On the recognition of transfer errors

Abstract

This study reconsiders a claim by Ioup (1984) that individuals can use only phonological clues in identifying the native language of ESL students. In two different investigations, Ioup found evidence that syntactic errors are of no help in enabling people to identify the mother tongue of an anonymous speaker or writer. Her approach, however, has unwarranted assumptions, and it does not give sufficient regard to some crucial considerations including the potential of bilingual judges to detect characteristic errors of individuals who speak the same languages as the judges. The results of the present study indicate that certain characteristic problems of Spanish and Korean ESL writers are distinguishable to readers who know either Spanish or Korean. For example, nearly all Korean judges considered the sentence She fell in love with a different country man to be a likely error of Korean students while almost no Spanish‐speaking informants considered it to be likely from a Spanish‐speaker. Other characteristic errors include reflexes of Spanish as well as Korean word order, certain adjectival constructions, and problems involving articles.