students use as a model for their own writing. This model, in turn, contains guidelines for composing a short essay, from title and subheadings to sentence and paragraph structure, word selection, errors to avoid, and revision. (MSE)

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 study examined the effect of five types of sentence faults on the method of information processing, recall ability, confidence rating, and comprehensibility rating of college freshman English students. The control text consisted of five passages and the accompanying comprehension questions exactly as they appear on the multiple choice Georgia…

This step-by-step guide to informal, classroom-based assessment of students with special needs offers a comprehensive presentation of error analysis procedures. The book deals with the following topics in 10 chapters: (1) an overview of traditional academic assessment; (2) enhancing the learning of handicapped preschoolers; (3) errors and error…

A study examined the errors in the use of prepositions, particularly of prepositional verbs, made by native Greek speakers learning English. Two tests were constructed, one a translation of a Greek text into English and the other a series of English sentences to be completed with the appropriate prepositional word based on the Greek equivalent…

It is important that teachers help students to realize that writing is not simply a product, or a means to an end, but an exploratory, cyclical process. Research has shown that skilled writers conceptualize the effect of their writing as a whole, as a generative process, whereas unskilled writers are distracted by surface-level features and are…