The abc of the b and c in Spanish: inconsistent and context dependent letter errors and the development of orthographic knowledge in primary school children

This study presents the results of a cross-sectional reading and spelling assessment conducted among 118 Spanish children in 3rd, 4th and 5th grade. The first aim was to explore whether children´s use of orthographic knowledge was modulated by lexical variables—word frequency and orthographic neighborhood—or sublexical variables—context-dependent, inconsistent or neutral letters- as well as the developmental pathway of such knowledge in both tasks. The second aim was to provide insight into the type of errors committed by children in order to detect the words and structures that convey most difficulties. Data showed that children rely on sublexical processes more than on lexical ones in reading and writing. Persistent errors in context-dependent and inconsistent letters were evident even in 5th grade, and writing involved greater difficulty in all grades. The presence of other type of errors such as substitutions, omissions or lexicalizations was negligible. Finally, an item analysis revealed that errors were located in low-frequency syllables, particularly in the first position. Data point to specific and persistent difficulties in context-dependent and inconsistent letters that may hinder the consolidation of accurate orthographic word representations in Spanish.

The No-to-Yes Project: Conquering Common Algebraic Mistakes That Drive Us and Our Students Crazy

Help students stop making typical, persistent errors related to misconceptions about exponents, distribution, fraction simplification, and more.

Assessment of Learning Difficulties (LD) in Writings of Arab Learners: A Perspective

The last four decades have observed a renewed research interest in the area of error analysis. It has been the focus of attention, and subject of debate, among scholars particularly those of second-language acquisition. Scholars in this area of study hold the unanimous view that errors are an integral and unavoidable feature of second-language acquisition. The purpose of the present paper is to analyze and classify the persistent errors committed by Saudi Arabian students at Northern Border University, Rafha while composing a variety of written texts in English. In the investigation, an effort has been made to uncover the causes and sources of various errors of usage at different linguistic levels, viz.-a-viz., grammar, morphology, syntax, lexico-semantics, spelling etc. The study aims at investigating the frequency of production of these errors of usage, expressing the findings as percentage, mean and standard deviation, across the different levels of learning (levels 1 to 4). The entire population of the study consisted of 106 English students from the first two levels under investigation, registered in the first and second semesters of the 2016-2017. All of the students under investigation were male and had a homogenous pre-university and university background. Upon a cursory look at the data in terms of percentage, the subjects have been found to produce the highest number of errors in the subcategory “articles”, and a smaller number of errors in the subcategory ‘present progressive instead of past’. In the major linguistic category ‘morphological errors’, the learners have been found to produce the highest percentage of errors. In another major linguistic category of errors, ‘syntactic errors’, the subcategory ‘noun + adjective instead of adjective + noun’ received the highest number of errors, whereas the subcategory ‘overuse of conjunction ‘and’’ has been found to receive the least number of errors.

Subtitling in the Nigerian Film Industry, Informative or Misleading?

Subtitles are captions displayed at the bottom of a cinema or television screen that translate or transcribe the dialogue or narrative. Nigeria and indeed Africa should be a major beneficiary of the subtitles considering the number of ethnic groups in the continent. The emergence of different film industries in countries around Africa has helped in showcasing Africa to the international community. Hence, subtitles came in handy, considering the fact that most viewers cannot understand the language with which the movies were produced. This paper explores the battle for meaning by English subtitles to movies produced in African languages especially the Nigerian film industry. The paper will look at the Hermaneutic Theory of Mass Communication to buttress the relevance of deriving meaning out of movie subtitles. The Hausa and the Yoruba film industries are the subjects of this study because of the large viewership they enjoy by people even outside Nigeria. The research came up as a result of the persistent errors which I have noticed while watching Yoruba and Hausa films with subtitles. Subtitles convey a summary of the dialogues taking place in a movie. Viewers who cannot understand the language used for the dialogue rely on the subtitles to make meaning out of the movie. If they are unable to make meaning out of the subtitles because of some inadequacies as a result of carelessness in the process of production, the aim of having the subtitles is defeated.

Consciousness-raising, Error Correction and Proofreading

The article sets out to explore the impact of developing a consciousness-raising approach in error correction at the sentence level in order to improve students’ proofreading ability at the level of text. Learners of English in a foreign language environment frequently fall into a reliance on translation as a composing tool and while this may act as a scaffold and provide some support with some utterances, it frequently leads to predictable and persistent errors. Such fossilization leads to on-going inaccuracies that detract from student composition and that require focused instruction and repeated practice in order to eradicate the errors. The current paper reports on an experiment in consciousness-raising about specific categories of errors with a group of 30 trainees teachers in Zayed University, Dubai during the spring semester 2014. Results on post-tests compared with scores on the pre test indicate a significant improvement in students’ performance as a result of focused instruction.