Extra Credit Quiz
Instructions:
This review quiz will replace your lowest quiz grade. You need to answer
all the questions in this quiz by putting something in each answer field, even
if the answer is "none". When you are entering text data, remember
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of the page. The deadline for
submitting this quiz is 9 a.m. Monday, 13 December 2004.
1. Why is it more informative as to the stage of a child's L1 acquisition of English if he or she says "goed" (as the past tense of "go") or "mans" (as the plural of "man"), than if he or she says "went" or "men"?
2. Consider this L2 error (from Gairns and Redman (1986: 3) as cited in Gass & Selinker, 1994:271):
I feel sorry for people who live in the suburbs.
The error isn’t an obvious -- it’s a lexical choice error. The native
speaker of Spanish wanted the sentence to mean I feel sorry for people who
live in the slums. The Spanish word suburbio means ‘slum quarter,
shanty town’. There are a couple of crucial things to notice about this error:
(1) it is not an error a native speaker of English would make and (2) it
strongly affects the hearers’ understanding of the sentence.
A. Why wouldn’t an L1-English speaker make this error?
B. Why does this kind of error support the learner belief that "Of all error types, ...vocabulary errors [are] the most serious." (Gass & Selinker, 1994: 270 from Politzer, 1978 as cited in Levenston 1979: 147).
C. Sometimes L2 speakers/writers produced sentences that are simply incomprehensible. Why is the kind of lexical error found above more dangerous to communication than a completely incomprehensible string?
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