Abstract

This paper discusses linguistic issues that one must address in order to design an e ective CALL system for second language learners. We focus on how one should develop an error taxonomy and indicate how that taxonomy can a ect the design of the entire system. This work was done in the context of designing a CALL tool to help native signers of American Sign Language (ASL) learn written English. Here we report the methodology used in developing the error taxonomy for the system. Our analysis of writing samples from ASL natives indicates that language transfer (LT) (when considered appropriately) can account for many of the errors we found. Recognizing this possibility has substantially in uenced the error taxonomywehavedeveloped. The resulting taxonomy captures the true source of many errors and will allow the eventual system to take advantage of ASL knowledge when teaching English. We provide a characterization of language transfer that provides a broad perspective on the ways that two languages may di er and indicates how these di erences could potentially in uence acquisition and production of the second language. In addition, we argue that an e ective CALL system must not only examine sentences in isolation, but it must identify and correct discourse-level errors. We point out that the source of several error classes we identi ed rests in discourse-level processing. We showhow these errors can

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