Error Analysis

(1)?traditional Error Analysis

①impressionistic collections of ‘common’? errors and their linguistic classification

②?pedagogic goal: to sequence items for teaching or to devise remedial lessons

③?no serious attempt to define ‘error’?or to account for it in psychological terms

④?the prevention of errors was more important than the identification of errors(like Behaviorist learning theory)

(2)?Procedure

①?A corpus of language is selected.

size of the sample, the medium to be sampled, homogeneity of the sample

②?The errors in the corpus are identified.

1)?distinguish ‘lapses’?from ‘errors’

processing limitations?v.s.?lack of competences

2)?‘overtly idiosyncratic’??v.s.?‘covertly idiosyncratic’

ill formed according to TL rules?v.s.?superficially well formed but ungrammatical in context

③?The errors are classified.

a grammatical description to each error

④?The errors are explained.

to identify the psycholinguistic cause of the errors

⑤?The errors are evaluated.

assessing the seriousness of each error to take principled teaching decisions

(3)?Error Analysis in SLA

①?sequence of development (the interlanguage continuum)

1)?linguistic type of errors: idiosyncratic forms

2)?Error Analysis present an incomplete picture of SLA

a.?focuses only on idiosyncratic forms instead of what the learner can do in toto

b.?provides a synchronic description while SLA is a continuous process

3)?Conclusion

Analysis of the linguistic types of errors does not tell much about the sequence of development

②?learner strategies

1)?psycholinguistic type of errors

2)?there is no single or prime cause of errors

3)?strategies: employed to simplify the task of learning a L2

a.?overgeneralization

b.?ignorance of rule restrictions

c.?incomplete application of rules

d.?false concepts hypothesized(Richards)

4)?errors → the learner’s need to exploit the redundancy of language by omitting elements that are non-essential for the communication of meaning(George)

5)?conclusion

some of the causes of errors are universal and Error Analysis can be used in SLA

(4)?conclusion

①?contribution of Error Analysis

1)?the reassessment of the Contrastive Analysis Hypothesis

2)?elevating the status of errors:

from undesirability to the learner’s active contribution to SLA

②?Errors appeared to be broadly the same irrespective of learner differences

③?The human faculty for language may structure and define the learning task, so that the way of SLA and FLA was universal in nature