AN ANALYSIS OF TYPING ERRORS MADE BY BILINGUAL CHAMORRO AND FILIPINO STUDENTS ON GUAM IN 1986

To test hypotheses stating that there would be no significant variances in typing proficiencies among bilingual Chamorro students, bilingual Filipino students, students who understand but do not speak either Chamorro or a language of the Philippines, and monolingual English-speaking students on Guam, two instruments were used: a five minute timed writing which was developed for this study and a composition exercise which was used by Cronnell in his 1982 study of language influences in the English writing of Chicano students. These instruments were administered to a random sample of students from the four language groups.;The analyses of the data from the composition exercise showed that the mean numbers of total typing errors, language related typing errors, and standard typing errors of the bilingual Filipino subjects increased form the first year to the second year; also, these Filipino students made more typing errors within all three language classifications than other language groups. On the five minute timed writing, there were no differences in mean numbers of typing errors among the language groups. Investigation of the subjects' standard typing errors on the timed writing showed that among all language groups, 34% of the errors were in classifications that imply reading difficulties.;These results suggest that further efforts be made to explore the second year Filipino students' increased numbers of language related typing errors; also, to investigate relationships between bilingual students' reading skills and their typing proficiency.;Two-factor Analyses of Variance (ANOVA's) were calculated to determine statistically significant differences among the language groups' gross words per minute on the timed writing and their total typing errors, standard typing errors, and language related typing errors on both the timed writing and the letter composition. Tukey HSD post hoc tests were calculated when statistically significant F ratios were obtained by the ANOVA's.