AN ERROR ANALYSIS OF THE SPOKEN ENGLISH OF MEXICAN‐AMERICAN PUPILS IN A BILINGUAL SCHOOL AND A MONOLINGUAL SCHOOL¹

Abstract

Speech samples were obtained from Mexican‐American children who attended a monolingual school (N = 67) and Mexican‐American children who attended a bilingual school (N = 59) in the same school district. The children were asked to tell the story of a silent movie they had watched immediately before being interviewed. Their answers were recorded on tape and transcribed. Deviations from standard English were counted and categorized. The main findings of the study were (a) that the causes of deviations from standard English appeared to include the expected interference of Spanish as well as the improper application of standard English rules and the influence of nonstandard English dialects, and (b) that children in the bilingual school did not differ significantly from those in the monolingual school with respect to frequency of deviations from standard English.

Contrastive analysis of Turkish and English in Turkish EFL learners’ spoken discourse

“…While two of the three studies related to spoken error analysis (i.e. Dulay & Burt, 1974;Politzer & Ramirez, 1973) focus on participants learning English as their second language, the other (i.e. Ting, Mahadhir & Chang, 2010) shows similarities with the present study in that its participants learn English as their foreign language.…”

“…The study by Politzer and Ramirez (1973) aims at categorizing the spoken English errors of Mexican-American pupils and at investigating whether the total number of learner errors differs with regard to type of schooling. Errors are classified into morphological, syntactic and vocabulary.…”

“…However, very little research (e.g. Dulay & Burt, 1974;Politzer & Ramirez, 1973;Ting, Mahadhir & Chang, 2010) has delved into learners' spoken error analysis. Ting, Mahadhir and Chang (2010: 54) refer to this scarcity of literature on error analysis of oral interlanguage as "near-absence of attention".…”

“We All Make Mistakes!”. Analysing an Error-coded Corpus of Spanish University Students’ Written English

“…During this period and the following decades research centred on different aspects of error-making: the development of taxonomies for identifying and classifying errors (Dusková 1969, Burt and Kiparsky 1974, Politzer and Ramírez 1973, Corder 1981, Chun et al 1982, Dulay, Burt and Krashen 1982; the investigation of error gravity (Tomiyama 1980, Hughes and Lascaratou 1982, Davies 1985, McCretton and Rider 1993; and detailing the different causes of errors (Richards 1974, Odlin 1989, Gass and Selinker 1992, Ringbom 1992.…”

Error Correction in Foreign Language Teaching: Recent Theory, Research, and Practice

“…Many linguists believed that once a teacher had a systematic knowledge of the differences between the two languages, he or she could begin developing appropriate instructional techniques and materials that would help students avoid producing errors. However, considerable empirical evidence indicates that although interference from students' native language is the major source of phonological errors, interference errors are only one of many types of errors found in the lexicon, syntax, morphology, and orthography of students' utterances in the target language (Wolfe 1967, Falk 1968, Wilkins 1968, Duskova 1969, Selinker 1969, Buteau 1970, Ervin-Tripp 1970, Grauberg 1971, Hussein 1971, George 1972, Politzer and Ramirez 1973, Richards 1973a, 1973b, Burt 1975, Hanzeli 1975, and Hendrickson 1977b.…”