Grammatical Errors and Communication Breakdown

Grammatical accuracy is not always required of an ESL student to accomplish communication with native English speakers. In this study, the relationship between grammatical errors and communication breakdown was investigated by examining native speakers’ ability to correct grammatical errors on the assumption that communication breakdown exists to a certain degree if a native speaker cannot correct the error or the correction distorts the information intended to be conveyed by the writer. Two grammatical items, i.e., articles (local feature) and connectors (global feature); three types of errors, i.e., omission, insertion, and wrong choice; and two passages were the variables examined in the experiment. The subjects corrected the texts which were mutilated in one of six different ways (two grammatical items × three types of errors) for one of two different passages. The results indicated that mutilation of articles was easier to correct and hence less crucial to communication than connectors for omission and wrong choice type but not for insertion type. These findings can be generalized over different kinds of passages when a synonymous scoring rule is used but not when a verbatim rule is used; the latter produces a passage effect. Judgment of likely academic achievement was also affected by grammatical item. Overall, the findings have implications for the measurement of comprehension as measured by cloze procedure and for the assessment of writing competence.