Errors of English Speakers of German As Perceived and Evaluated by German Natives

Abstract

negative or positive effects of correcting these errors may vary with the readiness of the learner to assimilate and apply the information provided in the correction. Little is known, however, about the nature of learners' interim grammars or the processes of fossilization.Finally, techniques and procedures need to be designed and tested for giving students feedback about the effects of their errors on communication. If the teacher's role in developing speaking proficiency in learners is to set optimal conditions for practicing communication within realistic situations, he or she should be prepared to employ the most effective strategies for avoiding and correcting those errors that are both disruptive of communication and within the learner's powers to eliminate from his linguistic performance. The teacher's intuition alone cannot be expected to be sufficient to the task. A Error Analysis: Causes versus Effects of ErrorsGREAT DEAL of recent pedagogical and linguistic research has dealt with the analysis of learners' errors in second language acquistion. Usually the error analysis has taken the form of classification of errors according to their causes and has been undertaken for the purpose of gaining insights into the language acquisition process. 1 Relatively little attention has been paid to a classification of errors from the point of view of their effects. In a recent publication, Albert Valdman states "unfortunately there is scarcely any research dealing with the perception and evaluation of errors on the part of native listeners. "2 Research dealing with the perception and evaluation of errors by native speakers can, of course, give foreign language educators a great deal of valuable information. For instance, it can furnish insights concerning the relative importance attached to different aspects of language (e.g., phonology versus syntax) by native speakers and thus help in establishing priorities in second language teaching. The pilot study reported in this article illustrates a methodology that can be used in determining the relative importance of different error types according to evaluations made by native speakers and presents some preliminary results concerning the relative importance attached by native German teenagers to errors committed in German by English speakers.Instrument Used in the Experiment (Table l) For the purpose of the experiment an instrument-fully reproduced in Table I-was developed. The instrument consists of the recording of sixty (60) pairs of German sentences, all of which contain deviations from standard German

The Relationship Between Native Speaker Judgments of Nonnative Pronunciation and Deviance in Segmentais, Prosody, and Syllable Structure

“…Examples ofsome ofthe questions investigated are the relationship between factors in the speakers' backgrounds and judgments of pronunciation accuracy (Suter, 1976;Purcell & Suter, 1980;Thompson, 1991), the comprehensibility of different types of accents (Smith & Bisazza, 1982), and the relationship between stereotypical reactions and the type of accent (Lambert, Hodson, Gardner, & Fillenbaum, 1960;Anisfeld, Bogo, & Lambert, 1962;Bradford, Farrar, & Bradford, 1974;Brennan, Ryan, & Dawson, 1975;Ryan & Carranza, 1975;Ryan, Carranza, & Moffie, 1977;Brennan & Brennan, 1981). Other studies investigating native speaker reactions to nonnative speech have investigated the effects of the subsystems of language (e.g., grammar and phonology) on native speakers' judgments (Politzer, 1978;Varonis & Gass, 1982), the effects of familiarity on comprehensibility (Gass & Varonis, 1984), and the effects of speaking rate on native speakers' comprehension of nonnative speech (Anderson-Hsieh & Koehler, 1988).…”

Impact of Explicit Vocabulary Instruction on Writing Achievement of Upper-Intermediate EFL Learners

“…Of all errors type, vocabulary errors are the most serious one for the learners (Politzer, 1978). Additionally, large corpora of errors consistently introduced lexical errors as the most common error among second language learners.…”

Variable beliefs about the need for accuracy in the oral production of German: an exploratory study

“…Several confounding variables complicate learners' efforts to ascertain norms of NS expectations. They include contradictory views across and within NSs, such as reported in Dubiner et al (2006) and evidenced in the contradictory results of error-gravity studies for German (DeLisle 1982;Politzer 1978), the differential between the idealized standard language taught in foreign language classrooms and the real-life national and regional variants that, in turn, are bound by subtle social norms (e.g. Crispim 2000; Luzon, Campoy, del Mar Sanchez and Salazar 2007;Bieswanger 2008;Van Compernolle and Williams 2011), and the fact that communicative language teaching, the prevalent method of foreign language instruction in the US, has refrained from taking a firm ideological stance on accuracy, leaving matters of focus on form contested in both teaching practice and research (e.g.…”

“…Lindemann (2005), for example, demonstrated that biases held about specific ethnic and national groups affect how native speakers react differently to NNSs of English with different L1s. NS judgments may also vary by age group (Politzer 1978;DeLisle 1982) and schooling and gender (Politzer 1978).…”