Language Learners’ Errors: Approaches and Significance 

Vali Mohammadi*

 Abstract

Language learners’ errors were, at a time, thought highly inappropriate and supposed to be avoided by any means. It is inevitable that learners make mistakes in the process of foreign language learning. However, the question among teachers is why students go on making the same errors even when such errors have been repeatedly pointed out to them. Yet not all mistakes are the same; sometimes they seem to be deeply rooted, but at other times students correct themselves with ease. Thus, researchers and teachers of foreign languages came to realize that the errors a learner made in the process of learning a new language are needed to be analyzed carefully, for they possibly held in them some of the keys to the understanding of second language acquisition.

In this paper, the author is going to: 1) give a historical overview and a theoretical account of the approaches dealing with errors, 2) give different typologies of errors and provide a framework to study the errors, and finally 3) offer some implications to teachers and syllabus designers.

 Key words: Error, mistake, error analysis, error correction, interlingual transfer, intralingual transfer.

 Introduction

For some decades, a vast majority of studies have focused on the nature and process of first language acquisition and second language learning (Dulay and Burt, 1973, 1974;  Hatch, 1978; Larsen-Freeman, 1975). Based on the findings drawn from these studies, the researchers have come to this conclusion that both first language acquisition and second language learning work in a similar way. Children learning their mother tongue make a lot of mistakes which is a natural part of language acquisition process. As they receive different feedbacks from the people around including their parents, caretakers, and peers, they learn how to produce grammatically and semantically acceptable sentences in their native language. What a foreign language learner does in operating on the target language is not different from that of a child acquiring his first language.  

     It is inevitable that all learners make mistakes and commit errors. However, that process can be impeded through realizing the errors and operating on them according to the feedbacks given. The steps that learners follow lead the researchers and language teachers to realize that if the mistakes and errors of language learners in constructing the new language system are analyzed carefully, the process of language acquisition shall be understood. The analysis of errors, thus, has become a field of linguistics in that sense. The field of language teaching benefits from the findings of linguistics in many cases including error analysis. As indicated above, what a linguist looks for in understanding the language learning process contributes a lot to the questions of language teachers. Many teachers complain that their students are unable to use the linguistic forms they are taught. Lengo (1995) states: “this situation is due to the teacher’s false impression that output should be an authentic representation of input” (p.20). This belief ignores the function of intake- that knowledge of language the students internalize. Intake may be different from the teacher’s syllabus being subject to be internalized.

     Error analysis enables teachers to find out the sources of errors and take pedagogical precautions towards them. Thus, the analysis of learner language has become an essential need to overcome some problems and propose solutions regarding different aspects of committing errors in the process of learning.  

     This paper concerns learners’ errors and approaches to these errors and significance of them.

 A Historical Background to Error Analysis

Until the late sixties, the prominent theory regarding the issue of second language learning was behavioristic, which suggested that learning was largely a question of acquiring a set of new language habits. Therefore, errors were considered to be the result of the persistence of existing mother tongue habits in the new language. Consequently, this idea made the researchers of applied linguistics devote their studies largely to the comparison of the native and the target language in order to make predictions and explanations about errors. However, errors that were not explained in this way were underestimated. As a result, all errors whatever their origins, were dealt with by the same technique of further drilling and exercise.

     Error analysis, a branch of applied linguistics, emerged in the sixties to demonstrate that learner’s errors were not only due to the learner’s native language but also they reflected some universal learning strategies, this was in sharp contrast to contrastive analysis hypothesis, which considered language transfer as the basic process of second language learning as suggested by behavioristic theory. Error analysis, on the other hand, deals with the learners’ performance in terms of the cognitive processes they make use of in recognizing or coding the input they receive from the target language.

     It is to S.P. Corder that error analysis owes its place as a scientific method in linguistics. As Rod Ellis cites (1994), “it was not until the 1970s that EA became a recognized part of applied linguistics, a development that owed much to the work of Corder” (p. 48). Before Corder, linguists observed learners’ errors, divided them into categories, tried to see which ones were common and which were not, but not much attention was paid to their role in second language acquisition. It was Corder who showed to whom information about errors would be helpful (teachers, researchers, and students) and how.

     There are many major concepts introduced by S. P. Corder in his article “The significance of learners’ errors” (1967), among which we encounter the following:

 1. It is the learner who determines what the input is. The teacher can present a linguistic form, but this is not necessarily the input, but simply what is available to be learned.

2. Keeping the above point in mind, learners’ needs should be considered when teachers/linguists plan their syllabuses. Before Corder’s work, syllabuses were based on theories and not so much on learners’ needs.

3. Mager (1962) points out that the learners’ built-in syllabus is more efficient than the teacher’s syllabus. Corder adds that if such a built-in syllabus exists, then learners’ errors would confirm its existence and would be systematic.

4. Corder introduced the distinction between systematic and non-systematic errors. Unsystematic errors occur in one’s native language; Corder calls these “mistakes” and states that they are not significant to the process of language learning. He keeps the term “errors” for the systematic ones, which occur in a second language.

 5. Errors are significant in three ways:

To the teachers: They show a student’s progress.

To the researchers: They show how a language is acquired, what strategies the learner uses.

To the learners: They can learn from their errors.

6. When a learner has made an error, the most efficient way to teach him the correct form is not by simply giving it to him, but by letting him discover it and test different hypotheses.
7. Many errors are due to the fact that the learner uses structures from his native language. Corder claims that possession of one’s native language is facilitative. Errors, in this case, are not inhibitory, but rather evidence of one’s learning strategies. Therefore, a primary focus of error analysis is on the evidence that learners’ errors provide an understanding of the underlying process of second language acquisition.

     In this regard, Keshavarz (1997) suggests that the field of error analysis can be divided into two branches: (I) theoretical, and (II) applied. Theoretical error analysis, as mentioned before, is primarily concerned with the processes and strategies of language learning and its similarities with first language acquisition. In other words, it tries to investigate what is going on in the minds of language learners. Secondly, it tries to decode the strategies of learners such as overgeneralization and simplification, and thirdly, to go to a conclusion that regards the universals of language learning process whether there is an internal syllabus for learning a second language or not. Applied error analysis, on the other hand, concerns organizing remedial courses, and devising appropriate materials and teaching strategies based on the findings of theoretical error analysis.

Doing Error Analysis

According to Ellis and Barkhuizen (2005) there are five steps in conducting any error analysis study:

1. Collection of a sample of learner language

2. Identification of errors

3. Description of errors

4. Explanation of errors, and

5. Error evaluation.

Collecting a sample of learner language

Collecting a sample of learner language provides the required data for conducting an error analysis. The researcher needs to be aware that the nature of the sample that is collected may influence the nature and the distribution of the errors observed. In collecting this sample, there are some important factors waiting to be accounted for by the researcher. Table 1.1 shows the factors affecting the learner language.

Factors                                       Description

A Learner

1 Proficiency level                           Elementary, intermediate, or advanced

2 Other languages                           The learner’s L1, other L2s

3 Language learning background        Instructed, naturalistic, mixed

B Language

1 Medium                                      Oral or written

2 Genre                                         e.g., conversation, narrative, essay

3 Content                                      The topic of the discourse

C Production

1 Unplanned                                  The discourse is produced spontaneously.

2 Planned                                      The discourse is produced after planning or under

                                                     conditions that allow for careful online planning.

Table 1.1. Factors affecting learner errors in samples of learner language (adopted from Ellis and Barkhuizen, 2005, p.58)

 

Identification of Errors

Identifying an error goes beyond explaining what an error is. However, as linguists pay attention to the distinction between an error and a mistake, it is necessary to go over the definition of the two different phenomena.

     According to Dictionary of Language Teaching and Applied Linguistics (2002), a learner makes a mistake when writing or speaking because of lack of attention, fatigue, carelessness, or some other aspects of performance. Mistakes can be self-corrected when attention is called. Whereas, an error is the use of linguistic item in a way that a fluent or native speaker of the language regards it as showing faulty or incomplete learning. In other words, it occurs because the learner does not know what is correct, and thus it cannot be self-corrected.

     To distinguish between an error and mistake, Ellis (1994) suggests two ways. The first one is to check the consistency of learner’s performance. If he sometimes uses the correct form and sometimes the wrong one, it is a mistake. However, if he always uses it incorrectly, it is then an error. The second way is to ask learner to try to correct his own deviant utterance. Where he is unable to, the deviations are errors; where he is successful, they are mistakes.

 

Description of Errors

A number of different categories for describing errors have been identified. Firstly, Corder (1973) classifies the errors in terms of the difference between the learners’ utterances and the reconstructed version. In this way, errors fall into four categories: omission of some required elements; addition of some unnecessary or incorrect elements; selection of an incorrect element; and misordering of the elements. Nevertheless, Corder himself adds that this classification is not enough to describe errors. That is why he includes the linguistics level of the errors under the sub-areas of morphology, syntax, and lexicon (Corder, 1973).

     Ellis (1994) maintains that “classifying errors in these ways can help us to diagnose learners’ learning problems at any stage of their development and to plot how changes in error patterns occur over time” (p.19). This categorization can be exemplified as follows:

 Omission:

Morphological omission            *A strange thing happen to me yesterday.

Syntactical omission                  * Must say also the names?

Addition:

In morphology                           * The books is here.

In syntax                                    * The London

In lexicon                                   * I stayed there during five years ago.

Selection:

In morphology                          * My friend is oldest than me.

In syntax                                   * I want that he comes here.

 Ordering:

In pronunciation                       * fignisicant for ‘significant’; *prulal for ‘plural’

In morphology                          * get upping for ‘getting up’

In syntax                                   * He is a dear to me friend.

In lexicon                                  * key car for ‘car key’

 An error may vary in magnitude. It can include a phoneme, a morpheme, a word, a sentence or even a paragraph. Due to this fact, errors may also be viewed as being either global or local (Brown, 2007). Global errors hinder communication. They prevent the message from being comprehended as in the example below:

* I like bus but my mother said so not that we must be late for school.

 On the other hand, local errors do not prevent the message from being understood because there is usually a minor violation of one segment of a sentence that allows the hearer to guess the intended meaning as follows:

* If! hear from her, I would let you know.

The final group is the two related dimensions of error, domain and extent. Domain is the rank of linguistic unit from phoneme to discourse that must be taken as context in order for the error to be understood, and extent is the rank of linguistic unit that would have to be deleted, replaced, supplied or reordered in order to repair the sentence. This suggestion by Brown (2007) is parallel with Corder’s other categorization of overtly and covertly committed errors (1973). Overt errors are unquestionably ungrammatical at the sentence level and covert errors are grammatically well-formed at the sentence level but are not interpretable within the context of communication. For example, “I’m fine, thanks.” is a correct sentence but if it is given as an answer to the question of “How old are you?” it is a covertly committed error.

 Explanation of Errors:

Explaining errors involves determining their sources in order to account for why they were made. Ellis and Barkhuizen (2005) believe that determining the sources of errors from the point of second language acquisition (SLA) is the most important stage in an error analysis. As there are many descriptions for different kinds of errors, it is inevitable to move further and ask for the sources of errors. It has been indicated in the fist part of the present paper that in contrastive analysis errors were assumed as being the only result of interference of the first language habits to the learning of second language. However, in the field of error analysis, it has been understood that the nature of errors implicates the existence of other reasons for them to occur. Then, the sources of errors can be categorized within two domains: (I) interlingual transfer, and (II) intralingual transfer. Interlingual transfer is a significant source for language learners. Dictionary of Language Teaching and Applied Linguistics (2002) defines interlingual errors as “being the result of language transfer, which is caused by the learner’s first language”. However, this should not be confused with behavioristic approach to language transfer. Error analysis does not regard them as the persistence of old habits, but rather as signs that the learner is internalizing and investigating the system of the new language.

     Interlingual errors may occur at different levels such as transfer of phonological, morphological, grammatical and lexico-semantic elements of the native language into the target language. These different levels can be explained with some possible errors of Persian students learning English as foreign language.

     At phonological level, the sounds that do not occur in Persian cause the students to mispronounce some of them. They attempt to pronounce ‘th’ of ‘thank you’ as‘t’ of ‘tea’; or ‘th’ of ‘they’ as ‘d’ of ‘dean’. Or else, since Persian does not allow consonant clusters at the beginning of a word, learners tend to place a vowel in front of them as in the example of *'estation’, instead of ‘station’.

     At morphological level, Persian students tend to omit the plural suffix at the end of the word as Persian does not put it in adjectival phrases indicating numbers as in the following examples:

* three book

* Three student is coming.

It is also possible that students transfer some lexical items to the target language. For instance, the students tend to copy their L1 and literally say *"I am going to give my chemistry test.", instead of; "I am going to take my chemistry test."

     Interferences from the students’ own language is not the only reason for committing errors. As Ellis (1994) states, some errors seem to be universal, reflecting learners’ attempts to make the task of learning and using the target language simpler. Use of past tense suffix ‘-ed’ for all verbs is an example of simplification and overgeneralization. These errors are common in the speech of second language learners, irrespective of their mother tongue.

     Intralingual errors result from faulty or partial learning of the target language rather than language transfer. They may be caused by the influence of one target language item upon another. For example, learners attempt to use two tense markers at the same time in one sentence since they have not mastered the language yet. When they say: *‘He is comes here.’, it is because the singularity of the third person requires ‘is’ in present continuous, and ‘-s’ at the end of a verb in simple present tense. In short, intralingual errors occur as a result of learners’ attempt to build up concepts and hypotheses about the target language from their limited experience with it. Learners may commit errors due to this reason in many ways as in the following examples:

* He made me to smile.

* I want learning English. * The meat smells freshly.

* Doctors always give us good advices. * I don't know why did he go.

Error Evaluation

Error evaluation is not so much a stage in the analysis of leaner errors as a supplementary procedure for applying the results of an error analysis (Ellis and Barkhuizen, 2005). It involves determining the gravity of different errors with a view to deciding which one should receive instruction. According to these authors, planning for an error evaluation study involves the following steps:

1. Select the errors to be evaluated (these could be all the errors identified in the error analysis or, more likely, a subset of them). The errors are usually presented in either complete sentences or a continuous text.

2. Decide the criteria on which the errors are to be judged. The most commonly chosen criterion is gravity.

3. Prepare the error evaluation instrument. This will consist of a set of instructions, the erroneous sentences or text, and a method for evaluating the errors. Common methods used are ranking or Likert scale.

4. Choose the judges. It is best to have at least two. The more judges, the better, as this increases the reliability and generalizability of the results.

Pedagogical Implications of Error Analysis

Studies regarding errors are carried out in order to (I) identify strategies which learners use in language teaching, (II) identify the causes of learner errors, and (III) obtain information on common difficulties in language learning as an aid to teaching or in development of teaching materials (Richards and Schmidt, 2002). In fact, the first two are also useful for the third aim, which includes the teaching-learning process. Thus, it can be inferred that language teaching cannot stand away from the findings of error analysis. Students’ errors have always been of interest and significance to teachers, syllabus designers and test developers. This may lead educators to devise appropriate materials and effective teaching techniques, and construct tests suitable for different levels and needs of learners. Hence, the implications of error analysis to language teaching can be viewed from the perspective of language teachers and syllabus designers.

 Implications for Foreign Language Teachers

Teachers can benefit from the findings of error analysis in many ways. Errors tell the teacher how far towards the goal the learner has progressed and what remains for him to learn (Corder, 1981). Following the student’s progress, the teacher is able to carry on his studies in accordance with what the learner needs to know and what part of the teaching strategy to change or reconstruct. Errors are a means of feedback for the teacher reflecting how effective he is in his teaching style and what changes he has to make to get higher performance from his students. Furthermore, errors indicate to the teacher the points that need further attention. Additionally, errors show to the teacher how they should be treated when their sources are identified correctly.

Implications for Syllabus Designers

Syllabus design of an English teaching course is a very important component of teaching-learning process. There are many factors to be considered to decide on what to teach to what level and age group. In this respect, errors are significant data for syllabus designers as they show what items are important to be included or which items need to be recycled in the syllabus. Keshavarz (1997) maintains that an error-based analysis can give reliable results upon which remedial materials can be constructed. In other words, analysis of second language learners’ errors can help identify learners’ linguistic difficulties and needs at a particular stage of language learning. Corder (1973) reminds of de Sassure’s words that language is a ‘self-contained system’, in which each part is systematically related to another part. Then learning of some new items requires the learning of all items that are already studied. Eventually, this requires the necessity for a cyclical syllabus in language learning.

Error Correction and Error Analysis

At the outset of this paper, the question “why do students make mistakes or commit errors?” was posed. Now, some other questions arise: How should teachers correct students? What kind of feedback should they give? Does each error need to be treated? Error analysis has an important role in finding the answers to these questions.

     In general, the teacher’s job is to point out when something has gone wrong and see whether the student can correct himself, then, to find out what the student says or writes is just a mistake, or it is a global or a local error. However, the technique of correction is not simply presenting the data repeatedly and going through the same set of drills and exercises to produce the state of overlearning. On the contrary, it requires that the teacher understand the source of the errors so that he can provide appropriate remedy, which will resolve the learner’s problems and allow him to discover the relevant rules. Thus, the source of the error is an important clue for the teacher to decide on the sort of treatment. Harmer (2007) suggests three steps to be followed by the teacher when errors occur. The teacher first listens to the students, then identifies the problem, and finally puts it right in the most efficient way. Corder (1973) states that knowledge of being wrong is only a starting point. Skill in correction seems to lie in determining the necessary data to present to the learner and what statements, descriptive or comparative, to make about it.

     Since no teacher has time to deal with all the errors of the students, a hierarchy should be established for the correction of errors according to the nature and significance of errors. In such a hierarchy, priority should be given to errors which may affect communication and cause misunderstanding. If a teacher knows about all these items, he can direct himself accordingly. For example, Brown (2007) suggests that local errors as in the following example usually need not be corrected as the message is clear and correction might interrupt a learner in the flow of productive communication:

* I gave she a present.

 On the other hand, global errors need to be treated in some way since the message is not comprehended clearly:

* Daddy my car happy tomorrow buy.

 Errors in pluralization, use of articles, tenses, etc., are less important than errors regarding word order, the choice of placement and appropriate connectors in terms of the comprehensibility of the sentence. Therefore, it is implied that priority in error correction should be given to global errors in order to develop the students’ communication skills. The knowledge of error analysis enables the teacher to monitor the students’ errors in this frame and take precautions where needed.

     Different kinds of tasks may require a different treatment. The reaction of the teacher towards errors and the type of feedback to be given is usually determined by the position of the error in the objective of the task. Oral works are crucial in terms of corrections and feedback time. For oral works, it is usually recommended that students making mistakes during a fluent speech not be interrupted, but be reminded of the mistakes and talk about the reasons at a later point in time. The type of the feedback- form or content- should be decided on according to the goal of the teaching. If the goal is to make the students practice a certain grammatical point, it may be necessary to give a form feedback. Or else, if a pronunciation item is being practiced, the teacher should correct the related mistakes without interrupting the speaker (Ur, 1996).

     For correcting written works, it is accepted that the teacher should not correct the students’ mistakes directly but instead, should put marks indicating there is something wrong with that sentence, word, or punctuation. There are symbols to show the kind of mistake that teachers use. For example, it is better to write ‘sp’ for spelling mistakes near the wrong word, to write ‘rw’ for the sentences need to be written once again than writing the correct form. Thus, students are able to correct themselves looking for the source of their errors.

Conclusion

This paper has been devoted to introduce what error analysis is and what sort of relationship it has with language teaching, and what implications it provides for language teaching studies. The aims of the studies regarding error analysis can be summarized as follows:

Ø                  Error analysis identifies the strategies that language learners use.

Ø                  It looks for the answer to the question ‘why do learners make errors?’

Ø                  It determines the common difficulties in learning and helps teachers to develop materials for remedial teaching.

In short, error analysis has two-fold aims including theoretical and practical aspects. Theoretical objectives contribute to the language studies and the most obvious practical use of the error analysis is to the teacher. Errors provide feedback about the effectiveness of his teaching techniques and show him what part of the syllabus he has been following needs further attention. They enable him to decide on whether to move on to the next item or not.

     Studying the learner language with respect to learners’ errors, is something that teachers have always done for very practical reasons. Through the results of tests and examinations, the errors that learners make are a major element in the feedback system of the teaching-learning process. For this reason, it is important that the teacher should be able to not only detect and describe the errors from a linguistic point of view, but also understand the psychological reasons for their occurrences. Therefore, the diagnoses and treatment of errors is one of the fundamental skills of the teacher.

     Correction of errors is as important as identification and description of them. In fact, the last two are preliminary for error treatment. The sources and the sorts of the errors are determiners for the sort of feedback. In conclusion, the inevitable existence of errors has led researchers to investigate them and find out the natural steps for language learning. Findings of error analysis function as a facilitator in language teaching in many ways only if the teacher is aware of them and able to make use of them in the teaching process appropriately.

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