Competing criteria for error gravity

Abstract

Thirty judges (ten native-speaker teachers of English, ten Greek teachers of English, ten educated English native-speakers who were not teachers) judged the seriousness of 32 errors made by Greek-speaking students of English in their penultimate year of High School. Both groups of native-speakers were more lenient than the Greek teachers. The three groups differed in their assessment of the relative seriousness both of individual errors and of categories of error. In judging the seriousness of errors, the Greek teachers made reference to the ‘basic-ness’ of the rules infringed, while the non-teachers depended almost exclusively on the criterion of intelligibility. The English teachers made use of both criteria, but showed some preference for that of intelligibility. It is suggested that if the objective of teaching is the development of communicative competence, then the work must be assessed with reference to the effectiveness of the communication that it achieves, i.e. to its intelligibility.

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