Error Analysis

INTERNATIONAL BURCH UNIVERSITY

FACULTY OF EDUCATION

ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE DEPARTMENT

ELT 424 Error Analysis

Report on Error Analysis

Submitted to

Ceylani Akay

by

Senija Ogrić

SARAJEVO

January, 2016

Literature review

Errors have played an important role in the study of language acquisition in general and in examining second and foreign language acquisition in particular.

Error analysis is the systematic study of deviations from target-language norms in the course of second-language acquisition, especially in terms of the learner’s developing interlanguage.

According to Lennon (1991) an error is “a linguistic form or combination of forms which in the same context and under similar conditions of production would, in all likelihood, not be produced by the native speakers’ counterparts”.

On the other hand, according to Crystal, D. (1999) defines error analysis in language teaching and learning is the study of the unacceptable forms produced by someone learning a language, especially a foreign language.

Error analysts distinguish between errors, which are systematic, and mistakes, which are not.

Errors are systematic, governed by rules, and appear because of learner’s knowledge of the rules of the target language is incomplete, since they follow the rules of the learner’s interlanguage.

On the other hand mistakes are random deviations, unrelated to any system and instead representing the same types of performance mistakes that might occur in the speech or writing of native speaker, such as slips of the tongue or Freudian slips, as in “You have hissed all my history lectures”.

Lapses are errors due to language speakers switch means to declare something before the whole utterance (sentence) expressed more finished. For spoken language, this type of error is termed the “slip of the tongue” language was to write, type of error is termed a “slip of the pen”. This error...