Native‐Speaker Judgments of Second‐Language Learners' Efforts at Communication: A Review

the tento fifteen-year history of the field. Initial studies focused on the frequency and types of recurrent errors committed by second language (L2) learners, with an eye toward uncovering the linguistic and communicative strategies which characterize the use of a foreign language (FL). These pioneering efforts have paid off handsomely. A sizable body of empirical work now allows us to talk meaningfully not only about how these learners use (and confuse or misuse) what they know of the target language (TL), but also how they compensate for lacunae in their L2 repertoires. A recent area of inquiry within error analysis concerns the measurement of comprehensibility and irritation in communications in the TL, and the study of the degree to which the two interact. This type of error analysis focuses on the impressions and reactions of native speakers (NS's) rather than on the productions of learners per se, in an attempt to document the characteristics of successful and unsuccessful L2 communications. The lin-