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The Nature of Learner Language. Errors and error analysis. 1. Identifying errors The first step in analyzing learners errors is to identify them. A man and a little boy was watching him. It should be A man and a little boy were watching him. It used ‘was’ instead of ‘were’.
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Errors and error analysis • 1. Identifying errors The first step in analyzing learners errors is to identify them. • A man and a little boy was watching him. It should be • A man and a little boy were watching him. It used ‘was’ instead of ‘were’.
… went in the traffic A native speaker would probably prefer to say : • … went into the traffic • The big of them contained a snake One way of reconstructing the correct sentence is : • The bigger of them contained a snake.
Describing Errors One way is to classify errors into grammatical categories. Another way might be to try to identify general ways in which the learners’ utterances differ from the reconstructed target-language utterances. Such ways include ‘omission’, ‘misinformation’, and ‘misordering’.
Explaining Errors Errors are, to a large extent, systematic and, to a certain extent, predictable. Errors are not only systematic; many of them are also universal. Thus, the kind of past tense error in the samples above have been attested in the speech of many learners. In fact, most, if not all learners go through a stage of learning where they substitute the simple form of the verb for the past tense form.
Of course, not all errors are universal. Some errors are common only to learners who share the same mother tongue or whose mother tongue manifest the same linguistic property.
Error Evaluation Some errors, known as global error, violate the overall structure of a sentence and for this reason may take it difficult to process. The utterance : • The policeman was in this corner whistle… Which is difficult to understand because the basic structure of the sentence is wrong.
Developmental Patterns • The early stages of L2 acquisition A silent period is they make no attempt to say anything to begin with. Some learners talk to themselves in the L2 even when they decline to talk to other people. The second characteristic of early L2 speech is propositional simplification. Learners find it difficult to speak in full sentences so they frequently leave words out. For example : J says “Me no Blue” it means “I don’t have a blue crayon”. In time, though, learners do begin to learn the grammar of the L2.
2. The Order Acquisition To investigate the order of acquisition, researchers choose a number of grammatical structures to study. They then collect samples of learner language and identify how accurately each feature is used by different learners. Researchers have produced evidence to show that sometimes learners begin using a structure accurately early on only to start making errors with it later. It cannot be concluded, they have argued, that learners have acquired a structure simply because they can use it accurately.
Variability in Learning Language We have also seen that learner language is variable. At any given stage of development, learners sometimes employ one form and sometimes another. • Yesterday the thief steal the suitcase • Yesterday the thief stealing the suitcase Thus it appears that learners vary in their use of the L2 according to linguistic context.
In one study it was found that the target-language variants (for example, ‘is’ and ‘s’) were used more consistently with pronoun subjects, while ‘be’ was more likely to be omitted with noun subjects (for example, ‘teacher not here’) Another important factor that accounts for the systematic nature of variability is the psycholinguistic context-whether learners have the opportunity to plan their production.
A characteristic of any natural language is that form realize meaning in a systematic way. Learner language is no different. However, the particular form-function mappings which learners make do not always conform to those found in the target language. It is possible that free variation constitutes an essential stage in the acquisition of grammatical structures. Different kinds of variability may be evident at different stages of development.
It is important to recognize that this general sequence of acquisition applies to specific grammatical features. Thus, it is possible for individual learners to be at different stages in the sequence for different grammatical features. For example, a learner may be at the completion stage for past tense but at the free variation stage for the articles a and the.
