ERROR GRAVITY AND ERROR HIERARCHIES

Twenty judges (ten Native-Speaker Teachers of English and ten Non-Nati ve-Speaker Teachers) completed a questionnaire evaluating twenty-five sentences containing seven types of error. While the NNST judges were consistently more severe in their judgements than the NST judges, the order in which both groups ranked the errors was remarkably similar, l eading us to consider the validity of establishing a 'universal hierar chy of errors'. In the final analysis, however, we concluded that any such error hierarchies are not inherent and 'universal', but merely re flect the subjects' own educational training.