Written Usage of American Indian and Anglo College Students: A Comparative Error Analysis

It was the purpose of this study to determine whether North American Indian college students in freshman writing classes made grammar, usage, and mechanics errors which differed significantly from the errors of their Anglo peers. In-class essays were written by 43 Anglo and 43 Indian students enrolled in a basic writing course at Brigham Young University during fall semester 1978 and winter semester 1979. Each paper was read by three readers, and errors were classified according to error type and ethnic group. A stepwise discriminant analysis was then carried out to determine significance of each of the differences in error type. Since significant differences at the .05 level occurred in the grammatical areas of verbs, pluralization of nouns, articles, connectives; in all the lexical and syntactical categories but one, and in comma splices and spelling, it was concluded that Indian/Anglo differences are significant enough to merit separate emphases in instruction.

Thesis Author: Dyck, Patricia B.

Year Completed: 1979

Thesis Chair: Harold Madsen