Investigating Linguistic Acceptability with Egyptian EFL Students

A number of errors which typify the spoken or written English of Egyptian EFL students were identified. A series of matched sentencessome containing a deviant feature, others not-were recorded by a native speaker of Arabic. Groups of intermediate and advanced EFL students listened to tape recordings and rated each sentence in terms of prescriptive grammaticality and social acceptability. Listeners were then presented with the subset of deviant sentences, then were asked to correct the errors and to indicate the extent to which each of the errors bothered or irritated them. Thus it was possible to examine listeners' reactions to various types of errors and to map out a heirarchy of acceptability of various deviant utterances produced by native and non-native speakers.