Error Gravity: A Study of Faculty Opinion of ESL Errors

This study is part of a larger project which examines faculty response to the written errors of students who are non‐native speakers of English. The particular study described here was designed to determine which sentence‐level errors are judged to be most serious by an academic community and to discover what factors may influence this judgment. A survey was conducted to measure how a cross‐section of faculty at Iowa State University respond to certain common ESL writing errors. The 164 respondents ranked the relative gravity of 12 typical ESL written errors occurring in 24 sentences. Results indicate that most respondents did not judge all errors as equally grievous; rather, their judgments generate a hierarchy of errors. The study also suggests that both the age and academic discipline of faculty members may be important factors in predicting their response to certain ESL student writing errors.