Definition of Error
The present researcher uses the term "error" to refer to a systematic deviation from a selected norm (after Burt et al. 1982) or set of norms. In the Iranian education system, for instance, the selected norms are standard British English and educated Iranian English, although using standard American English or other standard varieties of native English will not be considered deviant.
What is Error Analysis?
Error Analysis (hereafter EA) is the examination of those errors committed by students in both the spoken and written medium. Corder, who has contributed enormously to EA, writes thus:
"The study of error is part of the investigation of the process of language learning. In this respect it resembles methodologically the study of the acquisition of the mother tongue. It provides us with a picture of the linguistic development of a learner and may give us indications as to the learning process."
(Corder, 1974: 125)
Why Error Analysis?
Error Analysis is useful in second language learning because this will reveal to us - teachers, syllabus designers and textbook writers - the problem areas. We could design remedial exercises and focus more attention on the trouble spots.
What are the Sources and Causes of Errors?
The following factors have been identified by various error analysts including the present writer.
Mother tongue interference
Wilkins observes:
"When learning a foreign language an individual already knows his mother tongue, and it is this which he attempts to transfer. The transfer may prove to be justified because the structure of the two languages is similar - in that case we get 'positive transfer' or 'facilitation' - or it may prove unjustified because the structure of the two languages are different - in that case we get 'negative transfer' - or 'interference'.
Wilkins, 1972: 199)
There is mother tongue interference in the areas of syntax, grammar, lexis and pronunciation.
Teachers of English in Iran are very familiar with erroneous constructions such as using "although" and "but" in the same sentence. In Farsi Language (hereafter FL) it is perfectly alright to write:
Agar che Ali tanbal ast , ama ba hoosh ast.
When a weak student attempts to transfer this construction to English he may write it as
* Although Ali is lazy, but he is clever.
The above sentence is an instance of negative transfer in grammar. When someone says:
* I'll talk with you
there could be mother tongue interference in the area of lexis.
Ba to sohbat khaham kard.
An example of how mother tongue interference could affect the pronunciation of certain words in English is the way some Iranian students pronounce "stop". They pronounce it as "estop" - the FL equivalent. Some students speak English with a strong vernacular accent, for example, as in India, Hong Kong, Ghana, etc.
* An asterisk indicates an erroneous item.
Loan Words
Some people or even media in the country are indiscriminately adopting English words into the vocabulary of the national language. Since the spelling follows the pronunciation, students would find it easier to remember the spelling of the loan
words rather than the spelling of the original English words from which the former are derived. Such loan words do appear in the written work of students because of orthographic resemblance, for example,
* Everyone who's taking part are sent a maseig. (message)
* Why he was murdered is still a sekret . (secret)
Inherent Difficulties of the Target Language
English is a rich, complex language. Consequently, certain features of the language which are there are inherently difficult for the learner. To mention just a few, in grammar, for example, we have "preached" and "reached" as the simple past tense form of "preach" and "reach" respectively. But we cannot say "teached" although the word "teach" rhymes with "preach" and "reach" and is orthographically very close.
We can form the adverb "quickly" from "quick" but we do not form "hardly" from
"hard". The latter two words are different in meaning.
The plural of "tooth" is teeth, but for "booth" it is not "beeth".
In lexis, for example, the language has many words which have more than one meaning and are of different parts of speech.
Let us take for example the word "fast". It has the following meanings with different parts of speech. (Hornby, 1974)
Used as an adjective
a. Firmly fixed
The post is fast in the ground. b. Steadfast; loyal; steady; close
fast friend/friendship)
c. (of colours) unfading d. quick, rapid
a fast train
e. (of a person, his way of living)
spending too much time and energy on pleasure and excitement lead a fast life
f. (of a watch or clock) showing time later than the true time
My watch is five minutes fast.
Used as an adverb
g. quickly
Don't speak so fast
Used as a verb
h. go without food
Muslims fast in the month of Ramadhan
Used as a noun
i. (period of) going without food
Hamid broke his fast when he heard the azan for evening prayers. In pronunciation, for example, we have:-
chemist pronounced as /kemist/
chief pronounced as /t?i: f/
chef pronounced as / ? e f/
The 'ch' in all the three words are pronounced differently.
The Model
The teacher may not be a good model of the language with regard to the way he speaks, writes or teaches the language. So, some of the errors are ironically teacher induced. For example:
The student must work more harder.
When a student sees the abovementioned comment by a form teacher who also
teaches English, (in his report book), he would promise his parents *"to work more harder."
When an English language teacher uses a preposition when it is not needed, as in:
* "Now let us discuss about the unemployment problem among graduates for writing your essay" it would not be surprising if the students write * "I am going to discuss about the causes and effects of unemployment in my essay".
Teachers of English who have no training in phonetics may pronounce English words according to their spelling, for example, quay may be pronounced as */kweI/ instead of /ki:/, and etiquette may be pronounced as /etIkwItI/ instead of /etiket/.
In all the literature on EA reviewed by the writer, the possibility that errors could result from the inevitable exposure to non-native speakers of English teaching subjects such as history, geography and science in schools and colleges where the medium of instruction is English has not been mentioned. With due respect to these subject teachers, the researcher is hesitatingly compelled to state that while some are highly proficient in the language, some of them are also a source of error, especially in spoken English.
The Method
The teaching method may be at fault by overemphasizing one aspect of the language and neglecting the other. For example, if teachers are fond of only emphasizing the oral component of a course, a learner's general speaking ability would improve. But he may lag behind in reading and writing.
The audiolingual method emphasizes the acquisition of basic grammatical patterns of the language first and vocabulary development comes later.
The Materials
Materials which have teaching items sequenced in a certain way or which lack organization could lead to errors.
Norrish (1983) gives an example of material - induced errors. Although it is the
simple present tense which is normally used to describe a sequence of events that take place at the present moment, some teaching materials use the present progressive aspect. This results in the use of English which is neither normal nor natural.
Inadequate Exposure to the Target Language
Students who live in a country where English is taught as a foreign language obviously do not have adequate exposure to the target language. Opportunities to use English in both the productive and receptive areas of the language are limited. Insufficient exposure to the target language could give rise to errors such as those below in the areas of grammar, lexis, spelling and punctuation.
When a student has a limited exposure to the language learnt, it is possible for him to make errors in all aspects of the language.
Overgeneralization
Richards cites overgeneralization as one of the contributory factors. He explains thus: "Overgeneralization covers instances where the learner creates a
deviant structure on the basis of his experience of other structures in
the target language."
(Richards, 1974: 174)
After having read or heard sentences such as He reached the house at 10.00 p.m. a student may produce He leaved the house at 6.00 a.m.
A learner may write She walked fastly to catch the bus because he already knows He walked quickly to catch the train.
One who has read often about drug trafficking may think that there is *drug addicting. Overgeneralization is also applied in the pronunciation of certain words on the basis
of what they already know, eg. words like Beauchamp and Arkansas.
Indeterminacy
This is the term used by Jain to refer to an inconsistency or uncertainty in handling a linguistic item. He calls errors arising from such a situation asystematic errors (Jain,
1974). Below is an example given by him to show asystematic errors with respect to article use:
I started from hostel to go to see a movie. When we were still waiting at bust stop........I could only get some space to keep my one leg on foot-board ........I had to request conductor ........At last bus moved. The bus stopped at a bus stop with a jerk. All the time I was trying to balance myself on the footboard. I was more worried aboutmovie.
(Jain, 1974: 213) The underlined words show that the articles have been used asystematically.
Medium Transfer
This is the term used by Tench (1983) for the learner's undue reliance on either the spoken or the written form of a word when the other medium is being used. If a pupil pronounces a word according to its spelling, then medium transfer has taken place. If
a student spells a word according to its pronunciation, that too is medium transfer, e.g.
*teribel, *prestigous, and *surprised.
Communication Strategies
A communication strategy is defined as "a systematic technique employed by a speaker to express his meaning when faced with some difficulty" because of his "inadequate command of the language used in the interaction". (Corder, 1981 : 103) Some familiar communication strategies employed by language learners are avoidance, prefabricated patterns, appeal to authority, approximation, word coinage, circumlocution and language switch. Let us look at each of these briefly.
Avoidance
Learners tend to shun lexical items whose meanings they are not sure of, sounds they have difficulty in producing, and grammatical items they are not familiar with. Their avoidance leads to replacement of erroneous items. A learner who did not know the expression I lost my way, said I lost my road instead. (Brown, 1987 : 84) This is an instance of lexical avoidance.
Prefabricated patterns
Set phrases and stock sentences for different occasions may sometimes be used inopportunely by learners. An example is *I don't understand how can you do that, formed from two separate sentences "I don't understand", and "How can you do that?" The two sentences have been
juxtaposed without deleting "can".
Appeal to authority
This strategy is aimed at referring to an authoritative source - the
native speaker, teacher, or dictionary. The third source may not always be effective. A Persian-English bilingual dictionary which has the meaning of randan as both "to drive", and "to ride" is a possible contributor of error. In Persian-English bilingual dictionaryrandan corresponds to the antonyms in English. Thus, if a student were to say
*"Can you drive a horse ?", it is a deviation from standard English.
Approximation
In this strategy, the learner employs a lexical item which is not specific enough, but shares certain common semantic features, for example "knife" for "breadknife", "stick" for "truncheon", and "The visiting minister met the king" for "The visiting minister had an audience with the king".
Word coinage
A learner creates a new word or phrase which is usually non-existent to convey the intended meaning. For example, a learner who is not aware
of the vocabulary items "bucket" and "kettle" may come up with
*"water-holder" and *"water-boiler" respectively.
Circumlocution
The learner who is not familiar with the appropriate lexical item, goes on to describe the characteristic of the target object or action. For example, a learner who does not know the word "clothes line" may say "the thing to hang clothes on". Similarly if one cannot recall the word "optician", one might say "the person who tests our eyes". Although
the circumlocution strategy may not lead to errors, it shows the
learners' inadequate lexical competence.
Language switch
This is the strategy of weak learners. They simply fall back on their first language without attempting anything in the target language, for example: Every Sunday and Wednesday, the "Post Bergerak" will come to my village. The equivalent of the mobile post office in BM is pos bergerak.
Thus far I have identified the major contributory factors to students' errors in their written English and I have also included spoken English where appropriate.
Suggestions
I shall now go on to make some pedagogical suggestions in order to reduce the number of errors committed by our students in their written English, in particular, and spoken English as well.
1. Teachers must frequently remind their students that when they speak or write in English they must think in the target language so that they do not bring in any feature of their mother tongue.
The teacher should explain why certain constructions are ungrammatical. It would be ideal if the teacher has a very good command of the target language as well as a working knowledge of the first language or the national language of his students.
2. Loan words, as we have seen, contribute to spelling errors. Teachers could give dictation practice as regards words in English which have Persian equivalents e.g.message, strategy and top, which are spelt in Persian as maseij, strategi and tooprespectively.
3. English is not an easy language to master. The spelling is irregular. The pronunciation is puzzling and it often differs from the written form of a word. The vocabulary is elaborate. There are polysemous words with many meanings which can be used as different parts of speech. The complexity of the vocabulary and grammar would strain the learning capacity of many a student. So what can be done?
Teachers of English should advise their students to persevere in studying English. There are no short cuts to learning the language. When they are sufficiently exposed to the language through the various language skills of reading and listening, the possibility or making errors is minimized.
Teachers should encourage their students to write by providing helpful criticisms and not damaging ones. They should make constructive criticisms of their students' work. Over-insistence on 'correctness' hinders the learning process. The right attitude of the teacher is important for students who are grappling with the complexities of English grammar, vocabulary and pronunciation. The language is difficult enough; let us not make it more difficult for them. Please refer to Mohideen (1993) for a discussion on effective error correction techniques.
4. The majority of teachers of English are non-native speakers. It is not our first language. Consequently, there is a likelihood of us going wrong in some aspects of the English language. In order to upgrade ourselves professionally
as good models of the language we teach, we have to try to approximate native speaker competence. Students should want to emulate the way we speak or write in the language.
Not only do students need more exposure to the language, we teachers too need to be well exposed. We need to keep ourselves abreast of current issues
by reading books and journals related to our profession. Unless we take a more professional interest in our work, we may lag behind our more professional counterparts in the domain of English language teaching.
5. Teachers should make sure that there is all round language development. They should not spend too much time on one area of language to the detriment of others.
6. Students should be advised to listen to good English from whatever available source - radio, television, native speakers and good local speakers of the language. They should listen for correct pronunciation and understanding.
7. Teachers should encourage students to speak in English with their fellow