Communicative Error Evaluation: Native Speakers' Evaluation and Interpretation of Written Errors of Arab EFL Learners

Abstract

The study reported in this article attempted to evaluate the communicative effect on native speakers of a selected sample of grammatical and semantic errors in written English. Two types of measures were used: evaluation (intelligibility and naturalness judgments) and interpretation. The effects of error type (grammatical/semantic) and immediate linguistic context (in and out of context) on each of these measures were determined. An attempt was made to address some of the methodological weaknesses of the majority of such studies to date. Semantically deviant utterances were judged to be less intelligible and interpretable than were grammatically deviant utterances. Context did not influence native speakers' ability to interpret the writer's intent. Most important, there was no association between native speakers' judgments on the two measures of intelligibility and interpretation (comprehension). This result raises questions about the basis of intelligibility judgments, since they do not appear to reflect native speakers' actual comprehension of the meaning intended by the writer. Rather, they appear to indicate the extent to which native speakers think they understand the meaning of the deviant utterances. The implications of these results for classroom teaching and future research on communicative error evaluation are discussed.