THE NATURE OF LEARNER LANGUAGE (Second Language Acquisition, Rod Ellis, page 15-30)

1. THE NATURE OF LEARNER LANGUAGE (Second Language Acquisition, Rod Ellis, page 15-30)

2. Errors and Error Analysis There good reason for focusing on errors. • They are conspicuous feature of learner language • It is useful for teacher to know what errors learners make • Making errors actually help learners to learn they self correct.

3. Identifying Errors The first step in analysing learner errors is to identifying them. To identifying errors we have to compare the sentencess learner with what seems to be correct sentences in the target language.

4. We need to distinguish errors and mistakes. • Errors reflect gaps in a learners, because the learner does not know what is correct. • Mistakes occur because the learner is unable to perform what he or she knows.

5. Example: Mistakes in Jean’s speech, early in the narrative he says : “The big of them contained a snake”. Using past tense correctly, however in the final sentence he says: “The basket contain a snake”

6. Making what seems to be a past tense error, but clearly Jean knows what the past tense of “contain” is as he has already used it correctly once. His failure to say “contained” in the last sentence might be considered a mistake.

7. Describing Errors There are several ways of doing this. • Classify errors into grammatical categories. • Identify the learners’ utterances differ to the reconstruction target language utterances.

8. Explaining Errors • Learners commit errors of omission. For example articles “a” and “the”, and leave the –s plural form. • The use of “eated” in place of “eat” is an overgeneralization error. • Other errors, reflect learners’s attempts to make us of their L1 knowledge known as transfer error.

9. Error Evaluation • Some errors, known as globlal error, violate the overall of structure of a sentence. Example : “The Policeman was in this corner whistle… ” • Other error, known as local errors, affect only a single constituent in the sentence (for example the verb).

10. Developmental Patterns • The early stages of L2 acquisition Some learners, if they are children, undergo silent period. When learners do begin to speak in the L2 is to manifest two particular characteristic. - One is the kind of formulaic chunks. - Propositional simplication.

11. The Order of Acquisition - To investigate acquisition, researchers choose a number of grammatical structures to study(fo example. Progressive –ing, auxiliary, be, and plural -s) - Another problem is that the research treats acquisition as if it is a process of accumulating linguistic structures.

12. Sequence of Acquisition The acquisition of a particular grammatical structure, must be seen as a process involving transitional contructions. The example :

13. Some Implications - The discovery of commons patterns in the way in which learner language changes over time is one of the most important findings of SLA. - The work on developmental patterns is important for another reason.

14. The use of specific grammatical forms has been shown to vary according to: • the linguistic context, • the situational context (for example, who the learner is addressing), • the psycholinguistic context (for example, whether the learner has an opportunity to plan).

15. Variability In Learner Language Research on variability has sought to show that, although allowance should perhaps be made for some free variation, variability in learner language is systematic. That is, learners use their linguistic sources in predictable ways.

16. Variability in learner language is clearly not just random. • It would seem that at least some variability is free. Furthermore, variability plays an intregative part in the overall pattern of development, with learners moving through a series of stages that reflect different kinds of variability.