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Where to Draw the Red line: Error Toleration of Native and Non‐Native EFL Faculty
Author(s) -
Porte Graeme
Publication year - 1999
Publication title -
foreign language annals
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.258
H-Index - 49
eISSN - 1944-9720
pISSN - 0015-718X
DOI - 10.1111/j.1944-9720.1999.tb00873.x
Subject(s) - toleration , first language , grading (engineering) , native american , psychology , perception , mathematics education , social psychology , linguistics , sociology , political science , law , anthropology , philosophy , civil engineering , neuroscience , politics , engineering
The central purpose of the study reported here was to investigate professors' reactions to the academic writing of non‐native students. The object was to ascertain any statistically significant differences between the error‐gravity perceptions of native‐speaker (NS) and non‐native speaker (NNS) faculty, and what such findings might reveal about the respective error tolerance of these professors. Fourteen native and sixteen non‐native university professors were asked to respond to student errors based on a random selection of fifty‐four anonymous ungraded compositions written by students at Granada University. General comparison of the error grading between the two groups of subjects revealed small differences in the error toleration of native and non‐native faculty. While differences do exist in the perceived gravity of specific errors, it would appear that teachers in this study generally agreed in their judgments. Nevertheless, there was evidence that errors are not being perceived as seriously as one would have expected and the implications of this finding are discussed.